The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public Communications, Dr. Sunday Akin Dare, has urged entrepreneurs and founders to look beyond raising capital and focus on building strong institutions capable of sustaining growth, attracting long-term investment and outliving their founders.
Dare made the call while delivering the keynote address titled “Building for Global Scale: The Venture Architecture That Attracts Institutions” at Investors Connect London 2026, held at Imperial College London on Thursday. He said capital could accelerate growth only when an enterprise had already developed the technology, people, governance, processes and operating systems required to support scale. “Scale is not simply a function of ambition; it is a function of architecture,” he said.
He urged founders to distinguish between market reach and genuine scalability, stressing that a large potential market did not automatically translate into a viable business opportunity. According to him, the real test was whether a business could serve millions of customers, withstand regulatory and financial pressure, manage greater complexity and preserve quality and trust long after its founders had moved on.
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Dare said strategic partnerships, aggregation and institutional alignment were often essential to achieving scale, noting that businesses did not have to build every capability themselves. He advised entrepreneurs to identify partners with existing market access, infrastructure, knowledge and networks, while creating clear roles, shared objectives and systems capable of aligning different strengths.
Drawing on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s record of political organising and institution-building, Dare said the President had demonstrated how separate interests, networks and capabilities could be brought together within a coherent structure to create a stronger platform. He cited the formation of the All Progressives Congress and its victory in the 2015 presidential election as an example of how political aggregation, supported by a clear architecture and common purpose, could achieve results beyond the capacity of any single component.
He stressed that the lesson from President Tinubu’s approach was not merely the ability to assemble individuals and groups, but the capacity to convert that coalition into a functioning institution. By defining a shared direction and creating a platform through which different interests could operate together, Dare said, Tinubu showed that durable scale depended on organisation, trust, coordination and the ability to make an institution larger than its originator.
“An idea may begin with an individual, but if it is to achieve genuine scale, it must eventually become bigger than its originator,” Dare said. He urged founders to ask not only what more they needed to build, but also who already possessed the capabilities that could help them scale faster. He added that institutional investors ultimately wanted to invest in institutions rather than permanent dependence on individuals.
Dare also stressed the importance of infrastructure, human capital, predictable regulation, financing and governance. Reflecting on his experience at the Nigerian Communications Commission, he said investment, competition, standards, consumer protection and regulatory certainty were essential to creating markets capable of sustainable expansion. “Regulatory risk is investment risk,” he said, while warning that approved budgets alone could not guarantee impact without implementation capacity, accountability and predictable financing.
Using Uber’s exit from Nigeria as a case study, Dare cautioned global businesses against assuming that a model successful in one market would automatically succeed elsewhere. He said population size was not an automatic customer base and urged founders to understand local purchasing power, consumer behaviour, operating costs, regulation and market economics. “Global scale is not the ability to reproduce exactly the same model everywhere,” he said. “It is the ability to preserve what makes your model valuable while adapting sufficiently to the economics, behaviour and institutions of each market.”
The Investors Connect London event was convened by Vivacity Development, led by Founder and CEO Oluwakemi Ann-Melody Areola, as part of the organization’s ongoing commitment to bridging global capital, institutional frameworks, and emerging market opportunities. Through strategic convening and high-level dialogue, Vivacity Development continues to build international platforms that drive sustainable investment, foster cross-border collaboration, and empower the next generation of scalable African enterprises.
