KEYNOTE ADDRESS: BUILDING FOR GLOBAL SCALE: THE VENTURE ARCHITECTURE THAT ATTRACTS INSTITUTIONS
Delivered by Sunday Akin Dare, CON, Ph.D
9/11/202612 min read
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Investors Connect London 2026
Imperial College London
10 September 2026
PROTOCOLS
Distinguished investors, founders, entrepreneurs, partners, ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to join you at Investors Connect London 2026 for a conversation that goes to the heart of what separates a promising idea from an enduring institution.
Our subject is building for global scale and, understandably, much of that conversation begins with capital. Founders want to know where the capital is, what investors are looking for and how businesses can become attractive to institutional investors. These are important questions, but I would like to begin one step earlier: what exactly are we attempting to scale, and have we built the architecture capable of carrying that scale?
A good idea is not necessarily a scalable idea. Early success is not scale, and a successful pilot is not the same thing as impact at scale. Capital is indispensable to growth, but capital does not automatically create scalability. It accelerates what has already been designed and built to scale.
Institutional investors therefore look beneath the idea. They want to know whether the technology, people, governance, processes and operating systems can absorb significantly more customers, capital, regulation, scrutiny and complexity without the enterprise beginning to fail under the weight of its own success. Scale is not simply a function of ambition; it is a function of architecture.
REACH IS NOT SCALE
Every venture begins with the challenge of reaching people, but reach itself should not be confused with scale. What matters is whether that reach can be sustained, expanded and converted into trust, adoption and value.
I learned something about that very early in journalism and broadcasting. You could have an important story and a potentially enormous audience, but neither guaranteed impact. You still needed the infrastructure to carry the message, the systems and people to deliver it consistently, and sufficient understanding of the audience to make it relevant and trusted.
There is an obvious lesson for founders. A good product is not enough, and the existence of a large potential market is not enough either. If you have 50,000 customers and tell an investor that the addressable market is 50 million, the more important question is what happens if those 50 million people actually come.
Can your technology support them? Can your supply chain serve them? Can your people manage them? Can your financial systems withstand the volume? Can you maintain quality, protect customer data and preserve trust? The real question is not simply whether the market exists, but whether you have built an enterprise capable of serving that market at scale.
SCALE THROUGH AGGREGATION
Scale also does not always require building everything yourself. Sometimes it comes from bringing together capabilities, networks and strengths that already exist separately.
I saw a powerful demonstration of this while working closely with Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then a former Governor of Lagos State, during a period of intense political organization, consultation and alliance-building. The challenge was to bring different political parties, leaders, constituencies and strengths into a larger national platform capable of competing nationally. The eventual emergence of the All Progressives Congress, and its victory in the 2015 presidential election, demonstrated what aggregation could achieve: separate strengths, brought together within the right architecture, achieved a scale and outcome that had previously proved elusive.
For entrepreneurs, the lesson is organizational rather than political. Scale does not always mean building everything yourself. Strategic partnerships, alliances, distribution networks and complementary capabilities can provide market access, infrastructure, expertise and reach that could take years to build independently.
For a venture seeking global reach, the critical question may therefore not simply be, “What more must I build?” but also, “Who already has the market access, infrastructure, knowledge or capability that can help us scale faster?”
An idea may begin with an individual, but if it is to achieve genuine scale, it must eventually become bigger than its originator.
INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE ENABLING ENVIRONMENT
Demand does not produce scale by itself. There must be an architecture capable of converting demand into access, transactions and sustained growth. That architecture includes physical and digital infrastructure, investment, standards, institutions, skills and, critically, an enabling regulatory environment.
Telecommunications provides a useful example. Millions of Nigerians wanted access to mobile services, but demand alone could not have produced the scale the industry eventually achieved. At the Nigerian Communications Commission, I saw at close quarters how investment, spectrum, infrastructure, competition, standards, consumer protection and regulatory certainty had to interact for the market to expand. My responsibility for stakeholder management placed me at the interface of consumers, operators, licensees and government, and it reinforced how much successful markets depend on the quality of the environment around them.
There is an important lesson here for both founders and governments. Government does not always have to be the entity doing the scaling. Sometimes its most consequential role is to create the conditions in which others can scale. Where regulation is credible and reasonably predictable, businesses can plan and investors can assess risk with greater confidence. Where regulation is inconsistent or unpredictable, capital becomes cautious and investment becomes more expensive.
For a founder seeking institutional capital, regulatory readiness therefore cannot be postponed until the business becomes large. Regulatory risk is investment risk. The venture that intends to cross borders must understand not only the markets it wants to enter, but also the regulatory architecture within which it will have to operate.
WHEN A GLOBAL MODEL MEETS A LOCAL MARKET
There is, however, another side to global scale. What works successfully in one market does not necessarily scale successfully in another. A company may have global technology, a powerful brand and considerable capital and still discover that local economics are stronger than global assumptions.
We have a very current Nigerian example. Uber entered Nigeria in 2014 and helped pioneer app-based ride-hailing in the country. Twelve years later, it has just ended its Nigerian operations. Uber has not attributed that decision to one specific cause; it says the decision followed a review of its operations and investment priorities. But it leaves a market in which competition had intensified while inflation, fuel costs and currency volatility had placed considerable pressure on both drivers and platforms.
That should interest every founder and investor in this room because Nigeria did not stop needing ride-hailing when Uber left. Competitors remain in the market. Some competed aggressively on price and driver economics, while the Nigerian consumer became increasingly sensitive to the cost of mobility. Reporting around the exit also points to the pressure created by competing platforms, operating costs and differing approaches to pricing and commissions.
So perhaps the question is not whether Uber could build a globally scalable company. It obviously did. The more interesting question is why a globally scalable model ultimately ceased to make sufficient sense in Africa's most populous market.
That forces us to distinguish population from addressable market. Nigeria may have more than 200 million people, but 200 million people are not automatically 200 million customers for your product. The relevant market is the population with the need, access, purchasing power and willingness to pay at a price that also sustains the economics of the business.
Founders frequently tell investors, “If we capture just one percent of this population...” But one percent of a population is not a business model. You still have to explain who that one percent is, what they can afford, why they will choose you, how frequently they will use your product and whether you can serve them profitably.
The Uber case also raises an important regulatory question, although we should not pretend that regulation alone explains its departure. Uber itself has said its exit was not caused by the recent airport restrictions, even as industry participants have called for a broader examination of the regulatory and operating environment for ride-hailing.
The larger lesson is that global scale is not the ability to reproduce exactly the same model everywhere. It is the ability to preserve what makes your model valuable while adapting sufficiently to the economics, behavior and institutions of each market.
THE HUMAN CAPITAL QUESTION
Infrastructure alone cannot deliver scale. Ultimately, systems have to be built, managed and improved by people, which means that the human-capital architecture of an enterprise must be capable of growing with the enterprise itself.
We often describe Africa's youthful population as a demographic advantage. There is enormous potential in that proposition, but population by itself is not an economic advantage. Demography becomes an advantage when people are equipped with the skills, opportunities and productive capacity to create value.
That reality became particularly stark while I served as Minister of Youth and Sports Development. When the constituency for which you are responsible runs into tens of millions, you quickly learn that impressive beneficiary numbers do not necessarily amount to population-level impact. An intervention may genuinely improve the lives of 100,000 young people and still leave you confronting the much larger question of how that opportunity reaches millions more.
Businesses face the same arithmetic. A company may raise substantial capital and invest heavily in technology, but if it cannot recruit, develop and retain the people required to execute its strategy, growth eventually encounters a human-capital ceiling. A business moving from twenty employees to two hundred cannot simply become a larger version of what it was at twenty.
It needs management depth, technical capability, institutional knowledge, delegation, leadership development and succession. The people architecture must be as scalable as the technology architecture.
There is also a founder question here. Institutional investors are not investing only in the individual who started the business. They want to know who else understands it, who can make decisions, who can lead the next market and whether the organization can function without every major decision returning to one person. Institutional capital ultimately wants to invest in an institution, not permanent dependence on an individual.
WHEN A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT IS STILL TOO SMALL
The distinction between successful output and impact at scale becomes even more important when we turn to government. Governments develop policies, establish programs, approve projects and implement pilots, and some of those interventions work extremely well. But the fact that something worked should be the beginning of the scale conversation rather than the end of it.
If an intervention reaches 10,000 people while the problem it was designed to address affects ten million, the 10,000 beneficiaries matter and the project may rightly be considered successful. But the intervention has still reached only a fraction of the population for whom the policy was intended.
An investor looking at a company with 10,000 customers in a market of ten million will immediately ask how the company intends to reach 100,000, one million and eventually several million. Government should be equally rigorous in asking how an intervention moves from a successful pilot to population-level impact.
Otherwise, we can become very good at producing successful projects whose impact remains too small to be felt by the majority of the people they were created to serve.
The challenge is therefore not simply to formulate policy. We have to think through the entire chain from policy to implementation, from implementation to outcomes, from outcomes to scale, and from scale to sustainability. A weakness at any point in that chain can prevent a good idea from becoming meaningful impact.
This is also why we must be careful about what we call success. A project can complete its activities and still fall short of its intended outcome. A program can meet its immediate output targets and still fail to change conditions at the scale for which it was conceived. Activity is not impact, and pilot success is not population-level success.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN A BUDGET AND AN OUTCOME
Funding is one of the places where the architecture of scale can break down. In government, there can be a considerable difference between what is provided for in a budget and what is eventually available for implementation.
A program may have an approved budget and clearly stated objectives, yet implementation does not happen on paper. Where releases are delayed, unpredictable or substantially below what the implementation plan requires, projects slow down, procurement is affected, timelines slip and expected outcomes are compromised. A national ambition can therefore remain trapped at pilot-level output, not because the underlying idea was wrong, but because the architecture for financing its expansion was never dependable.
There is a fundamental difference between budgeting for an outcome and financing its delivery.
That distinction becomes even more important when we consider the scale of Africa’s development challenge. Every year, millions of young Africans enter the labor market, placing enormous pressure on economies to create jobs, enterprises and opportunity at a scale that conventional interventions alone cannot meet. At the same time, Africa is not a continent without assets. It has large pools of capital, rapidly expanding markets, significant natural resources and some of the world’s most compelling investment opportunities. The challenge, therefore, is not simply how to attract more development funding. It is how to build financing systems capable of mobilizing those assets and supporting transformation at scale.
This is where the distinction between funding and financing becomes important. Funding can keep a project or program running. Financing transformation must do something larger: it must help build the productive capacity, institutions, infrastructure and systems that continue generating value long after an individual intervention has ended. If our ambition is scale, then the financing architecture must be designed not merely to sustain activities, but to sustain transformation.
The same principle applies to business. A founder cannot execute an ambitious global expansion strategy without sufficient and appropriately structured capital. A brilliant scaling plan that is persistently underfunded eventually becomes an aspiration rather than a strategy.
Yet funding alone cannot guarantee scale. A government can release all the funds and still fail to achieve the intended result, just as an investor can fully capitalize a company that subsequently fails. Money has to meet competent people, implementation capacity, systems, governance, discipline and accountability.
Capital is an accelerator, but what it accelerates depends on the quality of the institution receiving it.
FROM POLICY INTENTION TO CITIZEN EXPERIENCE
At national level, the distance between a policy decision and its eventual impact can be considerable. Between the intention at the center and the experience of the citizen lie legislation, regulation, institutions, budgets, releases, implementation capacity, coordination, communication and public response.
Working today in presidential media and public communications gives me a close view of that chain. A policy can be sound at conception and still lose momentum somewhere between announcement and implementation. This is why the architecture of scale has to be considered from the beginning rather than after a pilot has already succeeded.
Sustainability is especially important. If a public intervention depends entirely on one budget cycle, one source of funding, one political champion or one implementation team, then we have to ask what happens when any of those conditions change. A project that scales briefly but cannot survive transition has not achieved sustainable scale.
Institutional investors ask essentially the same question of businesses. What happens after the first large funding round? What happens when the founding team changes? What happens when the business encounters a new regulatory environment, an economic downturn or a much larger competitor? A scalable architecture must be capable not only of producing growth but also of absorbing shocks and sustaining performance.
COMMUNICATION IS PART OF IMPLEMENTATION
Communication is another part of the scaling architecture that both governments and businesses routinely underestimate. Too often, government treats communication as something that begins after the policy has been developed, the legislation enacted and the program approved. By then, an important part of implementation may already have been lost.
Communication is not merely the announcement of implementation; communication is part of implementation itself. The officials expected to implement a policy must understand it. Businesses affected by a regulatory change must understand what has changed. Citizens must understand what a reform means for them, while intended beneficiaries must know that an intervention exists, whether they qualify, how they can access it and what is expected of them.
Where that understanding does not exist, the implementation architecture is incomplete.
That lesson takes me back to broadcasting as much as it speaks to my present responsibilities. Broadcasting taught me that reaching people is not necessarily the same thing as being understood by them. Government adds another dimension: people cannot participate effectively in a policy or program they do not understand.
The private sector faces precisely the same challenge. A founder can build an outstanding product, but if customers do not understand its value, cannot access it or do not trust it, adoption will remain constrained. Knowledge and communication are therefore not decorative additions to scale; they are part of its infrastructure.
WHAT, THEN, ATTRACTS INSTITUTIONS?
When these pieces are brought together, the venture architecture that attracts institutions becomes clearer. Institutional investors want more than an exciting product and a large addressable market. They want evidence that the enterprise has thought seriously about infrastructure, people, partnerships, governance, regulation, financing, implementation, market understanding and sustainability.
They are asking whether the business can repeat what it has already done for many more people, whether it can adapt across markets, whether it can withstand greater scrutiny and whether it can continue functioning beyond the individuals who originally created it.
Government should ask the same questions of public interventions. Can the policy move beyond the pilot? Can implementation reach the scale of the problem? Is financing adequate and predictable? Is there enabling legislation and regulation? Do implementing institutions have the required capability? Do the intended beneficiaries understand the intervention? Can it survive a change in leadership, funding source or budget cycle? Most importantly, are we measuring activities and outputs or are we measuring outcomes and impact?
These are fundamentally institutional questions.
For the founders in this room, therefore, the challenge is not simply to become attractive enough to raise institutional capital. It is to begin behaving like an institution before the institutional investor arrives. Build the systems that can carry tomorrow's customers, develop the people who can lead tomorrow's organization, form the partnerships that can accelerate reach, understand the regulatory environments into which you intend to expand, understand the economics and behavior of each market, institutionalize knowledge and create governance capable of surviving growth.
The strongest proposition you can take to an institutional investor is not simply that your business is growing rapidly. It is that you have deliberately built the architecture capable of sustaining that growth.
Across the different worlds in which I have worked, the vocabulary around scale has changed. In broadcasting, we spoke about reach and audience. In political organization, it was about building alliances and aggregating strengths around a larger platform. In telecommunications, it was access, penetration, investment and an enabling regulatory environment. In youth development, it was inclusion, opportunity and the challenge of reaching a vast population. In government, it is policy, implementation, outcomes and sustainability. In presidential communications, it is also about whether policy is understood well enough to secure participation and produce the intended response.
The vocabulary may change, but the underlying challenge remains remarkably similar. The real test of an idea is not simply whether it works, but whether the architecture exists for it to work repeatedly, for many more people, under different market conditions, under greater pressure and complexity, and long after the individuals who first conceived it have moved on.
That is the difference between a promising venture and an institution, between a successful government project and population-level impact, and between attracting capital and being genuinely ready to put that capital to work at global scale.
Thank you.