Sona Mahendra asks: am I the right founder for this business?

I'VE HAD a front-row seat to Sona Mahendra's latest entrepreneurial chapter, watching her transition from backing founders at 54 Collective to building her own startup.

- ANDILE MASUKU

The transformation has been fascinating: seeing how lessons learnt while supporting other people's ventures now play out in her own.

After her initial TechTides Africa column hijack, African Tech's Next Big Challenge: Matching Venture Capital to Realistic Outcomes, I've been tracking how she navigates the founder's chair with fresh perspective from the other side.

Her four-part Sona's Field Notes email capsule series offers a window into this evolution, both psychological and practical.

The first instalment tackled that haunting question keeping African founders awake: "But is it VC-backable, though?"

Mahendra pushed back. Why pre-filter ideas through investor lenses when most founders are too early for VC conversations anyway?

Freedom from market-size obsession, she argued, actually speeds up learning.

March brought The Market Size Misconception, challenging founders who abandon promising ideas over perceived total addressable market limitations.

Drawing from Y Combinator wisdom, she called out the "VC toolkit" mentality that kills viable businesses before they prove themselves.

In Africa's problem-rich environment, she reasoned, any substantial challenge pursued long enough will grow into real opportunity.

April's Principles Over Playbooks cited Cedric Chin's demolition of the “Idea Maze” concept and Peter Thiel’s first principles thinking.

Mahendra questioned Africa’s dependence on imported playbooks. Successful companies, she concluded, emerge from deeply personal journeys that resist cookie-cutter approaches.

Across these pieces, a founder wrestles with structure versus intuition, received wisdom against lived reality.

Now, in the last in this series of public reflections, Mahendra turns the microscope on herself rather sharply, confronting a question that pervades every entrepreneur's quiet moments.

Here's what's on Mahendra's mind, in her words: