Some of you did. Most did not. This month has handed everyone who hesitated good reasons to feel wise about it.
On September 11, a gazette notice recorded the administration of GT Flow Limited and Templar Field Limited. You know them by their former names: Twiga Foods One and Twiga Foods. A company that raised over $185 million and was once counted by TIME among the world’s 100 most influential companies entered administration under names invented for the occasion. Copia and Sendy walked the same corridor.
The timing is cruel. The conclusion is obvious. The conclusion is wrong.
Notice what we actually talk about. Starting: pitch nights, incubators, the announcement, the round. Then ending: the collapse, the gazette, the verdict from people who never carried a payroll.
Between those two conversations sits everything that actually happens. Ten years. Fifteen. Twenty. Nobody covers it. Nobody prepares you for it. Nobody comes with you.
Call it the unaccompanied middle.
I started building at twenty-five. I am fifty-one now. In all that time, nobody has described the middle to me honestly, and I no longer think that is an oversight. It cannot be taught in advance. It can only be accompanied, and we have built an ecosystem that does everything except accompany.
So what makes a person begin? Never the business plan. That comes later, assembled to explain a decision already made. What starts a founder is closer to refusal. You see a broken thing and cannot leave it alone. Less ambition than irritation with the world as given.
That energy is the only asset present on day one. Everything else arrives later or never.
Then the middle begins, and the five states stop being a framework and become terrain.
In mindset, belief has to run ahead of evidence for years. Not blind belief. Belief with an honest ledger: conviction held while failures are counted accurately. Founders who cannot do both quit early or lie until the lie becomes the company.
Strategically, you learn the difference between motion and progress, usually by spending two years on the wrong one. Every founder I respect has a season they would like back.
Emotionally, this is where the loneliness lives. It is not the absence of people. Your calendar is full. Nobody in the room carries what you carry. Your team owns a job. Your investors own a position. Your family owns the consequences without the controls. You own the whole of it at three in the morning, and that asymmetry does not resolve with scale.
It grows with it.
Socially, you find out who stays when there is nothing to attend. The ecosystem shows up for launches. The middle is not photogenic, and attendance drops accordingly.
Spiritually, you meet the question that outlasts the others. Why did I begin? If the answer was applause, the middle strips it out because the middle contains none. If the answer was the broken thing you could not leave alone, it holds.
So consider what the gazette cannot record. That $185 million did not evaporate. It moved through farmers, drivers, warehouse staff, landlords, and PAYE. Thousands learned to run logistics at a scale this country had never attempted, and some are building now. An administrator counts assets. Nobody is assigned to count what a country learned.
Failure is not the opposite of this journey. It is a feature of it. The only failure deserving contempt is built on deceit, and that is a matter for prosecution, not for shaming everyone who tried and fell short.
I will not sell you the glamour. It is lonely, it is long, it costs your health if you let it, and the odds are unkind. But I have watched the alternative. People who never began carry a different weight, quieter and heavier, and it does not lift.
So if that January line is still in your notebook, start with the middle in view. Find two builders further along and ask what the years between actually contain. Pick something you cannot leave alone rather than something that looks fundable. And once you are in it, accompany somebody else, because you will be the only one who knows what to say.
We celebrate the beginning. We autopsy the end. The middle is where the founder is made, and it is the one stretch nobody walks with you.