The Organization Is the Product

Whenever we talk about startups, the conversation always circles back to the product. That magic thing you build once, then sell infinitely. Apps, devices, software — they scale. But there’s something most founders miss: the organization itself is the real product.

Products are a reflection of how well the organization is built. A strong organization ships good work repeatedly; a brittle one eventually cracks, no matter how brilliant the initial idea. And unlike code, organizations are made of people. People don’t “scale”; they grow — incrementally, organically. They aren’t machines; they are plants. Building an organization isn’t about assembling cogs — it’s about cultivating a garden.

People Grow Like Plants

When you build products, you think in terms of exponential scale. When you build people, you accept organic timelines.

A plant doesn’t grow faster because you demand it.
A plant doesn’t bloom because you send it angry emails.
A plant doesn’t yield fruit if the soil is poor or the roots are neglected.

People are the same. They need clear purpose, real support, a culture of trust, and leaders who protect them from chaos. When those conditions exist, they produce fruit — in business: innovation, loyalty, recurring revenue, and compounding value.

The role of the entrepreneur isn’t just invention — it’s cultivation. You’re not only a builder. You are a farmer.

You Cannot Overpay for Talent

One of the most useful insights from David Senra’s Founders is blunt and true: you cannot overpay for talent. Great companies are built by great people. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Simons, Jensen Huang, Enzo Ferrari — different eras, same obsession: attract the best and keep them. The point isn’t pay-to-play; it’s invest-to-win.

Jim Collins captured it in Good to Great: first, get the right people on the bus. Direction becomes easier when excellence sits in every seat. Hiring isn’t filling roles; it’s planting seeds. When the right person appears, you invest — because their growth becomes the company’s growth.

The Fallacy of People as Bottlenecks

Too many leaders still talk about people as cost centers or bottlenecks. Some even fantasize about a company run by contracts, code, and AI alone.

They forget something obvious: they themselves are people. That’s the hypocrisy — visionaries dismissing the very labor that makes their visions real.

Economics is straightforward: output depends on land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Labor is foundational. If people are that critical, why treat them like expenses? Mismanage this truth and you get toxicity, churn, and collapse.

Hubris vs. Legacy

Extractive leaders think they’re winning by squeezing teams — longer hours, lower pay, fear-driven cultures. It looks efficient in the short term. In the long term, it’s rot: your best people leave, your culture hollows out, and your product quality erodes.

The founders who build legacies take a different path: you cannot build something that matters by treating people like trash. If you’re serious about endurance, you nurture the soil, water the plants, and protect the grove. Otherwise you’re playing for headlines, not history.

The Entrepreneur as Farmer — With Real Numbers

In Kenya, agriculture doesn’t blanket every inch of land — but it remains central, contributing roughly ~20–22% of GDP and employing a huge share of our people. Central Bank of Kenya Kenya National Bureau of Statistics The land teaches patience and compounding.

Consider the Hass avocado. It starts modestly, then turns into a perennial cash generator if you plant well, space well, and wait. Typical guidance puts first fruit at year 3–4, with economic returns after year 6. Wikifarmer Standard spacing like 5m × 5m yields about 150 trees per acre. Farming in Kenya | Farming in Kenya A Hass fruit commonly weighs ~200–300 g, so ~3–5 fruits per kg — we’ll use ~4 fruits/kg as a practical midpoint. Wikipedia Fruty Green

Below is a clean, mid-case model that’s easy to grasp (assumptions are stated; your actuals will vary by agronomy, rains, pests, and market access):

🌱 Avocado Economics — Patience Pays

Assumptions (mid-case): 150 trees/acre; price 100 KES/kg (from your 20–40 KES per fruit ≈ 80–160 KES/kg; midpoint used); initial setup 250,000 KES/acre; annual opex 60,000 KES/acre; yield ramp aligned to common extension guidance (first fruit year 3–4; economic gain year 6; mature yields ~2.8–5.5 t/acre). Wikifarmer

Year	Yield (t/acre)	Revenue per Acre (KES)	Revenue per Tree (KES)	Cumulative Balance (per Acre)
0	0.0	0	0	–250,000 (setup)
3	0.5	50,000	~330	–380,000
4	1.5	150,000	1,000	–290,000
5	3.2	320,000	2,130	–30,000
6	3.6	360,000	2,400	+270,000
8	4.5	450,000	3,000	+1,000,000
10	5.5	550,000	3,670	+1,930,000
12	5.5	550,000	3,670	+3,010,000

What this means:

Break-even ~Year 5–6.
From there, a mature acre throws off ~0.55–0.60 M KES per year in this mid-case.
Per tree at maturity: ~3,700–4,000 KES/year on a tiny annual upkeep — exactly the kind of patient compounding you want from a living asset.

And this is the point: employees are your trees — avocado, macadamia, coffee, tea. You are the farmer who wakes early to water, prune, protect. It’s in your best interest that your “trees” are well-fed (fair pay), rooted in good soil (culture), bathed in sunlight (vision), and protected from pests (toxic politics). Do that, and the fruit keeps coming.

For more on Avocado farming, you can check out: Avocado Farming 101 (Kenya Edition)

Side note, cultural beat: as Amerix keeps reminding Kenyans on X, “Everybody wants to be a politician; few want to be farmers. We must become farmers.” The metaphor holds for companies too.

Revenue per Employee — The Corporate Avocado

This farming logic shows up in the numbers of top tech companies: one great “tree” (employee) can yield millions in revenue. The exact figures shift each year, but the order of magnitude speaks for itself.

NVIDIA: FY2025 revenue $130.5B; headcount ~29.6k ⇒ on the order of $4M+ per employee. NVIDIA Newsroom CSI Market
Apple: FY2024 revenue around $391B; headcount ~161k ⇒ roughly $2.4M per employee. Bullfincher
Alphabet (Google): 2024 revenue reported ≈ $350B; employees ~183k ⇒ roughly ~$1.9M per employee. Wikipedia Macrotrends
Meta: 2024 revenue and 74,067 employees ⇒ on the order of ~$2.3M per employee in 2024–2025 snapshots. Meta Investor StockAnalysis

(For fast-moving AI outfits like OpenAI or Midjourney, public estimates vary wildly month-to-month; the pattern is the same: multi-million revenue per employee in growth phases. Reuters SEO.AI)

Interpretation: just like a mature avocado tree pays for itself many times over, a well-supported, high-impact employee returns multiples of their cost — every single year. Patient cultivation beats short-term extraction.

My Own Style of Leadership

I admire great entrepreneurs, but I also want a leadership style that fits who I am.

I love solving technical problems that create real-world impact. I want to meet customers, understand them, and build relationships. I enjoy working with smart, hungry people toward a mission that matters.

But I also want a life: time for family, a few deep friendships, side projects that bring joy (and sometimes become products). I want to invest in young people and give them room to achieve their dreams. I want to be remembered not just as a founder, but as a good leader, a good friend, a good father and husband.

That only works if I lead in a way that honors people.

How You Treat People Matters

When I left Shukran, I told Mark one thing: “How you treat people matters.”

It matters more than your strategy deck. More than your roadmap. More than your funding round. In the end, companies are just groups of people. And people — not profits, not processes, not products — are what make or break you.

This is leadership’s universal law: take care of people, and they will build with you. Treat them poorly, and however clever your idea, the collapse is only a matter of time.

Closing Thought

A company is more than product, process, or profit. It is, fundamentally, about people.

The organization is the product. Build it like a farmer tends a garden — patiently, carefully, with humility. Plant wisely, nurture relentlessly, and when the harvest comes, it will keep giving for years.

References

Notes on numbers & assumptions (for transparency): Kenya’s agriculture share of GDP is commonly cited near ~20–22% by CBK/KNBS. Central Bank of Kenya Kenya National Bureau of Statistics Avocado timelines (first fruit year 3–4; economic gain ~year 6) and mature yields (~2.8–5.5 t/acre) follow global/extension references. Wikifarmer Spacing (5 m × 5 m ≈ 150 trees/acre) is standard in Kenyan guidance. Farming in Kenya | Farming in Kenya Fruit mass (~200–300 g) supports our “~4 fruits/kg” midpoint. Wikipedia Revenue-per-employee illustrations are computed from the latest reported revenues and employee counts (see citations). NVIDIA Newsroom CSI Market Bullfincher Wikipedia Macrotrends Meta Investor StockAnalysis