Let’s be blunt.

If your business pitch still sounds like “we sell quality products at affordable prices,” you are not in trouble yet — but you will be. Because the economy shifted.

Not the vibe.

Not a trend.

The actual structural rules of what people pay for, why they’re loyal, and what they tell their friends. And if you’re a young founder building something right now in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, or anywhere in Africa — you need this framework in your head before your competition figures it out first.

This is not a theory piece.

This is a map.

And yes, a quantum physicist named Carlo Rovelli is going to show up and make your business strategy make more sense.

Stick with it.

In Dialogue With PhysicsThere Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness — Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists — he works on quantum gravity — and he writes essays that keep accidentally being about business.

Here’s one:

at the most fundamental level of reality, the universe is not made of things.

It’s made of events.

Interactions.

Moments of contact.

Objects don’t have fixed properties on their own — they have properties only in relation to other objects.

Reality is relational.

Translation for founders: your business does not have a fixed value waiting to be discovered.

Your value exists in the interaction between what you do and who experiences it.

The product is not the product.

The encounter is the product.

— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness (2020) · on relational ontology

01 — The Background

The Economy Levelled Up. Did Your Business?

In 1998, two economists — Pine and Gilmore — wrote something that was ahead of its time.

They said the economy had evolved through four stages, and most businesses were stuck on the wrong one.

The classic example:

a coffee bean is worth a few shillings.

Ground and packaged, it’s worth more. Served across a counter, more again. But that same coffee in a space with the right lighting, the right music, and the feeling that this is your place — people will pay 4x more.

Not for the coffee.

For what the coffee is inside.

It grantees you a good feeling. A feelinpoa

We are now past even that.

We are in what people are calling the imagination economy — where the highest-value offering is not a good, service, or staged experience.

It’s an identity.

A vision.

A version of yourself you want to be.

And the brands that win are the ones with a clear enough vision to sell that.

Your competitors are already there.

Are you?

The Shift: Things Stopped Mattering. Meaning Took Over.

Dematerialisation sounds like a science term. It’s not. It just means: the most valuable things are now things you can’t hold.

Think about the businesses destroying their categories right now. They don’t make physical things — or if they do, the physical thing is just the vessel.

Spotify isn’t selling music files. It’s selling your relationship with sound, your emotional identity, your daily soundtrack. A Nairobi gym membership someone pays for and uses twice a month — they are not buying fitness.

They are buying the identity of a person who has a gym membership. COuld that be slowly killing MDUNDO stakes in Africa?

Different thing.

Commercially more durable.

The most profitable thing you can sell in the modern economy is not a product. It’s a version of your customer they want to become.

For Kenyan founders, this is real opportunity.

Because dematerialised value — brand perception, cultural resonance, community trust, story — can be built without the capital a factory requires.

You don’t need funding to be meaningful.

You need clarity.

You need precision.

You need a story that people want to be inside.

The Problem with Knowing Things: The Knowledge Economy Has a Leak.

The knowledge economy gave us a generation of businesses built on one advantage: we know things you don’t. 

Consultants.

Agencies.

Training companies.

Professionals.

The model was:

we have the information, you need it, you pay us for access.

That model has a hole in it now the size of a WiFi signal. Information is everywhere. Anyone with a phone and data can access what used to take years and expensive degrees to accumulate.

The gap between what your business knows and what your customer can find out themselves has been closing fast — and for some industries it has already closed.

The Real Edge Now

Knowing things is not the moat anymore. We don’t care if you’re smart or not.

Knowing what to do with things — synthesising information into vision, seeing patterns nobody else is connecting, imagining what doesn’t exist yet — that’s what’s worth paying for now.

A Physics Lesson That’s Actually a Business Lesson Rovelli on Anaximander — and the courage to revise the map

Rovelli writes about Anaximander — a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher he considers the first real scientist. Anaximander’s achievement wasn’t a new discovery.

It was intellectual courage: he looked at his teacher’s framework, decided it was insufficient, and proposed something completely different.

He questioned the person who taught him everything and said: the map is incomplete.

That willingness to revise received wisdom is what Rovelli identifies as the founding gesture of all genuine knowledge.

It’s also exactly what separates founders who win in the post-knowledge economy from those still selling access to information everyone already has.

You don’t need more data.

You need the courage to look at your industry’s assumptions and say: this map doesn’t explain everything I’m seeing.

— Carlo Rovelli, 

There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · “Anaximander’s Legacy”

04 — The Hard Truth: There Is No Universal Customer. Stop Designing for One.

Here’s a word that sounds like a philosophy lecture but is actually a market insight: postmodernism. The simple version: there is no one grand narrative. No single truth that applies to everyone. No universal customer.

Your market is not one person. It never was. It’s a collection of communities, each with its own internal logic, its own definition of value, its own cultural vocabulary, its own idea of what a good life looks like.

A Nairobi Gen Z creative’s definition of luxury is not the same as her parents’.

A 26-year-old tech founder’s definition of professional success contains references that didn’t exist in the business lexicon ten years ago.

The brands that lose in this market are the ones still chasing the average customer — the statistical middle, the broad appeal, the “something for everyone” pitch.

Because here’s the thing about that: something for everyone is nothing for anyone. You’re background noise in every conversation instead of the whole conversation in one specific room.

Wait — Quantum Mechanics Just Explained Your CustomerRovelli on indeterminacy, perspective, and the limits of objectivity

In quantum mechanics — Rovelli explains this more clearly than anyone — a particle doesn’t have a fixed position until it’s measured. And what gets measured depends entirely on how you choose to look, and from where. Every perspective reveals something real. No single perspective reveals everything.

Your customer is the same.

They don’t have a fixed, discoverable nature waiting for you to find it with enough market research.

They exist in superposition — shaped by context, by who they’re with, by what story they’re currently telling about themselves.

The business that thinks it can arrive at the one true description of its customer is making the same mistake as the physicist who insists on a classical, deterministic universe after quantum mechanics arrived.

Technically confident.

Practically wrong.

— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · on quantum mechanics, perspective and the impossibility of fixed descriptions.

05 — The Currency Nobody Talks About Cultural Capital Is Real Money. Spend It Carefully.

French sociologist Bourdieu gave us the concept. Cultural capital is the non-financial asset that gives you status, access, and belonging in a specific social world. It’s knowing the right references. Speaking the right language. Embodying the right sensibility. It doesn’t show up on your balance sheet but it absolutely shows up in your conversion rate.

For brands, cultural capital is built over time through genuine participation in the communities you want to serve. It accumulates through the quality of your associations, the authenticity of your positioning, and the consistency of how you show up.

And it gets spent — fast — every time you make a move that’s off-brand, tone-deaf, or transparently commercial at the expense of real cultural engagement.

In Kenya, this plays out loudly. The brands that command real loyalty — not just sales, but active advocacy — are the ones that get it. They understand the references.

They speak to actual lived experiences.

They don’t treat local culture as a backdrop for a product designed somewhere else.

The brands that earn contempt do the opposite: they use Swahili in their copy without understanding Swahili communities.

They appropriate aesthetics without participation.

People notice. The internet remembers.

The Practical Version of This

Cultural capital is not something you can manufacture in a campaign or buy through a sponsorship deal. You build it through consistent, genuine engagement — over time. Through the decisions you make publicly. Through who you associate with and how. Through your willingness to be in cultural spaces as a participant, not just an advertiser placing banners.

06 — Pick a Room: The Mass Market Is Dead. The Niche Is Everything.

Here’s where it gets exciting for young founders. The fragmentation of the market into subcultures — communities within the larger culture, with their own distinct aesthetics, norms, and values — is not a problem for small brands. It is the single biggest advantage small brands have ever had.

There is not one Nairobi youth market.

There’s an underground music scene with its own hierarchy and visual language. A tech founder community that reads differently, dresses differently, and defines success differently from the corporate professional three floors above them.

There are afrofuturist creatives, faith-rooted entrepreneurs, fashion communities with tribal loyalties to specific aesthetics, literary communities, skincare communities, wellness communities, gaming communities.

Each is a real market.

Each has real purchasing power.

Each will respond powerfully — with loyalty, with referrals, with genuine advocacy — to a business that speaks their specific language.

The mass market is a statistical average. No one lives there. Real people live in subcultures. Speak to where they actually are.

You don’t need to serve all of them. You need to choose one — or maybe two that naturally overlap — and serve that community with such depth of understanding that you become part of it. That’s not a niche play. That’s the only play that builds lasting brand equity now.

07 — Let Them Make With YouMaker Culture Changed What “Customer” Even Means.

Maker culture is one of those forces that’s been reshaping commerce for a decade and still isn’t in most business strategy conversations.

The short version: a growing segment of consumers are also creators.

They make things. They document the process.

They share, remix, modify, and build on top of what they find. The line between audience and creator, between customer and collaborator, is disappearing.

This matters commercially for two reasons. First, customers who can make things themselves are harder to impress, more critical, and less captive.

Their bar is higher.

Second — and this is the opportunity — the business that genuinely involves its customers in creation unlocks a quality of loyalty that no advertising budget can replicate.

You see this in every direction if you look. The brand that drops a template and watches the community remix it. The label that lets customers customise.

The food brand that shares its recipes and builds a community of home cooks. The software that publishes its API and watches an ecosystem grow.

These are not gimmicks.

They’re a structural shift in the relationship between business and customer — from transaction to co-creation.

And co-creation builds communities.

Communities are the most durable commercial asset there is.

08 — This Is Not Content StrategyStorytelling Is the Architecture, Not the Output.

Let’s clear something up. Storytelling for your business is not “posting consistently.” It is not your content calendar. It is not a series of Reels with captions that end with a question mark. Those are expressions of a story — if you have one.

But the story itself is something deeper: the founding truth of your business. The essential conflict you exist to resolve. The vision of the world as it should be, which only your business is positioned to build.

Apple doesn’t make films — but everything it makes tells the same story about creativity, nonconformity, and the relationship between technology and human imagination.

So consistently that its customers become its storytellers, unprompted. Patagonia doesn’t primarily produce content — but everything it makes embodies a story about wild places and commercial responsibility so coherently that its products are also arguments.

Those are businesses that are stories. Not businesses that tell stories.

Rovelli on Dante — and What This Has to Do With Your BrandOn narrative architecture and time as felt, not measured

Rovelli writes about Dante’s Divine Comedy — not as religion, but as an act of astonishing architectural ambition. Dante took the entire known world — theology, science, history, politics, personal relationships — and organised it into a single coherent structure where everything had meaning in relation to everything else. He didn’t produce content.

He built a cosmology.

That’s the highest ambition for a brand story: not to create content, but to build a world — a coherent structure of meaning in which your customer finds themselves, their values, their aspirations. Rovelli adds one more thing that matters here: Dante wrote about time as experienced, not measured. The nine minutes that felt like an hour.

The hour that dissolved. In the experience economy, how long something feels — the emotional texture of every moment inside your brand world — matters more than how long it actually takes. Design for felt time, not clock time.

— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · on Dante, narrative structure, and the physics of experienced time

In Kenya, there are businesses operating right now with origin stories of extraordinary power. Communities genuinely transformed.

Problems solved through ingenuity that nobody exported from elsewhere.

The combination of tradition and innovation producing something genuinely new. Most of those stories are not being told — or are being told in ways that flatten all the power out of them. That is a commercial cost.

A real one.

Story vs. Marketing — Know the Difference

Marketing tells people what you do. Story tells people what you mean.

Marketing works on the rational mind. Story works on the part of the mind that’s already made the decision before the rational mind gets involved. You need both — but story comes first, because it’s the context in which your marketing is received.

09 — Sell the Better World: Escapism and Idealism Are Not Soft. They’re Strategy.

There’s something in the most commercially effective experiences that’s easy to see but hard to name.

They offer you a version of the world that’s better than the one you walked in from.

Not necessarily more expensive or more technologically advanced.

Just better. More coherent.

More aligned with who you’re trying to be.

This is escapism in its commercial form — not fantasy, but the escape from the present into a more desirable version of it. And it’s idealism as strategy: positioning your business not just as a provider, but as a demonstration of how things should be done.

A restaurant is not just serving food. It’s offering a version of hospitality — of what it means to be welcomed — that is either compelling or it isn’t.

A co-working space is not renting desks. It’s offering a vision of what professional life can feel like when the community is right and the conditions match the ambition of the people inside.

The commercial proposition is always also an ideological one. This is what we believe you deserve.

In a market as culturally charged as Kenya in 2026 — with its extraordinary creative output, its evolving urban professional class, its complex layering of tradition and aspiration — the businesses that win at this are not the ones with the most resources.

They’re the ones with the most coherent vision. Clarity of vision, honestly expressed, is the most democratically available competitive advantage in the experience economy. It costs nothing to have.

It costs everything not to.

10 — Not a CSR BoxInclusion Is Experience Design. And Your Customers Know the Difference.

Inclusion in the experience economy is not your diversity statement. It’s not the Swahili translation of your English FAQ. It’s an experience design question — maybe the most important one — and it works like this: when someone walks into your space (physical or digital) and sees nothing of themselves in it, that is an experience.

It is the experience of not belonging. And it lands with the same immediacy as everything else you’ve designed, with commercial consequences just as real.

The Essay the Book Is Named After — And Why It’s About Your CultureRovelli on kindness as the operating system, not the policy

The title essay describes a rural Italian community where social life is governed not by formal rules but by something that comes before rules: genuine human warmth.

Kindness as the actual operating system. Rovelli’s point isn’t that rules are bad — it’s more precise than that.

Rules are a codification of kindness.

But when the codification becomes more important than the original impulse, when the letter replaces the spirit, something essential has been lost.

You’re performing welcome.

You’re not actually welcoming.

Your customer — who is a fully human person, exquisitely sensitive to this distinction — will always know. The business that does inclusion badly treats it as a checklist: a ramp at the entrance, a translated FAQ, a diversity clause in the policy document.

The business that does it well treats it as a design philosophy: every decision about the experience is made with the question — does this make the whole room feel genuinely welcome, or only the people who already expect to be welcome here? 

Lived consistently, that question is a culture.

And culture, in the experience economy, is also a product.

— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · title essay

The demographic complexity of Kenya is not a complication for your business. It’s inventory. Every community that currently feels unseen by your category is a market you can own before anyone else figures out it exists.

11 — Community as Infrastructure: Shared Experience Is the Most Defensible Moat You Can Build.

Here is the single most commercially significant insight of the last decade: the most durable value in the experience economy is not individual experience. It’s shared experience. Something you did alone is memorable.

Something you experienced with people who share your values, in a community you genuinely belong to, is of a completely different order — and the business that can create that context has something that almost no competitor can replicate.

The gym with the community is not competing on equipment. It’s competing on belonging. Belonging is structurally harder to replicate than any piece of hardware.

The WhatsApp group that becomes the essential professional network for your niche. The monthly event that becomes the gathering point for your subculture. The comment section that becomes a community.

These are not marketing features. They are competitive moats, built from shared experience, that become the primary reason people don’t leave you for whoever’s offering 10% less.

Quantum Mechanics Again — But Now It’s About CommunityRovelli on relational quantum mechanics and where value actually lives

Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics holds that physical properties don’t belong to objects in isolation.

They belong to the interaction between objects.

There is no absolute state — only states relative to particular relationships. And isolation, in this framework, is not more fundamental than connection. Connection is primary.

This reframes your community strategy completely. Your brand’s value does not reside in the brand. It resides in the relationship between your brand and your community. Strip the community away and you don’t have a brand with reduced value — you have a different kind of entity entirely, one that has lost the relational field where its value lived.

Protect your community with the same strategic seriousness you protect your product quality. Because in the experience economy, the community is not a result of your value. It’s where your value lives.

— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · on relational quantum mechanics and the primacy of interaction

For Kenyan founders, the shared experience opportunity is especially rich because the culture already has the infrastructure. The harambee instinct.

The centrality of shared meals. The intensity of live music culture. The power of faith communities as genuine organising forces.

The businesses that authentically connect what they do to these existing traditions of communal belonging — not superficially, not as a campaign idea, but with real cultural literacy — are building on foundations that are structurally more durable than any product feature or price advantage.

The Synthesis

12 — Pull It TogetherThe Question Has Changed. Are You Answering the Right One?

Every concept in this piece is pointing at the same thing. In the age of experience, the commercial question is not primarily “what do we sell?”

It’s “what do we mean?”

And the answer to that question determines almost everything else — who your customer is, what they’ll pay, how loyal they’ll be, what story they’ll tell other people about you.

The experience economy, the imagination economy, cultural capital, storytelling, subculture, shared experience, inclusion, idealism — these are not separate trends needing separate strategies.

They’re different facets of one underlying shift: that human beings have always been driven by more than utility, that meaning has always been a market force, and that 2026 is the year these truths are commercially unavoidable.

The businesses that were already built around meaning are winning. The ones that were built around utility alone are fighting harder and harder to stay relevant.

Quality, price, and delivery still matter.

They’re just the price of entry now. In a market with abundant choice, entry-level conditions are not enough.

The winners are the ones who invested in meaning the way previous generations invested in manufacturing — with discipline, with seriousness, with full commitment.

The ones who treat the quality of their story with the same rigour they bring to their operations.

One More — And This One’s About You, Not Your Business

Rovelli on the beauty of not knowing — and why the sciences and humanities need each other

One of Rovelli’s most quietly radical essays argues that the foundation of all genuine knowledge is not certainty — it’s a cultivated, structured awareness of what you do not yet know. The scientist who knows everything in their field has closed the frontier.

The one who has precisely mapped the boundary between the known and the unknown is standing at the most generative point possible — because they can see, with clarity, where the next question lives.

He also makes a case, repeatedly across the collection, that the division between scientific and humanistic thinking is one of the most damaging fictions of modern intellectual life.

The biggest advances in both fields have come from people willing to cross lines — physicists who read poetry, writers who understand mathematics, entrepreneurs who think like anthropologists.

The experience economy, with its simultaneous demand for cultural intelligence, narrative skill, and analytical rigour, rewards exactly this kind of crossover mind.

The founder who reads widely, thinks across disciplines, and stays genuinely curious about what they don’t yet understand has an advantage that no single-track specialist can replicate.

Stay curious. Know where your map ends.

That edge is where the real business is.

— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · “The Beauty of Our Ignorance” and “Science and Democracy”

Six Commitments for the Experience-Era Founder

1. Know which story you’re telling— the founding truth, the essential conflict, the vision. Hold it across every expression of the business, every hire, every post, every customer interaction.
2. Choose your community— not the broadest possible audience, but the specific community whose vocabulary, values, and aspirations you understand deeply enough to serve with genuine authenticity.
3. Build cultural capital— through participation, not performance. Through the quality of your associations and the consistency of your presence in the spaces that matter to your people.
4. Design for shared experience— ask at every stage how an individual transaction can become a community-forming moment. Invest in the architecture of belonging.
5. Treat your idealism as strategy— be clear about the vision of the world your business embodies, and let it be coherent enough that your customers can explain it to other people without coaching.
6. Govern by kindness, not rules— Rovelli’s title essay, applied directly. The letter of welcome without its spirit is performance. Build a culture where everyone who represents your business knows their job is to make the whole room feel genuinely at home. That is above policy, above the script, above the procedure manual.

The age of experience is here.

It has been here.

The founders thriving in it are not the ones who waited for the trend to arrive. They’re the ones who understood, before the vocabulary caught up, that they weren’t selling things.

They were architecting meaning.

In Kenya.

In Africa.

In every market in the world.

The commercial opportunity of this moment belongs to the businesses willing to be about something — and to say so, clearly, consistently, and without apology.

That is what it means to do business in the age of experience.

Ready to build a business that means something?