How far are you from the nearest person who could write you a $100,000 check?
A hundred grand is a seed round someone announces on X. I like to think of proximity to capital along two variables: distance and time. Distance is how far you physically are from people with capital. Time is how long it takes to build the skills, relationships, credibility, or product that makes that capital accessible to you.
If you’re in San Francisco, the distance is small and the time is short. And obviously SF isn’t some meritocratic paradise, I’m not saying that. Plenty of people there spend years trying to get into those rooms. Class, which school, visa status, who you worked for before, all of that still matters a lot.
The difference isn’t that proximity stops mattering there. It’s that they’ve built a bunch of paths a stranger can walk. Accelerator. Demo day. Your GitHub. The fact that you worked somewhere people have heard of. Ways for someone who’s never met you to decide you’re real.
It would be an oversimplification to say those paths don’t exist in Africa. Africa is much bigger than any one country, and some countries have far better systems than others. I grew up in Nairobi, and I’ve known about the paths here for about seven years. But successful companies seldom come out of them. Some have, of course. The number is just small.
Back to our two variables.
In Nairobi, distance can actually be pretty small. There’s money in this city. I can literally point at the buildings.
It’s time that can be enormous.
You might only be a few kilometres away from someone who could write the check, and still be years away from becoming someone they would actually write it to.
So that’s the question I eventually got stuck on.
Can you shorten the years?
How I got here
The last two weeks have been shit. Genuinely miserable.
Not miserable the way people say it after a bad day. I mean I couldn’t get myself to do anything. I’d open my laptop and stare at it until 3 a.m., not doing anything useful, until my eyes hurt. Then I’d wake up and do the same thing again.
Underneath all of that was a question I’d been avoiding: is what I’m building actually working?
Not “is it hard.” Everything is hard. That’s not interesting. I mean: is this thing I’ve spent three years of my life on going to change anything? Or am I spending some of my best years building something slightly better that, if I’m being serious, nobody really needed?
That’s a horrible thing to think about. I spent two weeks thinking about it.
The way I deal with stuff like this is by researching. Whenever something bothers me, I start reading. Papers, books, random articles, videos. Maybe that’s just my way of avoiding the actual problem. I don’t know. But sometimes I find something useful.
So I tried to answer a different question: where is capital in Africa actually going? Not where I think it should go. Where does it go?
I’m writing that up separately because it got way too long, but here’s the general shape, because it matters for everything else. (One useful thing I found along the way was this piece on Narrative lock in. Dropping it here in case you want it.)
I was looking at the wrong numbers
First, a correction, because I’ve definitely said the wrong version of this before.
I went and looked at the venture capital numbers. VC funding across the continent peaked around 2022 and has fallen a long way since. A handful of countries, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa, take most of it, and a big chunk of what’s left goes to fintech.
All true. And I was about to build an argument on it.
Then I realised I was looking at the wrong data.
The things I actually care about are someone building a cashew processing plant, or cold storage, or a small factory making components, or a logistics company. Most of these don’t look like startups in the VC sense.
Nobody is raising a seed round to buy a cold room.
That money comes from somewhere else: trade finance, asset finance, equipment leasing, bank loans. A whole other world of capital I hadn’t been looking at. I was about to make a point about agriculture using numbers from software, and anyone who works in trade finance would have seen the problem immediately.
So I went looking for the right numbers.
There’s something called the trade finance gap: the difference between how much trade financing businesses apply for and how much they actually get. The African Development Bank and Afreximbank surveyed 185 banks across the continent and put Africa’s gap at around $81 billion. That’s from 2020 data, so the number has moved since, but it’s the best estimate we have.
These are real applications. Businesses asking for money and getting rejected.
And this is the part that got me. When you look at why, a lot of it isn’t simply that the deals are bad. Banks point to things like the client’s creditworthiness, collateral and access to foreign exchange. On top of that, tougher KYC and anti-money-laundering rules pushed a lot of international banks out of African correspondent banking altogether.
I’m not going to pretend that’s all one problem. Some of it is regulation, some of it is bank economics, some of it is genuinely risky borrowers. But look at “creditworthiness” and “collateral” for a second. For a lot of businesses here, those are really questions about what a bank can see. No credit history it trusts. No registered assets it can check. Accounts nobody credible has audited. A good business and a bad one can look identical from the other side of the desk.
So a real part of this gap is a verification problem. A stranger can’t cheaply tell whether you are who you say you are, or whether you’re good for the money.
Which sounds almost too boring for how big the problem is. Tens of billions of dollars, and some of it dies at a background check.
Goods, corridors and power
Second thing. I got interested in trade corridors, the actual physical ones. I’d spent so much time on how money moves that I realised I didn’t understand how the goods move. And the goods are supposed to be the point. The money is supposed to follow them.
That’s not always how it works. Sometimes money moves first, across borders looking for somewhere to go, and trade adjusts around it. Trade Wars Are Class Wars explains this much better than I can, especially for the US and China. But African financial systems aren’t nearly that large or deep, so for what I was trying to understand, starting with the goods made more sense.
There’s the Northern Corridor, from Mombasa through Kampala into Kigali. The Central Corridor out of Dar. TAZARA, the old Tanzania–Zambia railway being rehabilitated. And Lobito, which everyone is suddenly excited about, running from Angola through the DRC into Zambia.
A big reason people care about Lobito is critical minerals. A big reason it’s actually getting money is that the Americans and Europeans would much rather those minerals move west than east. (I went deep enough into this that I was reading about mismatched rail gauges. I had a genuinely good point about them and I’ve completely forgotten it.)
What stood out was that so much of the money going into these corridors isn’t about us trading with each other. It’s about getting raw materials to a port so they can leave.
Intra-African trade, us buying from each other, is only around fifteen percent of our total trade. In Europe it’s above sixty percent. In Asia it’s around half.
Fifteen percent.
You can’t fix that with an app. You need roads, rail, cold storage, power, and customs that work. Physical things that are slow and expensive to build.
That got me stuck on power. If you want to process cashews instead of exporting them raw, or manufacture something, or keep food cold until it gets somewhere, you need electricity. A lot of people on this continent still don’t have electricity they can rely on.
Including me. I’m telling you this as a man whose lights went out twice while he was doing a course on how electricity works.
Because at some point I realised I talk about energy constantly and couldn’t explain how electricity is made. I knew the words. Turbine. Grid. Generator. I could get through a dinner conversation. But if someone asked what was happening inside a generator, I’d be in trouble. Funny, because I wanted to study physics when I was younger and did computer science because it looked easier to make money with.
So I did something slightly unhinged and went back to learn it properly. A full course on electromagnetism, with the maths.
Michael Faraday, 1831. He moves a magnet through a coil of wire and current appears in the wire. That’s induction. And most of the electricity we use today is still made with some version of it. Coal boils water, steam spins a turbine, the turbine spins a generator. Gas, same idea. Nuclear is my favourite, because a reactor is an insanely expensive way to boil water. Geothermal, big here in Kenya, is cooler still: we don’t make the steam, we pull it out of the ground. Solar is the odd one out, doing something completely different at the material level. (Yes, there are other exceptions. Please don’t email me.)
Two hundred years of engineering, and most of it still comes down to one question: how do we spin this thing?
I tried explaining this to a friend at one in the morning because apparently he needed to know immediately. He was very kind about it.
That’s not really why I’m telling you, though. I’m telling you because it showed me how I learn. I’m bad at remembering facts. I only understand something when I take it apart down to the mechanism, the bit where I go “ohhh, that’s what’s happening.” After that, everything else makes sense on its own.
So I tried doing the same thing with whatever had been making me miserable.
And the question underneath it wasn’t really about my company.
It was about people.
Stuck, not failing
I know a lot of genuinely good people. Better engineers than me, better operators than me. I’ve watched some of them for years, and a lot of them are stuck.
Not failing. Stuck.
A friend called me recently and we had a long conversation about exactly this. We’d both spent months down the same rabbit holes: finance, trade, how money moves, why businesses here struggle to get it. At some point he said, basically, bro, I think we understand the problem. Not all of it, but enough. We have better technology now. Better tools for coordinating things. We can see opportunities everywhere.
But a lot of what we were talking about needed real capital. Underwriters. Relationships with people and institutions we didn’t have.
It felt like a wall.
So the conversation became: what do we do with our lives now? Move abroad, maybe the UK? Go back to school? We actually talked about master’s degrees. I’ve randomly become obsessed with economics and now physics, so maybe I should just go study it properly.
He has a finance degree and was even thinking about going back into banking. Nothing wrong with that. But if you knew this guy you’d understand why it was funny. He has an insane belief in himself and has spent years saying he’s never going back to corporate.
Then he said something that stuck with me. He didn’t want to leave. There are too many opportunities here. He wanted to make it here.
I agreed. We both knew the opportunities were here. That wasn’t the question anymore. The question was: if we can see them, what’s stopping us from reaching them?
Maybe nothing. Maybe this is just what the process looks like, and you keep going until something opens. But in that moment it felt like we’d reached the edge of what we could do with what we had.
So I went through it industry by industry. Agriculture and processing. Logistics. Power. Light manufacturing. Payments, which is the one I know best. (I run a payments company, so when I tell you payments is crowded, take that however you want.)
The annoying thing is that the opportunities are there. Not pitch-deck opportunities. Real ones, with demand and margin. Somewhere right now someone is making money doing a terrible version of exactly the thing you’re thinking about.
And I kept landing on the same thing. The problem wasn’t that people lacked ideas. It wasn’t that they weren’t good enough. It was people who could do the thing, but couldn’t get the people with money to see that they could do the thing.
That’s a different problem from there not being enough capital.
It’s the cost of becoming legible. Of getting to the point where someone who doesn’t know you can look at what you’ve done and trust you with money.
One honest caveat before I go on. Legibility isn’t the only reason checks don’t get written. When government paper pays high returns (Kenyan Treasury bills were paying over 15% not long ago), a $100,000 check to a stranger has to beat an almost risk-free return, and some good people stay stuck because the numbers don’t clear that bar, not because nobody has seen them. I’m not claiming trust explains everything. I’m claiming it’s the part that’s badly understood, and the part someone like me can actually work on.
So what gets you legible? People usually give three answers: age, skills and experience.
I think two of those are mostly wrong, and the third is the answer under the wrong name. I’ve believed all three at some point, so let me go through them.
Age
If you read enough American startup stories, being young almost looks like an advantage. The 22-year-old dropout who raised millions. People love that story.
Here I think it works almost the other way.
I don’t even think anyone is being unfair. When the systems around you don’t work well, people lean much harder on trust. Who knows you? Who’s worked with you? Who can call someone and ask whether you’re legit?
And trust takes time. People have to see you do something. Then another thing. Then maybe someone trusts you with something bigger.
So you’re 23. You have the energy. Maybe the skills. More free time than you’ll ever have again. But the one thing everyone wants from you is the one thing you literally can’t have yet.
Years.
Skills
Skills matter, obviously. In some industries they’re a huge constraint. Try finding enough people who can properly run a food processing line.
But that’s not what I kept seeing. I kept meeting people who were already good at what they did. Their problem wasn’t that they needed another course.
The electromagnetism thing made this clearer. I was curious and slightly miserable, I found a course for free, and I started learning physics. That doesn’t make me a physicist. But it showed me how insanely cheap learning has become.
And all of it moved me exactly zero metres closer to anyone who could fund me.
That’s when it clicked.
Knowledge got cheaper. Trust didn’t.
That’s the sentence I’d been looking for for two weeks. We’ve made it almost free to learn anything, and we haven’t made it any cheaper to become someone other people trust with money. I think we spend far too much time on the first problem.
Experience
This is the one I got wrong for longest.
I used to think experience was just experience. I’m young, I haven’t done enough yet, so I need more reps, and eventually everything will be fine.
Then I noticed people who’d been doing this for years and still couldn’t get near capital. And people with far fewer reps getting access much faster.
I’d been mixing up two different things.
Experience is what you did. Proximity is who saw you do it.
We talk about them as if they’re the same thing.
I think this has a lot to do with institutions. Where the systems work well, someone can read you off paper. They don’t need to know you. They can look at your accounts, your credit history, your previous work, numbers someone credible has audited. The institutions do some of the trusting for you.
Here, a lot of that information doesn’t travel. You might have done the work and be really good at it. But if nobody in the right room saw you do it, how does the next person know?
Maybe that’s part of what we mean when we say someone “needs experience.” Not just that you did the thing. That somebody saw you do it. Experience nobody witnessed almost doesn’t exist, economically. You lived it, you did the work. What’s missing is a credible signal of it for someone who wasn’t there.
So maybe what’s missing isn’t capital exactly, but some kind of index: a cheap, trustworthy way for someone with capital to find you and go, okay, this person has actually done what they say.
And when that doesn’t exist, you fall back on the oldest system we have.
Someone I trust knows this person. They’ve seen them work. They’ll vouch for them.
Mercy on Sunday
The funny thing is, I should have figured this out a year ago, because we already do this.
My mum has been in a chama since before I was born. If you’re not Kenyan, a chama is a group of maybe twenty or thirty people who pool money every month. People borrow from it, invest together, take turns receiving the pot, whatever the group has agreed.
It runs on something simple. Everybody knows everybody.
If my mum takes money and doesn’t pay it back, these are people she actually knows. She’s going to see Mercy at church on Sunday. She can’t disappear into a spreadsheet.
Mercy on Sunday is the collateral.
SACCOs are much bigger and more formal, but something similar is going on underneath. A serious amount of money moves through SACCOs in Kenya, and a lot of the trust comes from belonging to a shared thing: a workplace, a profession, a community. People know who you are.
So we’re not missing the technology for trust. We’ve been doing this forever.
In fact, we’ve already made some of it portable, which I should be honest about. Microfinance group lending, where members guarantee each other’s loans, is basically Mercy on Sunday turned into underwriting, and it’s been around for decades. M-Pesa made years of transaction history readable by lenders, which is why you can get a small loan on your phone in seconds. Credit guarantee schemes and trade credit insurance are literally someone putting their balance sheet behind a stranger.
But all of that works at the small end or the very large end. Mercy on Sunday works for a few thousand shillings. M-Pesa history works for a small loan. Guarantees work for big deals with big institutions. The gap is the middle: roughly $50,000 to $500,000. Too big for the group or the phone to vouch for, too small for anyone to spend real money checking you out. That’s exactly where the cashew plant and the cold room sit.
And there, the trust doesn’t travel.
My mum’s chama can know for twenty years that she always pays people back. What does that mean to a bank in Westlands that has never met her? Not much. To a lender in London? Basically nothing.
The trust works inside the room and dies at the door.
Rooms
When there’s no easy way for a stranger to tell whether you’re trustworthy, being in the right rooms matters enormously. Who knows you? Who’s seen you work? Which school? Which employer? Which family? Which church, honestly. Do you have an uncle in Houston who actually picks up the phone?
And it compounds. Getting into one room makes the next room easier.
But I had this wrong for a while too.
The room isn’t the index. The room is what we use because we don’t have a good index.
Hold that thought. I’m coming back to it.
There’s a lazy version of this argument: African capital is all nepotism, everyone funds their cousins, everything is captured.
I don’t think that explains much. Think about it from the side of the person with money. If checking out a stranger is expensive and hard, and your cousin says, “I’ve worked with this guy for five years, he’s solid,” of course that matters. I’d use it too.
Relationships matter more precisely because everything else is harder to verify. Which means everyone can make perfectly rational individual decisions and still end up with a closed system.
That’s where my thinking sat for a while. We have a vouching problem. Better institutions solve it.
Then I read something that complicated it.
Two kinds of vouching
Vitalik Buterin wrote a long essay called Let a thousand societies bloom. He’s the Ethereum guy, but he also helped create Zuzalu, a pop-up community in Montenegro in 2023. One section is about “vouching as a general-purpose substitute for regulation,” an idea that comes partly from the economist Robin Hanson.
The basic version, as I understood it: instead of the government writing rules for everything someone might want to do, you sometimes require that person to find someone with actual capital who’s willing to vouch for them.
Not “yeah bro, he’s a good guy.” Real vouching. If this person screws up, you lose money. So the voucher has a reason to actually work out whether you’re competent and whether the risk makes sense. It’s close to mandatory liability insurance.
I read that and thought: some of the most futuristic people I know are designing systems for vouching, and I’ve just spent two weeks annoyed that so much of our economy already runs on it.
They’re not the same thing, though, and the difference is more interesting than the joke.
Their vouching is backed by a balance sheet. Someone prices the risk, puts capital behind the decision, and loses money if they’re wrong. Ours is more like “this guy knew my dad.”
One is underwriting. The other is social trust. Same word, completely different machine.
What makes theirs different is that the trust becomes explicit. It gets priced. And, most importantly, it can travel. Someone can vouch for a complete stranger because the vouch has capital behind it, and a third person who has never met either of them can still take it seriously.
Most of our social trust is implicit, unpriced, and doesn’t leave the group that created it.
So I’ve stopped asking which system is “ahead.” The more interesting question is whether you can take the informal trust we already have and make it explicit, priced and portable, especially in that middle band where nothing else works.
Maybe that’s the index I’ve been looking for.
So what do you actually do?
The obvious answer is to build proper institutions. Credit bureaus people trust. Registries that work. Audited accounts. Property records. Contracts you can enforce without knowing somebody who knows somebody.
That’s probably the real answer.
The slight problem is that it’s a thirty-year project involving the state, and I am unfortunately not a state.
This is where How Asia Works keeps annoying me. Joe Studwell’s argument, at least the part I keep coming back to, is that much of the machinery behind Asian industrialisation wasn’t built by clever founders making apps. States did it. They could force companies to export, back firms and cut them off when they didn’t perform, and keep agricultural extension officers in villages for years.
I don’t have a startup answer to that, and I won’t pretend to.
So option one: build the institutions.
Option two is simpler: leave. Go where the machinery already exists. Individually, that can obviously work, and I’m not going to tell anyone they have a moral duty to stay home while they’re trying to build a life or feed their family.
But there was a third option I couldn’t stop thinking about.
What if you compress it?
If trust normally takes ten years because people need to see you again and again, can you shorten that? Put people in the same place. Let them actually work together. Let them watch each other solve real problems. Maybe some of those ten years fit into a few weeks.
Trust compressors
This is where the things people call pop-up cities got interesting to me.
Pop-up city is a terrible name. All the language around this is terrible. Community. Co-living. Network state. It all sounds like a wellness retreat for people who own too much crypto.
But ignore the language and there’s something real underneath. Maybe these places are trust compressors. You take what normally happens over years (meeting people, working together, dinners, projects, seeing how someone behaves when things go wrong) and squeeze some of it into a few weeks.
Zuzalu did a version of this. Edge City does it. Zanzalu did it in Zanzibar, and I was part of that one.
I came out of Zanzalu thinking the room itself was the thing. Get good people into the same place and trust happens.
Now I think that’s only half of it.
Rooms can create trust. They don’t automatically make it portable.
You spend three incredible weeks somewhere and now twenty people know you’re serious. Great. Then everyone flies home, and everything they learned about you sits inside twenty different heads. It’s real information. It still can’t travel.
That’s the chama problem again. The trust works inside the room, you walk out, and you start proving yourself from zero.
So maybe rooms are where trust gets made, and institutions are what let it survive after everyone leaves.
That’s what changed how I think about Jahazi.
Jahazi
I’ve somehow got this far without explaining what Jahazi is.
It’s something I’m building for 2027, probably in the first or second quarter, here in Kenya. For three and a half weeks, people who are building and thinking about these problems live and work around each other. Not talks and panels and networking. People actually doing things together: working on problems, arguing, building, and getting enough time around each other to see how the other person thinks and works.
A jahazi is a dhow, one of the big wooden boats on the East African coast that actually carries cargo.
Let me be clear about what it can and can’t do. Jahazi won’t fix a bank’s KYC problem with a cashew exporter in Mtwara. That’s the institutional problem, and it needs registries, credit data and guarantees, not a three-week programme. What Jahazi can work on is the layer underneath: the people who would start and run those businesses, and whether the right people with money ever get to see them work.
Getting smart people into a building for three weeks is logistics. The interesting question is what happens after.
If someone spends three weeks at Jahazi and twenty people leave knowing “this person is really good,” does that still mean anything six months later?
Can what the room learned about you still exist in October?
That’s the experiment. I genuinely don’t know the answer.
Arguing against myself
Which means I should argue against the whole thing before this turns into an ad for my own event.
First problem: gatekeeping. These things very easily become gatekeeping machines. Almost every one is invite-only, which is kind of hilarious. You build something to solve exclusion and the first thing you do is decide who gets excluded.
If getting into one of these rooms has real economic value, this gets more serious, because whoever chooses the room has power. Including me.
When people point this out, my first reaction is: somebody has to select. And part of me still thinks selection by me isn’t obviously worse than selection by somebody’s father or old school network. But that’s a very convenient thing for the guy doing the selecting to believe.
I haven’t solved the gatekeeping problem. I’ve just changed who the gatekeeper is.
Second problem: “local.” I’ve been telling people that one thing that makes Jahazi different is that it’s actually local. A lot of these communities land somewhere and then have to work out how to involve the people who already live there. Vitalik calls this one of the hard problems; his ideas include reaching the diaspora and coming back repeatedly instead of showing up once and disappearing.
For us, local participation isn’t something to bolt on. It’s the point. We’re not foreigners landing in Nairobi asking how to include Kenyans. If anything, the question is how many people to bring in from outside.
But that doesn’t solve it either. “Local” can mean a very specific Nairobi. Upper-middle-class Nairobi. Good universities. Tech Twitter. Diaspora returnees. People fluent in that professional English where everyone says “ecosystem” a lot.
You can easily rebuild the same closed network inside Africa and congratulate yourself because technically everyone is African. If my argument is right, the interesting people are partly the ones who aren’t already in the room. Finding them is the hard part, and holding the event in Nairobi doesn’t do it for you.
Third problem: money. This report catalogued 107 of these communities and found that none of the big flagship ones they studied closely is financially self-sustaining without some outside cushion, usually patrons who believe in the mission. The couple that have lasted five-plus years on their own anchor short events to a small permanent venue, at which point you’re becoming a landlord, not a pop-up city. Vitalik says in his essay that Edge City is now cash-flow positive, and I assume he’d know.
Both can be true. You can probably run an event that pays for itself. Building something that survives ten or twenty years is a different financial problem.
I was also being lazy when I used to say maybe it doesn’t need to be a business. Fine. It still needs money. Universities have tuition, endowments, alumni and property. Churches have donations. Institutions have to eat.
So the better question is: who benefits enough from this existing that they’d pay for it? And the harder second half: how do you take their money without letting them decide who gets into the room?
I don’t have a good answer yet. I have a list of people who might pay. I don’t yet have a theory for taking their money without eventually handing them the guest list.
One more thing: duration. Vitalik thinks about two hundred people for one to two months works well. He has a line I love: a week is a break from your life; two months is your life. Jahazi is three and a half weeks, so by that standard we’re awkwardly in the middle.
But I’m not sure duration is the right thing to measure. What actually makes me trust someone? Not that we slept in the same postcode for thirty days. It’s how much of them I got to see. How do they think? Can they do what they say they can do? What happens when the project goes wrong? Do they disappear? Can they work with people they disagree with? Can they finish something?
How much actual evidence about a person did the room produce?
I think twenty people working together on one real problem for a week could learn more about each other than two hundred people attending talks for two months.
So maybe it isn’t three weeks versus two months. Maybe it’s shared work versus shared airspace.
That’s encouraging, because suddenly it stops being a huge structural problem I can’t touch. It becomes a programme design problem. That part I can change.
Making the trust travel
If the room is where trust gets made, the design question is what leaves the room with you.
Three things I’m going to try.
Public work. Whatever people build at Jahazi should end up somewhere a stranger can see it: shipped projects, write-ups, code, decisions and the reasoning behind them. Twenty people’s impressions fade. A public record of how you think and what you finished doesn’t. (I’ve noticed that writing in public is already the closest thing I have to a portable signal. People who have never met me know how I think because of posts like this one.)
Named references. Not “great to meet you.” Specific, written statements from people who worked with you on a real problem: what you did, how it went, whether they’d work with you again. Something closer to a vouch than a vibe.
A fair test. If I only follow up with the people I picked, I’ll learn nothing, because the people I pick are probably the ones who would have done well anyway. So for part of the cohort, I want to pick by lottery from a pool of people who all meet the bar, and then compare them six months later with the qualified people who didn’t get in. That’s the only way to know whether Jahazi moved anyone, or whether I just got good at spotting people who were already moving.
The test
So why am I still doing Jahazi after spending all this time finding problems with it?
Because “this doesn’t work as a business” and “this doesn’t work” are different sentences, and people mix them up all the time.
And because if even some of this is right (if verification really is part of the financing problem, if businesses really are losing access to billions because strangers can’t verify them, if knowledge has become cheap while trust is still expensive), then something that helps people build trust and carry it out of the room is useful.
Maybe it’s a tiny piece of infrastructure. Or maybe I’m overthinking a three-week event. That’s also possible.
I don’t know if three and a half weeks can do any of this. That’s why I’m treating it as an experiment, not a grand plan. And the nice thing is that I can test it.
Remember the question from the beginning? How far are you from someone who could write you a $100,000 check? Distance and time.
After Jahazi, did the time shrink?
For someone who wasn’t already close to capital, did three and a half weeks move them closer? Did someone new see them work? Is there now someone credible who can say, “I’ve worked with this person. They’re good”?
Six months later, did anything come of it that wouldn’t have happened otherwise? A contract. An introduction. Capital. A job. A cofounder.
And most importantly: did what the room learned about them travel beyond the room?
That’s the test.
The years are expensive
I don’t think we talk about this enough.
If it takes ten years to become someone people trust, those ten years are much cheaper for some people than for others. It’s easier when you grow up around people who can see you, introduce you, vouch for you, and give you a shot.
It’s a lot harder when you’re 23, you think you might actually be good at something, and almost nobody who matters has seen you do it yet.
Anyway. That’s where two pretty terrible weeks got me.
Not a solution. I don’t know if any of this is right yet. Just a mechanism I think might be there, and something I can test instead of sitting around thinking about it.
I’ll take that for now.