The Attention Problem: What It Actually Takes to Run a Startup Studio

When you’re building everyone else’s company.

It’s 9am on a Monday and I already have three conversations open. One founder — B2B construction materials — needs a decision on a pricing model before his investor call this afternoon. Another, in fintech, just sent a message flagged urgent: his lead developer wants to leave. A third, building in the food supply chain, is waiting on feedback on a deck I haven’t had time to open yet. In the next two hours, I’ll need to think like three completely different operators in three completely different markets.

None of this is exceptional. This is just Monday.

Running a startup studio means you are never building one thing. You’re building about a dozen simultaneously — at different stages, in different sectors, with different teams, each with legitimate claims on your attention. The job is not to do everything. The job is to know, every single morning, what actually matters today.

What nobody tells you about the studio model

There’s a version of the startup studio that people imagine from the outside: a portfolio of companies, a small team providing support, clean separation between the studio and its startups. That’s not what it looks like from the inside.

At Mstudio, we don’t just invest in companies — we build them. We identify the opportunity, we construct the founding team, we co-create the product. Which means I’m not a spectator waiting for quarterly reports. I’m in the work. Some weeks, I’m a sparring partner on a go-to-market decision. Other weeks, I’m reviewing a design iteration or stress-testing a unit economics model. The distance you’d expect between a fund and its portfolio doesn’t exist here. That’s intentional. And it’s what makes the role unlike anything I can find a real job description for.

The real constraint in a startup studio isn’t funding. It isn’t even talent. It’s attention — the cognitive bandwidth of the people at the center of it. The skill isn’t in being everywhere. It’s in developing a precise sense of where a decision actually hinges on you being there.

The hardest decision: who do you keep?

This is the question nobody prepares you for — and it’s not what most people assume it is.

It’s not about a bad week versus a good week. It’s about a founder who has been building for eight months, has burned through most of their runway, and hasn’t found their model. You’ve given time, resources, introductions, frameworks. The team is still motivated. The founder still believes. But the data doesn’t lie. At what point do you stop? At what point does continuing to invest — your attention, the studio’s credibility, resources that could go somewhere else — become the wrong decision?

On the other side: a startup exceeding every KPI, a market opening faster than expected, a founder asking for help to go after a real opportunity. The right partnership, the right strategic push, and you could triple or quadruple their growth in the next quarter. But it requires real time. Real focus.

These two situations don’t always arrive in the same week. But when they do, the choice is stark. And it forces you to be honest about something most people in venture don’t say out loud: the kill is part of the studio. Deciding when to stop supporting something is as important as deciding where to double down. Pretending otherwise would be a disservice to everyone — including the founders themselves.

The part nobody pitches: when co-founders break

Strategy and metrics are manageable. Human friction is harder.

I got a call one afternoon from a founder who wanted to talk “off the record.” His co-founder, he said, had been making decisions without him — a partnership conversation, a hire, a shift in revenue strategy. He’d found out through a third party. By the time I hung up, I had a message from the other side of the table, with a version of events that sounded completely different.

This is also the job. A meaningful part of supporting founders is navigating what happens to a relationship when two people are building something under pressure together. Co-founders don’t break on bad ideas. They break on unspoken expectations. And most of the time, nobody sees it coming.

The context-switching is the work

The Monday morning scene I described above — construction materials, fintech, food supply chain, all before 10am — is not an anomaly. It’s the baseline. And what I’ve come to understand is that this isn’t a bug. It’s the core skill the studio builds.

When you’ve worked through the same type of problem across multiple startups, you develop pattern recognition that no single-company operator can develop at the same speed. You see what’s structural versus what’s specific. You bring a reference point from another context that the founder couldn’t have. The context-switching is exhausting. It’s also what makes the insights worth something.

The learning is mutual — and that’s underrated

When one startup figures something out, the whole portfolio can benefit. What Waribei learns about onboarding informal traders, Djoli can adapt for its restaurant suppliers. What Danaya discovers about trust-building in digital KYC, another company can draw from before hitting the same wall. And when Blok works through the hard problems of inventory management and supplier logistics, Revvo — another marketplace at a different stage — doesn’t have to learn those lessons from scratch. Different businesses, different verticals, but the underlying mechanics of how you run a marketplace are closer than they look.

We try to create the conditions for this to happen deliberately — not just by accident. It’s one of the things the Friday weekly is designed for.

The rhythm that holds it together

The week has anchors. Monday is for priorities — the run versus build tension surfaced, debated, resolved enough to move. The run is everything urgent: the operational fires, the decisions that can’t wait. The build is everything strategic: the work that won’t be urgent until it’s suddenly critical. If you only do run, the studio doesn’t grow. If you only do build, the portfolio suffers.

Friday is for the collective. All our founders in the same space, sharing what moved, what blocked, what surprised them. But it doesn’t end with status updates. It ends with gratitude — everyone, founders and core team alike, takes a moment to thank someone else for something specific they did that week. A problem they helped think through. A connection they made. A reply that came through on a late night. It sounds small. It’s actually one of the things that makes the studio feel like a community rather than a portfolio. It’s part of our DNA.

Then there are the beginning-of-quarter weeks, when board meetings land — for individual startups, with the fund partners who’ve invested in them. Budget allocation, strategic pivots, performance reviews. More structured, more consequential. Also the weeks where you step back far enough to see the shape of things, which the day-to-day rarely allows.

A reflection

Someone asked me recently what the hardest part of the role is. I didn’t say the workload or the context-switching. I said: learning not to do the job of our founders.

We are support partners. CXOs by nature. Our role is to bring the right advice at the right moment, the right resource at the right moment — not to take over. Which means watching a founder navigate a hard decision, sometimes knowing there’s a faster path, and staying out of the way anyway. The founder needs to own their project. Their mistakes are part of their learning. Taking that away from them — even with the best intentions — is one of the most counterproductive things you can do.

And that can be hard. It still is, sometimes.

What’s your version of the flying vs. struggling dilemma? How do you decide where to put your energy when everything feels urgent? Hit reply — I read every one.

Next issue: AI and the startup studio.
There’s a longer conversation I’ve been wanting to have about what artificial intelligence is actually changing inside a studio like Mstudio — not the hype version, but the real operational shifts. What it allows us to do today that we couldn’t do two years ago. Where it still falls flat. And what it means for the future of venture building in Africa. That one’s coming. Stay tuned.