Two lines from Chika Uwazie (Afropolitan podcast) stopped me cold this morning.

“When you lead with tech, you get users. When you lead with culture, you get believers.”

“The app we build today might be obsolete tomorrow. But the relationships, the understanding, the shared identity? That’s permanent infrastructure.”

That’s the tension every founder feels. Tech evolves. APIs change. Screens get swapped for headsets, and headsets for whatever comes next. If you define yourself by the app alone, obsolescence is a ticking clock.

But culture—that’s what sticks.

At Reflekta, I think about this every day. Families don’t log in because the interface is slick. They log in because they want to hear a grandfather tell a bedtime story, or a mother remind them of a lesson she lived. The tech is just scaffolding. The connection is the cathedral.

Culture is why vinyl records still sell, why people line up for live theater, why small-town diners survive the chains. It’s not nostalgia—it’s belonging. When someone says, this feels like mine, you’ve crossed the line from feature set to identity.

And in the AI age, that distinction matters more than ever. Anyone can spin up a chatbot. But only you can build the cultural gravity that keeps people coming back, not just for answers but for meaning.

So the playbook looks different:

• Invest in relationships. One believer tells ten friends. One user just churns quietly.

• Honor identity. People need to see themselves inside the product, not just on the login screen.

• Build for permanence. The app may fade, but the story, the value, the belonging—that’s the infrastructure that survives.

Electricity is cheap; conviction isn’t. Chika’s right: the code will change. The culture is what makes it worth building.

About the Author

Miles Spencer is a multi-exit founder, investor, and storyteller. His work at the intersection of memory and technology is rooted in personal experience and a deep belief in legacy.