Every founder loves the moment of the idea. Far fewer love the unglamorous months that decide whether it becomes a business. At the 2026 FAS Biocamp, Sebie Salim spent an hour walking the cohort down that harder road, from an idea to a venture that actually makes money.
Sebie is the Executive Director of Eclectics International, where he has spent more than fifteen years building banking and fintech systems for over two hundred clients across twenty-five African countries. He holds an MBA and a business analytics certificate from MIT and a statistics degree from the University of Nairobi, and he sits on the boards of companies across technology, banking, energy, and agriculture. He has built real products for real markets, and it showed.
Sebie Salim, Executive Director of Eclectics International.
His message was practical to the point of being blunt. Go to the market first. Do the hard, messy work of talking to real customers before you build, because most founders fall in love with their solution and skip the part where they sit with the people who are supposed to buy it. Watch the numbers that decide survival: cost, cash flow, and whether the model can actually return a profit. And above all, find a buyer with a budget and earn revenue, rather than only raising it.
For the founders, it reframed the work. “The idea that stuck with me was your insistence on going to the market first, not building a product in a room and hoping customers appear, but doing the hard, messy work of primary research before writing a single line of code,” said Bayiga Sarah Olivia, a 2026 Biocamp founder from Uganda. “Most founders fall in love with their solution and skip the part where they sit with real people.”
For others it challenged their funding instincts. “The line that stuck with me was, find a buyer with a budget and earn revenue instead of only raising it,” said Maleka Emmanuel, a founder from Uganda. “I had been chasing grants and angel cheques while ignoring the customers who are already willing to pay. Your session made me re-read my own cash flow.”
The cohort in Sebie Salim's fintech masterclass at the 2026 Biocamp.
That is the discipline the FAS Biocamp is built to instil. Africa's scientists can build brilliant things; the ventures that last are the ones that reach a paying market. Revenue, not only raised capital, is how they are built to stay, at home.
