Everywhere you turn in African tech, the conversation circles back to the same refrain: the skills gap. Universities struggling to graduate industry-ready talent. Engineers entering the field without enough depth. Workers leaving before they have the chance to mature into senior roles.
Politicians, founders, and investors echo this line so often that it has hardened into the ecosystem’s default narrative about itself.
The narrative resonates because everyone has felt its weight — the underprepared junior hire, the restless engineer chasing stability, the founder frustrated by employee churn. But in my experience, what many describe as a shortage of skills is, more often, a shortage of trust.
Time and again, when I evaluate a startup as an investor and operator, the place where I learn the most is payroll. Not revenue projections, not the pitch deck. Payroll tells me whether a company is truly built for endurance.
Payroll as X-ray
Payroll is the X-ray of a company’s soul.
In enduring companies, payroll is lean but solid: a small group of people, fairly compensated in cash, with equity that’s documented, vested, and honored. These teams don’t just work like employees; they work like owners, because they are owners.
In fragile companies, payroll tells another story: swollen headcounts, staff scraping by on starvation wages, equity as empty promises, and leadership that sees talent as disposable. These businesses look impressive in slides but hollow in substance.
Constraints are real, of course. Many founders are just scraping by, paying what they can. But integrity doesn’t always require abundance. Even lean pay can be paired with clear agreements, candid conversations, and fairness in how sacrifices are shared.
A tale of two startups
I’ve watched two cross-border fintech startups, in the same vertical, chasing the same opportunity at the same time, take radically different paths.
- One company began with fewer than five engineers. The founders paid fairly and above market, issued real equity with proper documentation, and treated talent as co-builders, not just staff. The result was a team that stayed small but intensely loyal, scaling their product into global markets with remarkable efficiency.
- Another company entered the same space with nearly 20 engineers on payroll from day one. Salaries were meager, turnover constant, and equity commitments were never honored. Not a single share certificate was issued. Leadership treated talent across the organisation as disposable, assuming people could be churned and replaced at will. The product has never reached stability, because people simply didn’t trust the company enough to stay and build.
Same market. Same regulatory headwinds. Same opportunity. Yet one has scaled and the other has stagnated. The difference wasn’t in skill. It was in trust.
The empire builder’s trap
This is the trap of the “empire builder.” Too many founders peg the value of their leadership to the size of their payroll. They equate headcount with legitimacy, mistaking a crowded office or online meeting for a strong culture.
But empire builders rarely build trust. They burn through people cheaply, chase vanity metrics, and offer equity they never intend to honor.
The temptation is understandable. Bigger teams look impressive to investors, and vanity metrics can grease the fundraising path. But while vanity raises rounds, it doesn’t build companies. In the long run, brittle cultures crack.
By contrast, the leaner founder, who hires carefully, pays fairly, and documents commitments, often scales further, precisely because trust multiplies output more than headcount does.
The founder pay signal
How founders pay themselves is just as revealing. In too many startups, CEOs draw salaries multiples above the average engineer while insisting that their teams should “believe in the mission” and “think long-term.” It’s not just bad optics, it’s a breach of trust.
Founders do need to be financially secure to lead effectively, but alignment matters more than absolute numbers. When founders extract disproportionate value early, they show that sacrifice is for others. They demand loyalty while modeling self-interest. By contrast, the founders who build enduring companies align their own compensation with the well-being of their teams.
They understand that trust is not rhetoric; it’s a strategic imperative.
The trust gap masquerading as a skills gap
What we often describe as a skills gap is, in many cases, really a trust gap. To be clear, there are real shortages in African tech, but they are most acute in leadership, not in junior talent. The deeper deficit isn’t coding ability; it’s the ability of founders and managers to build trust, structure equity compensation, and lead through uncertainty and scarcity. What often gets framed as a lack of technical skill is really the fallout of that leadership gap.
Consider wages. Staff are churned through on thin salaries that barely cover living costs, then blamed for lacking loyalty or professionalism when they leave, often for better-run international companies and higher pay. Employers call it a skills shortage. But what looks like disloyalty is often rational behavior: people can’t commit to futures that don’t even cover their present.
Take equity. Too often in African startups, stock options are promised but never documented or vested. Employees quickly learn these offers are illusory, and they disengage. From the outside, founders frame this as “talent not sticking around long enough to learn and add value,” but the deeper problem is that trust was broken.
Or look at side hustles. Engineers working multiple jobs in secret aren’t doing so because they lack focus. They’re doing it because they don’t trust their employer to provide stability. Instead of acknowledging this, founders label them “unreliable.”
Across the continent, a generational fault line runs through the workplace. Older employers, shaped in a time when jobs were scarce and stability meant loyalty, still expect deference and long tenure. Younger workers, meanwhile, have grown up in an economy marked by sudden layoffs, rising costs, and a constant window into global pay scales on LinkedIn.
Many also see peers landing remote roles with international firms that offer more flexibility, transparency, and security than local employers. Against that backdrop, what looks to some founders like a “skills gap” is often really a deficit of trust in the institutions closest to them.
So when a manager complains that “African graduates lack workplace etiquette” or “African engineers hop too quickly for small raises,” what they may really be saying is, “I don’t trust them to stay, and they don’t trust me to be fair.”
And when a young engineer quietly updates their LinkedIn after seeing their most talented colleagues underpaid, sidelined, or pushed out, what they’re really thinking is, “I can’t trust this company to value me, and they don’t trust me enough to build with me long-term.”
Both sides misinterpret the same dynamic as a lack of skill. In reality, it’s a lack of trust.
And when trust breaks, our companies don’t just lose people, they lose velocity. Execution stalls because no one is fully invested. Everyone is hedging.
How people leave
Trust isn’t only tested in how people are hired. It’s also revealed in how they leave.
Turnover is inevitable. Talented employees will move on to new opportunities. Startups will need to upgrade teams as they scale. That’s normal.
But what separates great founders from failed empire builders is how those exits are handled. When leaders burn bridges, forcing people out with hostility, withholding earned equity, refusing to pay severance, or treating early employees as disposable once they’re no longer needed, they send a message to everyone left behind: loyalty flows only one way.
By contrast, when founders honor commitments, pay what is owed, and even help departing employees find their next roles, they build reputational capital that outlasts a single company. People may leave, but they leave as advocates rather than critics.
How talent exits often tells you more about a founder than how they hire. One path deepens the trust account of the ecosystem. The other depletes it.
Bridging the trust gap
Trust isn’t built by accident. It’s built by choices — often unglamorous ones. Both founders and talent have a role to play.
For founders:
- Document equity properly. A promise in a WhatsApp chat is not equity. Issue agreements with vesting schedules.
- Align pay with sacrifice. Don’t ask your team to live lean while you live large.
- Invest in fewer, better people. Headcount doesn’t equal progress. Trust does.
- Be candid about constraints. People can accept tough realities. What they can’t accept is deception.
- Handle exits with integrity. Severance pay, honoring equity, and providing support for the next role aren’t costs. They’re investments in reputation.
For talent:
- Be transparent. If you need side work to survive, raise it and disclose it. Concealment corrodes trust faster than scarcity.
- Push for clarity. Equity terms, salary benchmarks, growth paths — ask. Questions aren’t disloyalty. They’re diligence.
- Treat equity as real only when it’s real. If there’s no paper, don’t bank on it.
- Reciprocate commitment. When founders show good faith, give the grind. Trust runs both ways.
- Build judgment, not just credentials. Skills get you in the door; judgment keeps you in the room.
Beyond skills
Africa is overflowing with talent — adaptive, ambitious, and globally competitive. What too many startups lack is the trust infrastructure to harness it.
Yes, skills matter. Market timing and regulation matter. But without trust, none of it compounds. That’s why payroll matters more than pitch decks, why equity documentation matters more than “corporate values” slogans, and why founder salaries and exit practices matter more than stagecraft.
Because the true measure of a founder isn’t how many people they can put on payroll, but how many of those people would choose to build with them again.
About the author
Toni Campbell is the Founder and Managing Partner at Kinfolk Venture Capital. The firm has previously invested in African startups such as Norebase, Bento, and Yassir.
