With my boyfriend moving to Ghana, we were considering moving to a better apartment now that we’d be sharing rent. At the price range of “nice apartment in central Accra,” some of these apartments start getting quite fancy—weekly cleaning, laundry service, pools, gyms, backup power, the whole thing.

All of this is meant to help me save time. And I think I do waste quite a lot of time in Ghana. Every week, I spend hours on mundane things like cleaning my apartment, procuring food, and waiting through blackouts. We had our second nationwide blackout this month. I admit, I was quite annoyed at this one. I essentially lost internet completely, including both WiFi and data, and couldn’t join one of our calls for Niora because I had absolutely no internet. I then walked around the neighborhood trying to find a cafe with working internet and eventually found an overpriced workspace that charged $20 a day to basically sit there and use their WiFi. They don’t even provide snacks or drinks. All of this wasted about three hours of my day and a meeting. Hmph.

It got me thinking about efficiency culture in the US. Americans are obsessed with efficiency. People sell efficiency first, and entire companies sell themselves on the minutes or even seconds they can save you. Superhuman, for example, essentially markets itself on how much time you can save on email and what those minutes translate into over a year.

In Ghana, selling efficiency is much harder. If you’re trying to sell procurement software, telling someone that it will save them time doesn’t do very much if you’re not also saving them money or improving quality. An entrepreneur who had started a pharmaceutical company in Kenya once told me that his company shut down after he realized people were often more willing to walk for hours than spend a few extra shillings. That obviously isn’t applicable in every scenario, but I’ve generally noticed the sentiment here that time is cheap while money is scarce.

Economically, this makes sense. The value of saving an hour depends on what else you could have done with that hour. If labor is expensive, paying money to save time can be a very good deal. If labor is cheap and money is scarce, spending money to save time often isn’t. It’s difficult to sell someone software that saves them two hours if the software costs more than those two hours are worth to them.

This got my thinking about the culture of being “busy” at Stanford. In Accra, my life has slowed down a lot. I’m committed to far fewer things. I have one full-time job, and that’s mostly what I work on, compared with juggling research, clubs, friends, classes, and social events at Stanford.

During my workaholism days, I regularly worked 14 hours a day. I liked having the perpetual stress of deadlines in my head. I liked the pounding in my head. Now, I can’t really imagine living like that anymore. Sometimes I feel less productive for the sole reason that I’m not stressed 24/7. And some of our work just involves having the patience to wait for someone else. Sometimes, there really is nothing you can do about it.

I once spent a day working at our Korle Bu office with my partnerships lead. We were there for a meeting, but their team wasn’t ready yet, so we ended up waiting most of the day. I spent the time preparing for the meeting, writing emails, thinking, and pacing around the office. My partnerships lead decided to take a nap. We finally had the meeting at the end of the day. He secured the partnership we needed and moved forward exactly what we needed to move forward.

I joked afterward that he was working smarter, not harder. I think this is becoming increasingly reflective of work in general. In the age of AI, the amount of sheer labor required to get something done has fallen enormously. You can get an enormous amount done quite easily nowadays. The harder question is what you choose to allocate your effort toward.

I remember that one of the best things I did at Stanford was quit everything. I once suddenly quit almost everything I was doing and rebuilt my life from scratch. When I started adding things back, I only restarted the things I actually valued. There is something useful about being forced to clear out all the things that exist mostly because of inertia. It forces you to decide what actually matters. Just like Elon Musk’s design principles. Delete first. Add things back if you discover that you actually need them.

So while I don’t find spending hours wandering around Accra for internet inherently virtuous, I don’t think we need to constantly optimize our lives either. Sometimes, not being able to save time on everything forces you to think more carefully about what you actually want to allocate the valuable hours of your life to.

(I was an extremely adorable child…)

Connecting the dots backwards

One of my favorite professors at Stanford is Robert Sapolsky. He was one of the main reasons I wanted to go to Stanford, and I even wrote my application essay about him. I’m vehemently against being a fangirl of anything, but I will admit that Sapolsky is the exception.

In his work, he explores the idea of free will: whether or not humans have free will, and whether all of our experiences and decisions can theoretically be boiled down into a series of biological and chemical reactions.

Philosophically, I choose to believe that I have free will. I believe in the idea of local and global free will. Global free will refers to the circumstances you’re put into—I don’t have any choice over the body, family, or environment I’m born into. But local free will refers to the decisions I make day-to-day. I believe I can control the decisions I make every day.

But practically, do I actually have free will?

My friends like to say how oddly perfect it seems that my background set me up to become the founder of an international company. I grew up quite internationally, moving frequently as a kid between different countries and cities. I liked leading projects and making things, and I was rather good at it. I’ve always had this efficiency-obsessed personality. All of these aspects started in childhood and became part of how I turned out as an adult.

But I don’t think it was actually the experiences themselves that led to how I turned out. I actually find the way I turned out to likely be statistically one of the rarer outcomes of my life experiences.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford. He said:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

I really liked his talk. I think the reason was that while I couldn’t choose the environments and situations I was put into, I chose how I wanted to connect the dots in my background.

Take two possible interpretations of the same background. I moved a lot as a kid. I got good at making projects because we didn’t have money, so I learned to make things myself. I became extremely efficiency-oriented, practical, and independent because my mom was frequently raising us on her own, and I had to learn how to be independent because no one else could do it for me.

On one hand, I could’ve ended up becoming an insecure, stability-obsessed adult who remained upset about the imperfections of my childhood forever. But I chose to connect the dots in the most favorable way I could. The moving turned into diverse experiences in different cities. The lack of money turned into my skill for turning ideas into reality. Being independent from a young age turned into leadership ability and independent thinking. This is why I believe I have local free will. I can’t control what happens to me, but I can choose what parts of my story I choose to tell myself.

However, there is another confounding factor here: where did the optimism come from?

I read a piece this week from a friend of a friend about his experiences in the school system. He wrote about how he was seen as a “problem child” until he was put in an environment that told him otherwise. When everyone told him he was a problem child, he acted accordingly. When everyone told him he was intelligent and had potential, he became that way.

In the same way, my environments continuously shaped my expectations and internal locus of control. The early talent and competition environments I grew up in taught me that I could be exceptional, and that being young and accomplished was the norm, not an exception. I became accustomed to having friends who started billion-dollar companies and led global initiatives. I had a mother who believed in me and, every time, chose to support me even before she could fully understand what I was trying to do. I believed that the way you chose to define yourself was entirely within your control, and I developed a very strong internal belief in myself. Nothing looked insurmountable in my eyes.

And this shapes the way I lead today. I choose to lead like the idea of Niora becoming a generationally defining company is a perfectly normal idea. I give responsibilities to my team like they’re perfectly capable of leading anything, no matter how big the challenge is. I state expectations as if exceptional outcomes are just the norm.

And that’s just an average Tuesday to me.

Why NITA is failing education

There’s a controversial bill in Ghana currently being drafted, known as the National Information Technology Authority Bill (NITA), 2025, that essentially regulates the IT/ICT sector in Ghana.

There are many reasons why I think this bill is a mistake. For one, I think it incorrectly distinguishes between regulation and bureaucracy. Ghana does need stronger IT regulation for the pace at which technology is developing, especially around enforcement authority, consumer protection, and technological advances in AI. But forcing additional compliance and paperwork onto IT professionals and software developers doesn’t necessarily create better regulation. At some point, it just makes it harder to build things and find jobs.

Secondly, the bill includes requirements that parts of the IT/ICT sector be “wholly owned” by Ghanaian citizens. This is obviously a problem for us. Not because I’m not Ghanaian, but because Niora, Inc. is a US-incorporated company. Even for Ghanaian founders, registering a US-incorporated holding company is incredibly common. Most US investors prefer investing into US entities because of the familiarity and clarity of American corporate governance laws. This creates the situation where a company can be founded by a Ghanaian, built in Ghana, employ Ghanaians, and serve Ghanaian customers, but no longer wholly Ghanaian-owned because it raised foreign capital through a US holding company. Restricting foreign ownership therefore doesn’t only restrict foreign companies, but also restricts Ghanaian founders from taking foreign capital. And let’s be honest—there simply isn’t enough capital in Ghana’s investment ecosystem to replace the amount of capital available internationally.

However, another reason why I care about it beyond Niora came out of a conversation I had this week with one of my team members. I’ve seen several educational nonprofits and organizations popping up in Ghana and Nigeria recently, particularly around STEM. There’s a lot of attention being paid to developing more technical talent, and it made me wonder what we’re actually lacking in the education space. My team member was telling me about the software developer ecosystem in Ghana. There was a rise in educational opportunities for software developers, but there weren’t enough employment opportunities on the other side. Many developers ended up doing basic contract work like developing e-commerce sites.

I don’t think the problem with education is education alone. People respond to the returns they see from becoming better, and producing more skilled people only works if the economy is also producing increasingly valuable things for those people to do. If young people look five years ahead and see people getting hired by Google, founding startups, and joining research labs, then talent follows those opportunities. But if they look five years ahead and see the best developers they know building WordPress sites for local businesses for GH₵3,000, then no amount of STEM workshops is going to be the thing that significantly changes the ecosystem.

This is also why I think the NITA bill is moving in the wrong direction. Ghana is spending enormous effort trying to create more technical talent while parts of the bill would make it harder to build and finance the companies that create opportunities for that talent. Educational programs are only half of the equation. If Ghana wants to produce ambitious engineers and founders, it also needs to make it possible to build ambitious companies and create jobs worth becoming exceptional for.

Of course, none of this is a particularly novel perspective on NITA. The bill is already widely disputed and unpopular, but as a foreign company operating in Ghana, I have an especially personal interest in it. I’ve somehow developed a stronger interest in Ghanaian politics than American politics, and I can’t even vote.

But hey, no one’s stopping me from joining the complaining on Ghanaian Twitter.

I have a voice notes habit with my friends. With my closest friends, we often send voice notes to each other discussing moral philosophy and civilizational collapse and whatever. I’ve been talking with one of my good friends at Stanford (and also a supporter of this newsletter!) about our theories of global and economic development. Our conversation was about the theory behind Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. I read the book several years ago, before I started Niora, and I thought it was interesting to come back to it today.

I had a conversation with my Uber driver this week on my way back from work while we were stuck in traffic. We were talking about the fact that Ghana gained independence around the same time that countries such as Taiwan and South Korea emerged from similarly tumultuous periods of their histories. Why is Ghana markedly less developed than these countries today?

The conversation probably would’ve sent an American liberal into shock. My driver said that his belief was that “Blacks are cursed.” So naturally, I asked him to explain what he meant and why he believed that.

Behind his statement that “Blacks are cursed” was an interesting framing of the issue that differs from the usual development theory. Essentially, his belief was that Ghana’s problems came primarily from failures of leadership rather than historical circumstances. He talked about a culture of leadership that was very top-down and power-heavy, and how poor leadership choices had been detrimental to the country’s development. I’ve actually heard versions of this from other Ghanaians as well. People said directly that Ghana has used the colonialism excuse for long enough, and that they can no longer blame colonialism for the country’s current outcomes.

This is very different from how the average conversation about development goes in the US. We talk extensively about colonialism, geography, natural resources, infectious diseases, and the structure of the global economy. But almost no one dares suggest that some of Africa’s problems might have been produced by the people themselves rather than imposed on them from the outside. Because of this, I started wondering: why people prefer certain explanations for the same outcome?

I have a tendency to hate sympathy when something bad happens to me. I’d much rather someone say, “It’s not that bad. This is fixable.” When someone validates how much something sucks, it somehow makes the problem feel bigger. But when someone says, “That’s fine. Get back up and fix it,” the problem feels manageable.

In the same way, I think personal responsibility can sometimes be a more empowering narrative than misfortune. If Africa simply got the short end of the stick through geography, colonialism, disease, and bad luck, then what exactly are people supposed to do about it? But if bad leadership and bad decisions helped create the problem, then better leadership and better decisions can help fix it. There is something strangely more optimistic about believing that people screwed something up, because it means people can also do something differently. The reality is probably both, but at some point it stops mattering whose fault the problem was. The people living with it now are still the ones who have to fix it.

The economics of sustainability

This week, I attended a lecture on fashion sustainability in West Africa. The lecture was given by a wonderfully accomplished woman who runs her own African fashion atelier, Grâce Toléqué Atelier, and spoke about the history of West African prints and their connection to sustainability.

The economics of sustainability has always fascinated me. Morally, ethically, and scientifically, I understand the compelling arguments for sustainability. My question is how the economics actually works out. How do you make something mainstream if it is financially unfavorable for the people producing or consuming it?

First of all, sustainability itself isn’t necessarily financially unfavorable for brands. Many companies have made sustainability part of their brand. Reformation, a sustainable women’s fashion brand, recently IPO’d at over $1B valuation. But even the most sustainable fashion company still runs on consumption. It can produce clothing under better environmental conditions, but at the end of the day, it still makes more money if you buy more clothes.

That seems like the fundamental tension to me. You can make each unit of consumption more sustainable. But how do you make the economics of the industry itself reward less resource-intensive consumption? There seem to be a few ways.

Make sustainable production cheaper

One argument I hear frequently is that we should produce more clothing locally. In West Africa, for example, there is still a substantial culture of buying fabric and having clothes made by local seamstresses and tailors. In the United States, I have literally never gone to a seamstress to have ordinary clothes made, and most people I know haven’t either. Bespoke clothing is simply too expensive.

At first glance, this looks like a labor-supply problem. If there were enough demand for local clothing production and sufficiently attractive returns to the work, more people would enter the profession. More labor supply could then make local production cheaper. But large garment factories also benefit from specialization, standardized production, concentrated supply chains, bulk purchasing, logistics infrastructure, and enormous economies of scale that makes production cheaper.

So even if every American city suddenly had thousands of seamstresses, it’s still not possible for your neighborhood tailor to economically compete with an industrial garment factory. Unless consumers value the difference enough to pay for it, the cheaper garment has an advantage.

Okay, so if the labor method isn’t going to work, then perhaps we could make sustainable production itself radically more efficient.

Make reuse cheaper than making something new

I visited clothing factories in China a few years ago and learned that most clothing production is still done by human hands. Fabric is flexible, garments vary enormously, and sewing is much harder to automate than manufacturing something rigid and standardized. That means there is potentially a huge technological opportunity here.

Recycling already happens at industrial scale in places like Prato, Italy, where old textiles are processed into new fibers and fabrics. The problem is that recycling and reuse still generally aren’t cheaper than simply producing something new, unless the world runs into some giant resource crisis or something.

But what if technology eventually makes it cheaper to transform existing clothes than manufacture new ones?

Imagine warehouses containing millions of unwanted garments. You open an app, design whatever you want, and an AI system identifies existing garments that can provide the appropriate fabric and components. Robotic systems disassemble, cut, sew, and reconstruct them into your new piece. This is currently challenging because used clothing is incredibly heterogeneous. But computer vision, AI design, and eventually much better robotics could reduce those transaction costs dramatically.

Anyway, feel free to steal this startup idea.

Make unsustainable production more expensive

There is also another common argument from sustainability advocates: sustainable production looks expensive partly because unsustainable production is artificially cheap. If producing a $7 shirt causes pollution or environmental damage that neither the manufacturer nor the customer pays for, then the price of the shirt doesn’t actually reflect its full cost. In economics, this is called a negative externality.

Governments can correct for this through pollution taxes, carbon pricing, environmental standards, disposal fees, or other mechanisms that force some of those external costs back into the price of the product. But fashion production is global, which makes this considerably more complicated.

If one country imposes expensive environmental standards, production often just moves somewhere else. This creates a contradiction: the US can condemn the environmental harms of manufacturing abroad while simultaneously sustaining them through enormous consumer demand. China’s export economy depends heavily on American and foreign consumption. As long as that demand exists, there will likely be countries willing to tolerate greater environmental costs in exchange for the jobs, exports, and economic growth that manufacturing provides.

And importing countries face their own incentives. The US can impose environmental standards on imports, but doing so makes goods more expensive for American consumers and disrupts supply chains that American companies depend on. It is much easier to condemn pollution happening somewhere else than to voluntarily pay higher prices to stop causing it.

But what if the real problem is consumption?

There is another alternative, which I think is closer to what many sustainability advocates actually mean: we simply consume less. People rewear clothes they already own. They buy fewer, higher-quality garments. Clothes are repaired rather than replaced.

Economically, though, this creates an obvious problem for the fashion industry. If Zara convinces you that the environmentally responsible thing to do is wear the same dress for the next fifteen years, Zara has just successfully persuaded you not to give them any more money.

The industry’s incentives fundamentally favor continued consumption. And culturally, I’m skeptical that simply persuading billions of people to stop caring about novelty, beauty, status, and self-expression through clothing is going to work at enormous scale. Humans like new things. We are remarkably susceptible to advertising. Even when anti-consumption movements become popular, companies have an enormous financial incentive to convince us to start consuming again.

But perhaps we can change what consumption itself looks like.

Sustainability movements have already made significant progress, and sustainable fashion has become far more popular in recent years. To become truly mainstream, I think we need to change the underlying economics: make sustainable production cheaper (perhaps with my hypothetical AI sewing robots), or make reuse, recycling, and customization of existing clothing cheap and fashionable enough to compete with producing something new. And perhaps eventually, we can satisfy some of our endless desire for novelty without endlessly producing more physical stuff. Digital fashion in the metaverse, anyone?

But let me know what I’m getting wrong about the economics of sustainability. After all, I am a bloody capitalist.

“Big man” culture

I attended a conference this week. In one of my conversations, the person I was speaking to was very interested in our work, and he said, “We’d be interested in exploring a partnership. Please schedule a meeting with your manager for us.” I joked to my partnerships lead afterward, “Do we need to hire a big, serious man just to talk for us?”

My team members talk about this a lot. There’s a “big man” culture here, where people take you more seriously if you look like a “big man.” That’s an archetype of a tall, serious-looking Ghanaian man, probably in a kaftan with a nice watch. For women, the archetype is a tailored dress, an expensive wig, a nice purse and sunglasses, all while looking like she couldn’t be bothered. In higher education, my team members told me that their program required them to wear suits and ties daily to class. Ghanaians care about appearance, and this is a problem for me because unfortunately, I am approximately the least big-man-looking human available.

This is quite a contrast with Silicon Valley. There’s a Silicon Valley legend that Sam Bankman-Fried secured an investment from Sequoia while playing League of Legends on the call because they thought he must be a genius if he was so nonchalant. If you go to Stanford, lecture halls are filled with people who rolled out of bed in their pajamas and are dressed head to toe in free corporate merch. Being young and casual in Silicon Valley is often seen as a positive and precocious rather than a hindrance.

So Silicon Valley has its own status costume. The costume is a hoodie, a Stanford dropout story, and the appearance of not caring whether anyone thinks you’re important. We’re often given the advice that we should act like our fundraising round is perpetually oversubscribed to demonstrate urgency and demand. I’ve even heard of startups refusing investor diligence to demonstrate that they’re so in demand that they don’t even need to follow standard procedure. In Ghana, status means looking important, while in Silicon Valley, status means looking like you don’t care whether anyone thinks you’re important.

Part of being in different places is figuring out which signals translate. I can dress more formally. I can speak more slowly and deliberately. I can front-load Stanford, research, and health economics when I need to establish credibility quickly. I can make sure conversations last long enough for people to judge me by what I actually know. And sometimes, I just need to recognize when to send my partnerships lead instead.

The reality is that nobody has the time to deeply evaluate everyone they meet. Stanford is a shortcut. A nice watch and a kaftan are shortcuts. Because of this, how you choose to present yourself in a particular environment is ultimately a business decision. Networking is often the art of figuring out which shortcut gets someone to pay attention long enough to discover whether you're actually worth talking to.

Unfortunately, none of this fixes the fact that I remain baby-faced. But alas, Asians never raisin.

My boyfriend is coming to Ghana to live with me. I joke that this was part of my agenda all along, that I was trying to encourage more people from Stanford to explore the world outside of the Stanford bubble. It worked in a way. Well, even if my method was more due to my personal romantic prospects than my brilliant efforts to internationalize Stanford, but a win is a win.

He lived in the United States in the same very American town for nearly his whole life, but he has a genuine curiosity about the world. So I was thinking, what is the impression that I hope he gets from living in Ghana?

In the beginning, I hated to admit that I had never even been to Ghana before starting Niora. Even now, I know the story still sounds ridiculous. How did I have so much conviction about a country I had never been to, to the point of uprooting my life to move and start a company here?

I think part of my belief was because even though I had never been to Africa, I had lived in dozens of countries around the world. I had lived in some very wealthy countries and some very poor countries. And what I realized was that firstly, there was no ‘ideal’ way to live a life. You can be happy anywhere, from churning horse milk daily in a Mongolian village, to living in the bustling nights in Manhattan, New York. I tended to enjoy life everywhere pretty much all the same.

Secondly, I was strongly convicted on the idea that Africa has huge untapped potential. It was first the demographic trends I noticed. Africa is set to double in population by 2050, meaning a quarter of the world will be African by then. As a result, the African diaspora population is growing rapidly, currently reaching an estimated 350 million diasporans and representing a trillion dollar market force. I believe that the diaspora is powerful.

When I was a child, my grandparents insisted on having me born in the United States. My mother argued against it, as she wanted to raise me in Taiwan, but my grandparents said, “In the United States, they raise you to believe that anything is possible. If your child is smart, they will make them a genius.” I ended up still being born in Taiwan anyways, but raised with an American education. As I grew up, my psychology as a diasporan made me understand that I got the advantage of growing up with different exposure to ideas, capital, networks, and institutional expectations, but with extremely strong loyalty to my home country. I consider myself Taiwanese, not American. I got the opportunity to understand how some of the largest systems in the world function, and I live with a strong desire to make my home country proud.

And many of the most influential and transformative national leaders in the world come from diasporans. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana studied abroad. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore did too. So did Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan. With Africa’s demographic growth, there are more people, more diasporans, and more people educated with a different model of what is possible. Africa, and Ghana especially, has consciously invested in reconnecting with its diaspora through initiatives like the Year of Return, which I believe has the potential to draw in huge capital and intellectual power back into the continent.

Taiwan also inspired me in another way. Many people nowadays know Taiwan as the semiconductor giant and one of the four Asian tigers, but less than two generations ago, Taiwan was still agricultural. My grandparents and even parents still remember the time before Taiwan industrialized, and personally witnessed Taiwan’s transformation and economic boom. It was the same in Korea. Because of this, I always held the notion that while it seems like the present is the only reality imaginable, there’s actually no limit to what kind of transformative change is possible.

However, Africa most definitely has significantly different developmental challenges from Asia. One of the most noticeable to me is that the culture towards coordination is inconsistent. Sometimes Ghanaians are incredibly serious and bureaucratic—they send you formal proposal letters dated and stamped and show up 20 minutes early to a meeting, and sometimes decisions are just made on relationships and vibes. You see this in the urban planning, the culture around timeliness and “Ghana Man Time,” and bureaucracies within procurement approval processes at the hospitals. The inconsistencies in coordination makes it difficult to develop in one coherent direction. For example, the minimum capital requirement law was passed by national government, but whether the people in the actual governmental department that processes incorporations knows how to process the change is a whole other question.

So, what do I hope that my boyfriend takes away from being in Ghana? I think it’s the ability to fully understand the two truths about emerging markets. There are challenging things about Ghana. But at the same time, I hope he comes away understanding why I have so much conviction in what countries like Ghana can become, and why I feel so much belief, excitement, and pride about emerging markets.

Ghana’s education system

Over the weekend, I went to Aburi to go ziplining and visit the botanical gardens. On the hour-long drive back to Accra, I had a fascinating conversation with my driver about education systems around the world.

We were talking specifically about the similarities between education in Africa and Asia. From my time here, I’ve noticed that Ghana’s education system and values are actually quite similar to those in Asia. Both highly value respect, discipline, and listening to elders. Education is also highly structured, with a tendency to over-index on repetition, exams, and memorizing concepts instead of truly understanding them.

But my driver felt strongly that the Ghanaian education system often fails to equip students with the skills they need to succeed in the real world. So if many of the underlying values are similar, why is this the case?

One of the major differences we realized was not necessarily the education itself, but the environment that education is preparing you to enter. In much of East Asia, the environment is relatively structured. You get a structured education, and you’re often able to enter a relatively structured job. Around 46% of people in East Asia work at medium or large firms, where roles, hierarchies, and workflows tend to be more clearly defined. In Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing is a clear example: it is extremely structured, specialized, repetitive, and precision-heavy. You can become exceptionally good at one specific thing because there is an entire institution where other people are exceptionally good at other specific things.

But can you guess what the comparable number is in Africa? Less than 13%. In some areas, it can be less than 1%.

A large majority of Africans work in the informal economy. Even among university graduates, instead of entering a large organization where your role is clearly defined, you’re much more likely to work in a smaller company, run your own business, work informally, or have a job where the boundaries of what you’re responsible for are much less clear. As a result, you end up with an interesting mismatch: the education system rewards structure, while the real world rewards adaptability.

My driver gave me an example from when he worked at a small company. He had studied accounting and was hired as an accountant. But what he actually ended up doing involved being the receiving officer, cashier, and procurement lead all at once, because that was simply the reality of working at a small company. He told me that several people cycled through the job because, despite being very well-qualified in their own domains, they didn’t know how to handle work outside of them.

I’ve noticed the same adaptability among many of the market ladies I’ve met. They’ll talk about moving between opportunities depending on the market: from being a seamstress, to selling produce, to becoming a distributor for household goods, depending on where the opportunity is. They describe it almost as a basic requirement for survival. If the market for produce is poor, you need to know when to jump. You can’t survive if all you know is how to sell produce.

In fact, some of the people I’ve met in Ghana have had the most career jumps I’ve ever seen. One of my Uber drivers was a farmer turned telecoms logistics engineer turned seamstress turned hospital administrator turned mining worker turned Uber driver. You need to know when to adapt, and you need to be able to become competent at something new relatively quickly.

And I think this is something that highly structured education systems struggle to teach. Formal education tends to teach skills within clearly defined domains. You take accounting classes to become an accountant. You study engineering to become an engineer. There are syllabi, exams, correct answers, and relatively clear boundaries around what you are expected to know. But in a less structured economy, being good at your domain may not be enough—you also need to be able to adapt when the job in front of you looks nothing like the one you trained for.

So I don’t think the problem is necessarily that Ghanaian education is too structured. It’s that a structured education is preparing people for an economy that often requires them to operate without structure.

(The view of Accra from Aburi is beautiful!)

My fear of insects

I hate to admit a weak spot of mine, but I’m deathly afraid of flies.

Unfortunately, tropical countries have a lot of them.

Look, I know this is greatly inconvenient. Don’t ask me how I developed a fear of insects despite being from a fellow tropical country. But Ghana has been quite the challenge for me in terms of confronting my fear of insects.

And one question I have is—how do insects get up this high? I live on a rather high floor, and I’ve seen insects on the 25th floor of a building. So how do ants and other insects actually get that high?

For ants, the answer is somewhat horrifying. In older buildings, insects can slowly start nesting and making homes within the buildings themselves. If you see ants several floors up, it may be more likely that they have created a colony somewhere within the walls than that they are crawling all the way up from the ground every day.

Great.

Flying insects are slightly different. Some insects have been found thousands of meters in the air, often carried upward and transported by wind currents. Most household insects, naturally, spend their lives much closer to the ground. How high insects can actively fly depends partly on things like air density, temperature, and oxygen availability. It’s somewhat similar to why humans struggle at high altitudes. Insects need oxygen too, and at higher elevations it becomes harder to get enough of it to sustain flight. Air density matters as well: wings generate lift by pushing against air, so when there are fewer air molecules around, an insect has to work harder to stay afloat.

And while reading about insects, I ended up getting curious about ant swarm intelligence. Researchers have actually compared ants and humans on versions of the same collective problem. In one experiment, both species had to maneuver a large T-shaped object through a maze. Individual humans were, unsurprisingly, much better than individual ants. But as the groups became larger, ants outperformed humans on the task. This is interesting because swarm intelligence is essentially a system in which extremely simple agents, following extremely simple local rules, can collectively produce behavior that looks intelligent at the system level.

No individual ant understands what the colony is doing. Instead, ants follow relatively simple and actionable signals. An ant finds food and leaves a pheromone trail. Other ants are more likely to follow stronger trails. Successful paths get reinforced as more ants travel along them, while unsuccessful paths eventually disappear as their pheromones evaporate. Ant colonies also tolerate an extraordinary amount of exploration and redundancy. Lots of ants wander around doing things that appear completely useless. They follow bad paths. They explore places where there is no food. But these experiments are cheap, and occasionally one ant discovers something much better. The colony can then collectively shift toward it. In other words, they throw a lot of resources into small, cheap experiments, many of which are unproductive or useless, because the system is designed to recognize and reinforce the few that work.

So this made me wonder, why are humans so attached to the idea of leaders? I think part of the answer is that ants’ objectives are remarkably aligned. However, companies are full of people with different incentives, information, priorities, and time horizons. Even when everyone broadly wants the company to succeed, different parts of the organization can optimize for completely different things. For example, a sales team told to maximize sales might do exactly that. They could sign terrible customers, promise nonexistent features, give enormous discounts, and dump the resulting mess on everyone else. The sales team may have succeeded according to its objective while making the company substantially worse.

Still, there are attempts to build organizations that operate more like decentralized systems. My boyfriend introduced me to a decentralized hierarchy system used at a startup he worked at called holacracy. The basic idea is that authority is distributed into defined roles, so that whoever is closest to the relevant information has sufficient authority to act on it rather than constantly passing decisions upward through a hierarchy.

I think the idea is reasonable, but I don’t think I believe in pure holacracy. My belief is something closer to decentralized execution and centralized direction. I try to decentralize decisions when another layer of approval is unlikely to materially improve the outcome, particularly when experimentation is cheap. If someone already has the relevant information and the cost of getting something wrong is small, there is little reason for them to wait for someone else to approve it. But I think the direction itself needs to remain coherent. Everyone should understand what objective their individual decisions are ultimately working toward. Otherwise, decentralization can simply become fragmentation.

But anyways, I have nothing more profound to say about insects. Send help. And some bug spray.

I often think about a question: can too much funding make a company worse? More specifically, what happens when Silicon Valley venture incentives are transplanted into African markets without adjustment?

mPharma is an interesting example. Over successive funding rounds, the company expanded geographically, acquired companies, built a franchising model, financed patients, managed pharmacies, and owned physical inventory and warehouses—all at the same time. Eventually, it wasn’t really one company anymore. It was dozens of companies trying to exist under the same roof.

I’ve noticed an interesting difference in how the company is perceived. Outside of Africa, mPharma is often presented as one of the biggest healthcare success stories on the continent. But among many operators I’ve met in Ghana, the perception is more mixed. The company has gone through significant changes—members of the original leadership team have left, and it has gone through multiple large funding rounds, including a $35 million Series D.

A Series D isn’t inherently bad. But I don’t believe the Silicon Valley fundraising model is the right model for African companies, even at scale.

Silicon Valley rewards blitzscaling. Companies can stay deeply unprofitable for years while pursuing growth at all costs. Uber burned through more than $30 billion before becoming profitable. Safe Superintelligence raised billions before releasing a product. And in more extreme cases, startups spend enormous amounts on marketing and branding before there is any real proof of demand. Friend, for example, reportedly spent $1.8M of a $2.5M raise on controversial ads and branding, and ended up with only a few thousand sales.

That model works better when the market is already there and your main constraint is speed. But in African healthcare, you often can’t just assume that “the market will catch up, just give it more time.” What the market needs to catch up on is often basic infrastructure. You can’t try to impose AI on a hospital if they don’t even have basic inventory tracking or historical records. If you don’t solve a real problem, you lose trust and momentum, and the time for markets to “catch up,” especially in healthcare, can be years, if not decades. Investors won’t wait that long. At some point, they start pushing for expansion or other approaches to scaling in order to generate returns. That can lower operational quality and fragment the approach, which further reduces trust and creates a self-perpetuating cycle that is deadly to operations.

Last year, we received a venture capital offer for a large investment. However, when I read through the term sheet, I realized it would have absolutely killed our company. I know the investors were well-intentioned. Their response to the risk of operating in Africa was to impose more restrictions, more milestones, more aggressive timelines, and more pressure to scale. That’s a perfectly rational response if you’re trying to reduce investment risk. The problem is that those are exactly the things that would have prevented us from building a good company. The reality is that early-stage companies in this market need the freedom to experiment. The market throws unexpected problems at you every few weeks. You need to be able to change direction, test new ideas, abandon things that aren’t working, and spend months solving operational problems that no investor could have predicted from a boardroom thousands of miles away. Those expectations could never have worked in the kind of iteration our market actually demands.

Funding in Africa often pushes founders into two extremes: either you bootstrap indefinitely until you can prove everything on your own, or you try to force your company into a Silicon Valley-shaped fundraising model that doesn’t fit the market. I don’t think either extreme is right. What I think African companies need are different conditions for capital.

First, they need room to adapt. Investors often respond to uncertainty by adding restrictions and tighter guardrails. I believe the opposite is more useful. The less familiar you are with a market, the less likely you are to know in advance how the company should actually evolve.

Second, companies have to prove value and demand early. African markets don’t give you much room to survive on narrative alone. If you optimize for funding over value, you risk becoming essentially a donor-dependent NGO, except your donors are investors. You can become extremely good at raising money and looking successful from abroad while the actual operators in the country increasingly don’t trust you. As I shared last week, the skepticism in African markets doesn’t come from an unwillingness to believe, but from frequent exposure to interventions that fail. That makes African markets incredibly punishing. You have to grow from real demand, and there’s no room to survive on the promise of future growth and speculation.

I like working in African markets. I think the shape of the market teaches important capital and operational discipline, and with its challenges also come genuine opportunities. There are opportunities to be created by people who know how to navigate this market, but it’s a unique environment that isn’t perfectly mappable by the models that have succeeded elsewhere. I think Niora can succeed with as few funding rounds as possible. I want enough capital to build something genuinely ambitious, but enough discipline that the market—not the funding round—continues shaping the company.

(By the way, if you’re interested in pharmaceutical financing in Africa, George Kesse is worth following. All opinions above are my own.)

(Me in my research days at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston!)

The adventures of side-gigging

One of the funny realities of running a not-yet-profitable early-stage startup is that I’ve somehow acquired a second profession: finding ways to fund the first one. Niora’s official business model is pharmaceutical procurement. My unofficial business model is seeing how creatively I can finance the official one until it becomes self-sustaining. Every dollar I make from a side project is one less dollar I have to ask an investor for.

So, over the past year, I’ve accumulated an increasingly questionable collection of experiments. I’ve tried consulting. I’ve tried selling digital products. I’ve tried my little AI agent (reference this article!), which, so far, has only automated the process of losing me money.

One thing consulting did teach me, though, was something interesting about admissions committees. With college consulting, I find that the most common issue you’re trying to fix is that the kids don’t have any agency. They don’t truly want anything. There’s no hunger in their eyes. They do the activities because someone else told them to. Part of what you’re trying to do is construct a personality for a kid who has probably spent the last 16 years of their existence not having one.

Secondly, the logic behind admissions is about the logic behind their actions, not the outcomes. People often ask, “Should I do research? Should I start a nonprofit?” as if the activity itself determines the outcome. The strategy is in the narrative, not the list of objective accomplishments. Part of what admissions is looking for is whether they can construct an identity of the type of person you are, and that identity better be a favorable one. A perfectly curated list of accomplishments is often less compelling than one where the motivations and potential of a person are clear. You have to tell the story of what motivates you and make yourself a person worth backing.

I attended the MIT Research Science Institute (RSI) several years ago. It’s a famously selective six-week research program hosted at MIT. What I realized later was that it wasn’t simply an educational program. It was, in many ways, an incubator looking for people it believed had the potential to become successful in the future. At the time, I genuinely hadn’t won any significant awards. All I had was a little science fair project that I had built from my bedroom and entered into my regional science fair. My essays, however, included a 2,000-word rant about my idealistic pursuit of research, how I was obsessed with plasmids, and how I had built a laboratory in my bedroom to study antibiotic resistance. They saw the agency, the hunger, and the drive to make things happen in the world, and they bet on the person they thought I could become.

Several years later, at least six people from my cohort of 80 have gone on to start companies. And I ended up doing exactly what I wrote about in those essays—I actually did start an organization trying to make treatments more accessible in low-resource environments.

I think this lesson extends far beyond college admissions. People love optimizing for visible outcomes without asking whether those outcomes actually demonstrate the thing they care about. Activities become proxies for qualities like curiosity, agency, or ambition. The same ideas—constructing a narrative worth supporting, articulating how your experiences shaped your thinking, and demonstrating agency—are constantly being evaluated, whether you’re applying to college, raising money from investors, building partnerships, or convincing someone to join your company.

In the end, I don’t think the research project, the nonprofit, or even the company is what makes someone worth choosing. Over the long run, what matters is whether you can demonstrate and tell a cohesive story about why you’re the kind of person worth betting on.

Getting married off for waakye

I feel that I’ve been writing about food rather frequently. I guess it’s a pretty significant part of my life here, considering I’m cooking for myself the majority of the time. Also, I’ve noticed that Ghanaians love talking about their food. Nearly every Uber driver asks me what my favorite foods in Ghana are.

As I mentioned last week, one of my favorite Ghanaian foods (in addition to kosua ne meko) is waakye. I tried some supermarket waakye the first time I came to Ghana, and I was hooked. Because of this, I decided it was finally time for me to learn how to make it. It looked pretty simple. It’s just rice, black-eyed beans, and… sorghum leaves.

Okay, I’m not sure what that is.

I tried asking a few vendors. They don’t have it. I go to Shoprite. The guy looks confused as to why I’m asking for sorghum leaves in a Shoprite. He tells me to go to the Osu Night Market. So I go, and I ask the different vendors. They all tell me they have bowls of waakye, not waakye leaves. I keep asking.

Eventually, I come across an elderly lady selling oil and other cooking ingredients. She says she’ll show me, takes my hand, and brings me to a vendor who sells me a few leaves for GH₵2 ($0.17). Then she takes my hand again and starts bringing me somewhere else. At this point, I’m wondering where we’re going.

Eventually, she arrives at one of the MoMo vendor booths. She starts talking to the young man at the booth in Twi. This man looks positively mortified. He looks like he wants to disappear inside the booth. She turns to me and says, “This is my son,” before gesturing for us to talk. So we start awkwardly introducing ourselves while her son looks absolutely embarrassed. After a round of introductions, she continues gesturing for us to keep talking.

It slowly becomes clear that she’s trying to set me up with her son. I mention that I’m taken, but that I appreciate the effort, and we all laugh it off. Eventually, the lady decides that, unfortunately, her son is not getting married off today for a bowl of waakye, and wishes me well on my journey to making it.

As for the waakye itself, it was very successful. It’s essentially just boiling the beans and the waakye leaves in water, then adding the rice and letting everything cook together. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. And I now know how to win over a Ghanaian mother’s heart.

As for my marriage prospects, I guess I’m worth 30 cows. Or one bowl of waakye, apparently.

I witnessed a car crash this week. I was walking down the street when I heard a noise. I wasn’t sure what it was until I suddenly stumbled on a man crumpled face-down in a kneeling position in front of me. He had been thrown from his motorcycle on the opposite side of the road onto the side where I was standing. A few meters away was the car that had hit him, stopped in the middle of the road with the front bumper torn off.

The people around rushed to help. A construction worker started directing traffic around the man and the car. A few people ran over to him. He couldn’t stand, so they lifted him into the car that had hit him, presumably to bring him to the hospital. I assume the man was a delivery driver. His motorcycle had one of those large delivery boxes strapped to the back. He was crying. I wasn’t sure whether it was because he was injured, because he’d just watched the motorcycle he depended on for a living get crumpled in the middle of the road, or because he’d just been thrown several meters through the air.

Road traffic accidents in Ghana are no joke. They’re one of the biggest public health threats in the country, and the data backs that up. In 2025 alone, Ghana officially recorded almost 3,000 road deaths—more than eight people every day. I’m not surprised. I’ve been to places with similar road conditions, weak enforcement of traffic laws, and motorcycles sharing the road with cars. But Ghana stands out to me because of how physically close people and vehicles are to each other.

Take Oxford Street in Osu, one of the busiest streets in Accra. People are shopping, vendors are selling food, pedestrians are walking everywhere, cars are squeezing through, and motorcycles are weaving between them, all within inches of one another. Cars regularly drive so close to me that they could run over my toes. If you’ve ever taken a moto in Accra, you’ll know exactly what I mean. The motorcycles weave between cars while street hawkers weave between the motorcycles selling plantain chips, charging cables, and bottled water. There seems to be quite a bit of comfort with how physically close people and vehicles are to each other.

But surviving a collision is only part of the problem. Like I witnessed, many crash victims are taken to medical care by bystanders or private vehicles rather than ambulances. I’ve only seen an ambulance once or twice in Ghana, and several friends and team members have talked to me about the challenges facing emergency medical services. Earlier this year, a 29-year-old engineer named Charles Amissah was struck in a hit-and-run accident in Accra. The National Ambulance Service picked him up quickly. They then drove from hospital to hospital looking for somewhere that would admit him: Police Hospital, the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, and Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. He spent 118 minutes in the ambulance while his condition deteriorated before eventually dying in the back of the ambulance. The case sparked a national conversation about emergency care in Ghana—on overcrowded emergency departments, hospitals redirecting patients elsewhere, and poor coordination between ambulances and hospitals. Ambulances were effectively “shopping” for hospitals while the patient’s condition continued to worsen.

For me, the last time I saw the man was in the car that had just hit him. After that, I don't know what happened. I don't know whether he found a hospital that could take him, whether he received treatment in time, or whether he survived. We often think of road deaths as something caused by the collision itself. But the collision is only the beginning. What also matters is what happens afterwards, when urban design, emergency transport, and hospital coordination all have to work together—and too often, they fail.

Our team celebrating a big milestone Niora this week.

The belief that things can change

While we were drafting the paper, I asked my partnerships lead, Sylvester Denyoh, what he wished more people understood about implementing digital health systems in Ghana. He said: ”The disillusionment people hold that anything will change.” It’s not the kind of observation that fits neatly into an academic paper, but I think it’s one of the most important realities of implementation. With his permission, I’ve included his reflections below.

”One of the most disorienting realities of implementing a digital health solution in Ghana is discovering that the problem you are solving is one that people already know intimately, and have made peace with. In my experience leading implementation for Niora Systems across hospital and retail pharmacy settings in Accra, I have encountered something that I can only describe as institutionalised resignation. Pharmacists, procurement officers, and hospital administrators will, in the same breath, acknowledge the dysfunction of the current system and some express doubt that anything can meaningfully change it. Not because they lack vision, but because they have learned through years of experience that the system and its decision makers tend to absorb and neutralise reform efforts before they take hold.

This is not apathy. It is a rational response to a history of incomplete interventions. And it presents a unique implementation challenge: you are not only introducing a new tool, you are asking people to believe, against accumulated evidence, that change is possible this time.

As a pharmacist by training, I have lived this from the other side. Reactive procurement ordering stock only after it has run out is not a policy failure in most Ghanaian pharmacy settings. It is simply how things are done.

Fragmented supplier relationships, delayed financing, and the normalisation of stock-outs are features of the environment, not bugs that anyone is actively trying to fix. The problem is so embedded in daily practice that it has stopped feeling like a problem at all. Niora’s first challenge, before any technical integration, is making the problem visible again.”

In reading Sylvester’s reflections, I realized that I have slowly begun developing the same mindset myself.

I have always been an extremely impatient person. But over time operating in Africa, I noticed that when buses were delayed, meetings slipped by hours, or timelines quietly dissolved, I stopped feeling the same frustration I once would have. Instead, the thought that entered my mind was simply: it’s out of my control; it’s just life.

I remember being in Lesotho when our bus broke down on the side of the road. Everyone climbed out, sat quietly beside the highway, and waited for the driver to return with a replacement tire. Nobody argued. Nobody demanded updates. Nobody seemed particularly surprised. At the time, I found that reaction remarkable. Now, it feels normal to me.

This week, Ghana experienced a nationwide power outage. I regained electricity after about seven hours, but some parts of the country waited nearly two days. A few days later, the running water stopped halfway through my shower. I admit—I was annoyed about that one. But even then, my instinct was just to accept that it was beyond my control.

That, I realized, is exactly what Sylvester was describing. Repeated exposure doesn’t just normalize dysfunction inside institutions—it changes what people believe is reasonable to expect from them. After enough repetition, expecting things to work begins to feel less rational than expecting them not to. Acceptance becomes a way of protecting yourself from spending every day angry at things you cannot change.

The lady has an impressive plate of eggs balanced on her head….

Kosua ne Meko

It’s been a rather depressing article this week, so I thought I’d end on a happier note: my favorite foods in Ghana.

One of my favorite things about living in different places is the small cultural exports that I end up bringing with me forever. I get my tea from South Africa and the UK, my haircut in Taiwan, skincare from Korea, sunscreen from Japan, and hippie organic products from the US.

There are many foods I love in Ghana. In particular, Ghanaians do rice very well. As someone from a fellow rice-eating country, I have to give it to them for their jollof and waakye. One of my favorite foods, though, is a street snack called kosua ne meko, which means “eggs and pepper” in Twi.

You’ll see women walking around with enormous trays stacked with rows and rows of eggs balanced on their heads. You stop them, ask for an egg, and they’ll peel it and prepare it with a tomato and pepper paste for just a few cedis. One thing I found particularly clever is that the eggs are coated in coarse salt. It helps preserve them while also creating enough friction to stop them from rolling around in the tray. It’s what creates those impressive displays of eggs that you see balanced on the ladies’ heads.

I was craving some on my way home this week, but by the time I got back it was already dark and all the egg ladies had gone home. So I decided to make my own. The recipe is pretty simple. It’s usually just a hard-boiled egg served with a paste made from tomatoes, Scotch bonnets, onions, ginger, garlic, and salt. I do not have a particularly well-endowed pantry, nor do I have a robust spice tolerance, so my version consisted of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and salt.

And it turned out delicious! These eggs really are fantastic. I still find them to be quite an oddity as a street food because they seem to violate every law of street foods, as you have to peel them, prepare them, and they’re considerably more work than grabbing a skewer or a pastry. Somehow, though, they work, and I’m very glad they exist, as I already know that kosua ne meko is going to be something that I will continue making wherever I am.

We had a national gutter cleaning day in Ghana. I didn’t know this was a real thing, but following the floods earlier this month, the President announced a National General Cleaning Exercise for the entire country.

It is exactly as it sounds. Workers across the “various ministries, Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies” were expected to spend the day participating in a nationwide clean-up exercise instead of their normal duties. The following day, all Ghanaian citizens were encouraged to join in as well. Shops and markets were officially expected to close, although that wasn’t universally the case, as I definitely still saw plenty of shops open.

What does it mean when a country responds to an infrastructure failure by mobilizing citizens to manually clean around it? And also, how did the flooding get bad enough that it required a national gutter cleaning day?

A few weeks ago, we had incredibly heavy rains. I genuinely woke up some mornings convinced someone was hammering on my roof. Even though I live on an upper floor, water was finding its way through cracks in the windows, and I spent much of the weekend mopping to keep it from spreading across the apartment.

The rain was severe, but the flooding wasn’t just about the rain. Accra has a major drainage problem.

One of the first things you notice living here is the amount of rubbish that ends up in public spaces. Plastic water sachets, bottles, food containers, and household refuse regularly collect in the open gutters that run alongside many roads. One real estate listing I came across amusingly described the coastline by saying, “The ocean sometimes turns into a plastic soup.” They’re not wrong.

The gutters themselves are an experience. They’re often several feet deep, running uncovered beside the sidewalks. We joke that you can’t walk while texting in Accra because there’s a genuine chance you’ll step straight into one if you’re not paying attention. When those gutters become clogged with rubbish, heavy rain has nowhere to go.

But the drainage problem is also about urban planning. Illegal and unregulated construction has blocked drainage channels and natural waterways in many places. Authorities struggled to enforce building regulations, and I’ve also heard developers describe long bureaucratic delays, allegations of bribes, and approval processes frustrating enough that some eventually bypass the formal system altogether. As a result, the infrastructure struggles to keep pace with how quickly the city is expanding.

The consequences show up everywhere. The flooding this month killed at least 13 people. Traffic is another symptom. Some commuters spend up to four hours each day getting to and from work. I’ve personally spent over forty minutes travelling just five kilometres to one of our partner sites. Estimates suggest congestion costs GH¢4.5 billion ($200 million) each year in lost productivity. I once heard someone say, “for the four years I spent living in Lagos, I spent six of it in traffic.” I can definitely say the same for Accra.

One of our team members summed up his frustration, as he described that as a taxpayer, he felt that maintaining public infrastructure should be one of the government’s basic responsibilities. Instead, he saw the state asking citizens to spend their own time cleaning up the consequences of infrastructure that public institutions had failed to maintain. Ultimately, when systems become overwhelmed, the response often becomes reactive rather than structural. You clear the gutters after the flood. You procure medicines after the stockout. You solve today’s emergency while tomorrow’s is already forming.

The expert myth

I was watching random YouTube videos while making dinner, but the Veritasium video called The Expert Myth caught my attention.

The video describes a paradox. Experts whose fields give them immediate, repeated feedback become extraordinarily good at making predictions within their domain. A chess grandmaster is better at chess than the average person because they’ve played thousands of games. Over time, that feedback trains an incredible intuition for recognizing patterns.

The paradox comes when you look at experts who don’t get regular, direct feedback. Researchers studied whether experts in political and economic forecasting, such as journalists, economists, policymakers, intelligence analysts, make better predictions than non-experts. The results are surprising. When outcomes take years to unfold and every situation is unique, experts were no better than random guessing.

This fascinates me because global health is exactly this kind of field. Is Ghana’s healthcare system going to transform because we approved this one grant? Who knows! We’ll find out in fifteen years. Or never.

I remember hosting a professor for an event once. He was one of the leading experts in exactly the field I wanted to study. I was supposed to be inspired. But as he talked about advising governments and convening rooms full of world experts to discuss policy, I remember thinking, Is this really what I’m supposed to aspire to? To spend my career giving advice to national governments who will nod politely, thank me for my insights, and then proceed to do absolutely none of it?

Jokes aside, governments often ignore consultants is because they have other problems. If you’re trying to keep the electricity grid running, recover from a flood, balance next year’s budget, and stop your governing coalition from collapsing, who am I to tell you that my project should suddenly become your highest priority? Unless I’m actually going to help solve those other problems too, why should you listen to me?

So if the highest levels of expertise in global health don’t consistently expose me to the kind of immediate feedback that makes someone better at predicting what will actually work, then what does that say about the standard path for becoming an expert?

One of the things I like most about building Niora is that it refuses to let me be wrong about reality. Every day, I’m confronted with immediate feedback. The hospital doesn’t want to upload data. No matter how logically perfect the workflow is, they don’t want to upload the data. So now I have to figure out another way. The procurement head insists on paying with cash, even though an online payment would be easier for everyone involved. Human beings, it turns out, sometimes can be the exact opposite of the perfectly rational agents from economics problem sets. Sometimes Uncle Ebenezer has been writing cheques for twenty years, doesn’t trust computers, and has absolutely no intention of changing just because someone told him digital payments are more efficient.

So you figure something else out. Maybe you convince his nephew to show him how to use it. Maybe you redesign the workflow so he barely notices the technology. Maybe you realize you just need to give up on certain users. Every failed upload, every rejected workflow, every workaround becomes another piece of feedback. To me, that’s how I develop expertise in implementation. Not by building elegant theories of how healthcare systems should work, but by repeatedly being forced to confront with how they actually do.

Morality is a terrible value proposition

During a meeting with a health economics professor at the University of Ghana this week, she mentioned her work with the Ministry of Health on the ring-fenced fund for pharmaceuticals. The premise of the ring-fenced fund was to allocate the pharmaceutical budget so that the rest of the hospital couldn’t divert pharmacy funds for other uses. The policy was introduced to improve capital liquidity for pharmaceuticals, increase medicine availability, and reduce medicine stockouts.

The problem is, it didn’t work. One of the key design features was that withdrawing money from the fund only required two of three approvals. The three approvers were typically the head pharmacist, the hospital CEO, and another administrator. In practice, what often happened was that the CEO and the administrator decided they needed a new generator, a renovation, or some other pressing expense, and, wouldn’t you know, the pharmacy budget disappeared.

Why would anyone design it this way? I don’t know the real answer, but I can imagine that truly ring-fencing hospital funds was politically unpopular. Allowing two out of three signatures to override the restriction may have been the compromise that made the policy acceptable. The Ministry gets to say it implemented a new initiative, while hospital leadership largely keeps the same discretion it had before.

We get this question a lot. What do you do when people have entrenched interests?

I think the challenge comes from getting people’s consensus on principles. However, technology is often evaluated differently from laws or moral demands. People care far less about what a technology asks of them than what it does for them. Does it save money? Does it make their job easier? Does it give them better information?

Because of this, I’ve learned that you need to offer a value proposition beyond morality. When morality is the value proposition, people support you for as long as they care about appearing moral or earning your approval. Once they stop caring, very few people are going to surrender power, money, or discretion for the sake of your ideals. If better governance becomes a side effect of a system that improves their supply chain, that may be an acceptable trade-off. If you mandate that hospitals keep pharmaceutical funds ring-fenced because it's the right thing to do? Nah, not happening. But if you can show a hospital that it will save thousands of cedis through better procurement, and keeping pharmacy funds budgeted just happens to come with it—now that is a conversation with a chance of going somewhere.

For that reason, the most effective design is not always the one that makes the strongest moral demand. It is the one that makes the desired behavior worth choosing. The strongest institutions don’t demand virtue. They make good behavior the easiest, most valuable option.

Featuring me this week with one of our favorite hospital partners, Dr. Charles Ofei-Palm!

I came to a realization this week while revising a paper for an academic journal with a collaborator at Stanford. Normally, I love writing (as evidenced by this newsletter). But for some reason, writing this paper felt like pulling teeth. The strange part was that I wasn’t writing about an unfamiliar topic. I was writing about Niora and our implementation experience, which is something I’ve talked and written about countless times. So why was this so much harder?

I realized I have a habit of making very broad, high-conviction claims. I’ll say things like, “Medicine stockouts are a coordination problem, not a capability problem,” or “Ghanaian society is highly relational.” This drives some of my academic friends absolutely insane. Because empirically, those statements aren’t completely true.

But I realized that’s usually not what I’m trying to do. Academics are often trying to answer the question, ”What is actually true?” I’m usually trying to answer, “What assumption should I operate on if I have to make a decision?” For example, imagine 30% of hospitals have excellent inventory data, 40% have mediocre data, and 30% have unusable data. The academically correct conclusion might be that hospital data quality is mixed, which would be an accurate description. However, my conclusion would be, “Don’t build a product that assumes good data.”

That’s a much stronger claim than the evidence literally supports. But if enough hospitals have poor data that my product repeatedly fails, then from a startup perspective, I have to behave as though good data can’t be assumed. The cost of being technically correct but operationally wrong is much higher than the cost of slightly oversimplifying reality.

The same thing happens when I say that hospitals in Ghana don’t pay for productivity. That’s almost certainly not literally true. What I actually mean is that I probably shouldn’t build a business model that depends on hospitals paying for productivity. Even if some do, it happens inconsistently enough that I don’t want my company to rely on it.

I realized that a lot of my sweeping claims are about actionability more than truth. A good analogy is a subway map. A subway map is objectively wrong, as the stations aren’t to scale, the distances are distorted, and the geography barely resembles reality. But none of that matters, because the map isn’t trying to describe the world perfectly. It’s trying to help you get from one station to another.

I think that’s how I build mental models. I’m not usually searching for the most complete description of reality. I’m searching for the simplest model that reliably leads me to good decisions. If I say Ghanaian culture is highly relational, an anthropologist could probably spend several hours explaining all the nuances and exceptions. But if that model helps me hire better salespeople, design better products, or build stronger relationships with partners, then for my purposes it’s a useful model.

I think that’s why writing the paper felt so difficult, as I wasn’t struggling to explain the implementation, but I was trying to translate between two different ways of thinking.

The psychology of being scammable

I’ve been asked for bribes twice in Ghana. Both times were while dealing with immigration. To be fair, I do look pretty scammable.

This week, I went to the Ghana Immigration Service to extend my visa. The first challenge was figuring out where the immigration office actually was. There were two different addresses listed online, my driver thought it was one, Google Maps seemed to suggest the other, and I was already a little confused before I even got there.

I walked up to a guard and asked if this was the immigration office. “Yes,” he said. I told him I was trying to extend my visa, and he immediately said he could help me. So far, this all sounded perfectly reasonable. He handed me a form, asked me a few questions about why I was in Ghana and where I was staying, and then told me the fee would be GH₵300. That immediately sounded wrong. I was pretty sure I’d seen somewhere online that visa extensions were somewhere around GH₵20–70. So I asked him, “That doesn’t sound right. I thought it was closer to GH₵30?”

He explained that GH₵300 was for expedited processing. I’ve learned that whenever someone starts offering “expedited processing,” it’s generally worth becoming a little suspicious. So I asked for a minute. I pulled up the Ghana Immigration Service website, found the official fee schedule, and sure enough, the fee for my visa extension was GH₵65. Definitely not what he said. I showed him the official fee list, said I was only paying the published amount, and after a little back-and-forth, he pointed me toward the actual office, where I paid GH₵65 and received my receipt without any issues.

They don’t just target anyone for scams. I’m sure this would not have happened to me if I were a middle-aged Ghanaian man. However, I was young, alone, and visibly foreign, and scammers like to prey on uncertainty. When you don’t know how a process is supposed to work, confidence starts looking a lot like credibility. You’re standing in an unfamiliar building, talking to someone wearing a uniform, who sounds like they know exactly what they’re doing. Your instinct is to trust the person who appears to have the information that you don’t. The scam is about selling you certainty.

I think that’s why both times I’ve almost been scammed in Ghana, the thing that saved me was finding an independent source of truth. Transparency reduces corruption because it reduces information asymmetry. When official information is public, people become less dependent on individual discretion. They know what a visa extension should cost. They know what an account verification should look like. They know what the process is supposed to be before someone has the opportunity to invent one for them.

Because of that, I’ve realized that institutional trust isn’t built by expecting better people, but by designing systems that rely less on individual judgment in the first place. The more transparent and standardized a process becomes, the fewer opportunities there are for someone to quietly change the rules. Sometimes the most effective anti-corruption intervention isn’t catching more bad actors. It’s making it obvious when someone is breaking the rules.

Using AI to pay our bills

I need money. Unfortunately, Niora has not (yet) been wildly lucrative, and I am not filthy rich yet.

So, as early-stage founders do, I’ve been bootstrapping and doing consulting to fund my expenses while I’m in Ghana, and while I do enjoy the work, I don’t think consulting is actually a very good business model. Every consulting project requires my active input, preparation, and energy. The money only grows if I work more. That isn’t a particularly scalable business model for a full-time founder.

Therefore, the question was, could I build something that quietly generated income while I spent my own time building the company I actually cared about? Investing is always the default answer, but I think investing is better at preserving wealth than generating regular income. Dropshipping introduces inventory risk. Flipping houses, phones, or furniture seemed like a way to accidentally give myself another full-time job. I wasn’t trying to spend my life becoming a red-pill financial advice YouTuber.

There is something deeply ironic about where this led me. Anyone who knows me knows I complain about AI slop. I hate useless AI companies. I hate building technology simply because you can. My whole reason for starting Niora was almost the opposite: if I’m going to spend years of my life building something, I want it to solve a real problem.

However, for all the time I spend complaining about AI, maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and see how hard it actually is. The Silicon Valley has spent the past several years convincing everyone that AI is an infinite gold mine. I wanted to know whether that was actually true.

Over the weekend, I built the beginnings of an AI portfolio manager. The idea is fairly simple. It uses AI to generate digital products, publishes them online, watches how they perform, and then learns from those results to decide what to make next. If one type of product consistently sells well, it allocates more effort toward creating similar products. If another product flops, it gradually abandons that direction and tries something else. Essentially, every product is just another experiment. Build a product. Sell it online. Learn from the results. Repeat. Over time, the goal is for the system to become better and better at figuring out what kind of AI slop people on the internet are actually willing to pay for. It’s basically like having my own little product manager, marketer, and sales assistant rolled into one, but it’s AI.

What have I learned so far? Firstly, it’s much harder than I thought. Not technologically, but legally. I thought selling digital products online would have almost no barriers to entry. Instead, I’ve discovered that most platforms understandably insist on there being a real human behind the account. Chrome Web Store requires your real name, address, and contact information to be publicly listed. Many marketplaces require identity verification and copies of government identification before you can sell anything.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that the AI monetization wave seems to be changing. There was a period where AI credits were getting handed out like candy. Every provider wanted developers to try their newest model. You could build sophisticated projects almost entirely on promotional credits. That era seems to be ending. Providers increasingly need real business models instead of permanently running on venture capital, which means those free credits are slowly disappearing. Ironically, trying to build an AI business now requires spending a surprising amount of money on AI: API credits, marketplace fees, model subscriptions, and distribution costs. I’ve already spent around $65 just getting everything set up, with plenty more API charges inevitably coming.

So, will this actually work? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe the internet has already reached peak AI-generated spreadsheet template saturation. Maybe I’ll discover that the only thing my AI is exceptionally good at is losing my money.

But I don’t actually think this experiment is about AI—it’s about capital allocation. One of the ideas that originally motivated Niora was that many of the world’s most important problems aren’t constrained by talent, but by resource allocation. It’s relatively easy to sell something with immediate, tangible value. I know this because I’ve been able to sell consulting projects worth tens of thousands of dollars. Selling the vision that a difficult institutional problem is worth years of experimentation is much harder. Investors need convincing. Grants are competitive. Everything comes with far more uncertainty, more conditions, and more strings attached.

If I can build a system that quietly sells products people genuinely want, perhaps that cash flow can help fund work that markets are much slower to finance. Maybe somewhere in the background, an AI quietly selling digital planners to strangers on the internet to pay for building better pharmaceutical markets can be a way to rearrange how the world allocates funding.

That would be a strangely fitting use for my AI slop.

I went to Makola Market this week to shop for beauty products. Ghana is one of the world’s major producers of shea butter, cocoa butter, and African black soap, which are often expensive or difficult to find in the US. Since I was here anyway, I figured I should finally see what all the hype was about.

A small tub of shea butter costs around GH₵10 (about $0.87), and a block of African black soap is around the same price. Normally this is where I’d start talking about the economics of local production and supply chains. But before economics, I used to work in biochemistry, so I wanted to talk about the chemistry this time.

Soap is quite simple. It’s made from just two ingredients: fats and lye. Mix them together under the right conditions, and a reaction called saponification converts the fats into soap molecules. The interesting part is where the lye comes from. African black soap uses cocoa pods, plantain peels, palm leaves, or other plant material are dried and roasted until they become ash. That ash is rich in potassium-containing compounds. Mixing it with water creates a strongly alkaline solution that can then react with oils such as shea butter, palm kernel oil, or coconut oil to make soap.

Certain plants accumulate potassium while they grow, so when they’re burned, those minerals remain behind in the ash. This can include banana peels, hardwood, corn stalks, and other woody biomass. Europeans burned hardwoods to make potash, which was the alkali for making soap before industrial chemical production.

That means that technically, you can make soap from other alkali metals. Sodium soaps exist, and most hard bar soaps are sodium soaps. Lithium is possible as well, but not water-soluble. Rubidium or cesium is also technically possible, although I’m sure there are better uses for the world’s supply of rare alkali metals than artisanal skincare. But hey, I’m sure there’s a market for this in the luxury bath product space. And before you ask: no, you can’t make soap from human ashes. Humans don’t contain enough potassium to produce alkaline ash.

Sometimes, it’s quite fun to remember my biochemistry roots….

(This is African black soap! It’s soft, crumbly, and wrapped in a brown paper when you buy it at the market. My boyfriend said this looks like a muffin….)

Fraud and How to Rule the World

I read How to Rule the World by Theo Baker this week. It was a particularly strange experience because much of the story unfolded while I was at Stanford. Even though names are changed in the book, I recognized many of the people and events. Word travels fast on campus.

The book isn’t particularly interesting to me because of whether any particular person committed fraud. What interested me much more was the philosophy that seems to emerge around places like Stanford that produce outsized success.

When something can produce enough extraordinary outcomes, there is a temptation to discount its failures. A professor who builds a world-changing technology is remembered for the technology rather than their mistakes. A startup ecosystem that creates billion-dollar companies also produces spectacular failures, and those failures begin to feel like an acceptable cost of innovation. Over time, success can become an argument for excusing behavior that would be judged much more harshly elsewhere.

I interviewed for Stanford’s How to Rule the World class a few years ago. I remember people describing the interview as unsettling because it asks uncomfortable questions about power, ambition, and ethics. I didn’t find it unsettling. Most of the questions were ones I had already spent years thinking about myself.

Where I think my philosophy diverges is in one assumption: I operate under the expectation that I never get to walk away from the consequences of my decisions. Many discussions about startups frame difficult decisions as tradeoffs between ethics and scale. I agree that difficult tradeoffs are inevitable. Building organizations at scale is messy, and no founder gets through decades without making decisions that have consequences. However, to me, I think about it in terms of the question: would I still make this decision if I expected to spend the next decades personally living with its consequences?

If I raise money, I assume I’ll still be explaining to those investors years from now why I made the decisions I did. If I build a company, I assume I’ll still be responsible for the employees, customers, and partners who trusted me. I don't make decisions assuming that someone else will eventually inherit their consequences. That assumption changes what “ends justify the means” actually means. I’m willing to accept short-term costs, even painful ones, for something that creates a stronger institution over decades. However, I’m unwilling to pursue a short-term advantage that undermines the organization’s ability to exist ten or twenty years from now. Every shortcut becomes technical debt. Eventually, someone has to pay it, and I assume that someone will be me.

I don't think Stanford emphasizes this aspect of leadership enough. However, I believe organizations become more durable when their leaders act as though they'll be accountable for what they build forever.

Medicine stockouts and corruption

I faced a medication stockout this week while trying to buy medicine for myself. Kind of ironic, given that this is our entire problem statement. I went to five different pharmacies and called another trying to find the medicine I needed. Eventually, exhausted from running around Accra, I cobbled together enough information online to find the least terrible substitute. I walked home with an alternative based on the infallible advice of ChatGPT and Reddit.

I think this would often become a case story about a firsthand experience proving why this is a problem worth solving. It is a pretty consequential problem with potentially deadly consequences. And let’s be honest, I was pissed off as hell after running around for several hours. A friend asked me what my biggest culture shock coming to Ghana was, and I said, “the amount of time I waste every day.”

There is definitely consequential unproductivity. Some unproductivity can significantly hinder development or even be deadly. But I don’t actually think these are the most dangerous problems in the world. The truth is that humans are far more resilient and adaptable than we tend to believe. I was having lunch recently with a pharmaceutical executive who grew up in Ghana and his wife, who did not. He said that, to him, blackouts were something he had always been used to. To his wife, the same felt unacceptable and alarming. He had never felt that life was unlivable because a blackout happened. Similarly, growing up in Taiwan, people often think the high-pressure collectivist culture and its expectations around work, appearance, achievement, and behavior can be really hard to live with and must be damaging in many ways. But people grow used to it. Humans are remarkably adaptable to all sorts of circumstances when they have to be.

Because of this, I actually think that one of the most dangerous problems in society are the ones that make people lose faith for a better future. In many conversations on moral philosophy with my friends, I’ve settled on the idea that much of the meaning of life comes from believing in the possibility of a better future and feeling that you have some ability to work toward it. This is why I think disillusionment can be so dangerous to a society: when people stop believing that their actions can lead to something better, they have less reason to invest in the future, strive for improvement, or uphold social order. You do not need everyone to become a worse person for a society or a market to deteriorate. You only need people to learn that being the first person to cooperate makes you the fool.

To me, this translates into a particular kind of corruption: the kind that erodes people’s willingness to cooperate and work toward long-term goals because they stop believing there is any reason to. And while Niora’s surface-level mission is to reduce medicine stockouts, my deeper motivation has always been to realign incentives in a deteriorating procurement market so that cooperation becomes worthwhile again. I think this is deeply consequential to development. The greatest damage caused by institutional dysfunction may not be the immediate consequences it creates, but the way repeated exposure to dysfunction changes people’s expectations about whether cooperation, discipline, and long-term investment are worthwhile at all.

I was looking for dresses to wear to a funeral in a few weeks, and when my team members showed me what Ghanaians typically wear, my first thought was: these dresses are fancy. Like full-on ballgowns, beautiful prints, elaborate embroidery, intricate designs. I thought, are we not outshining the dead with these outfits?

As it turns out, that level of expressiveness is simply a normal part of style and culture in Ghana. People dress elaborately for weddings as well, and I’ve noticed the same pattern in other parts of everyday life. Church services, for example, are incredibly expressive. I’m normally not someone who enjoys sitting through long speeches, but Ghanaian church services are filled with passionate preaching, music, performances, and singing. The congregation doesn’t just sit quietly either, as they clap, sing along, and respond to the sermon. Quite a bit more exciting than other church services I’ve been to.

I’ve always been curious about how culture develops. Many societies across West Africa relied heavily on oral traditions, such as storytelling, proverbs, myths, and spoken history, to pass down knowledge across generations. Beyond that, music, dance, ritual, communal participation, textiles, political oratory, and Pentecostal Christianity reinforced the traditions that place a high value on public expression. Even preaching involves charisma, vocal performance, and audience engagement, not just delivering theological content.

There is also a theory that different societies came to recognize and signal leadership in different ways. For example, China developed bureaucratic institutions that relied on written records, formal examinations, and mastery of classical texts to select and legitimize officials. By the third century B.C.E., literacy and success in written examinations had become closely tied to political advancement, making written mastery itself a signal of competence and authority. In West Africa, authority was also highly institutional, but it was often exercised through public life: chiefs, councils, oral testimony, public deliberation, ritual, and the ability to coordinate communities. This contributed to skills that were rewarded as signals of leadership. And as people contributed to institutions, the ability to persuade, build trust, maintain relationships, and command attention became economically valuable.

Developing hobbies as an adult

I’ll admit, I’ve never been huge on hobbies. Once in San Francisco, an Uber driver asked me what I liked to do for fun. I said I liked my work. He looked at me and said, “That’s not fun! Tell me something that’s actually fun!” And I said, “Uhh... I like... walking...” Yeah, he was quite disappointed.

I’ve never actually minded not having many hobbies. People often talk about the importance of balancing work with hobbies, but I think my mind is organized more as one coherent whole than several separate branches. The way I think about career, family, and enjoyment all grows from the same throughline. Even how I imagine raising children feels like an extension of how I think about meaningful work. I think many people see those parts of life as separate branches of themselves, but to me, they’ve always felt like an extension of the same philosophy of a fulfilling life.

Lately though, I’ve been exploring the idea of having hobbies. Not because I’ve suddenly discovered that hobbies are secretly exhilarating, but because I think they introduce more variation and creativity into my life. I spent weeks rotating between co-working spaces, partnership meetings, conferences, and grocery shopping, and it occurred to me that being in the same kinds of environments every day was limiting how much of Ghana I was actually experiencing. So I picked up two hobbies: dance and horseback riding. I started learning Azonto, a dance style originating from Ghana, because I thought it would challenge the habits I’d built from figure skating and ballet. I also decided to learn horseback riding properly. I’d ridden horses whenever I had the chance while traveling in Mongolia and Lesotho, but had never actually learned the fundamentals.

I won’t pretend I feel the thrill of practicing that many people describe. I have weeks where I think, Ugh, I’m so swamped with work. I’ll just go next week instead. But I do think it’s rather nice. I enjoy watching myself improve, learning a new skill, and having a part of my life that exists outside my everyday work.

But I think there’s another reason hobbies have become important to me. For years, I’ve lived with a public self and a private self. I think that divide first developed when I became known as young and exceptional. My public self was composed, capable, sometimes joking and unserious, but always seemed to know what she was doing. Over time, it became easier to stay in that version of myself than to admit to uncertainty, insecurity, or being a young person trying to figure things out. That’s why hobbies feel different. No one knows who I am or who I’m supposed to be. I have to confront the uncomfortable feeling of being confused, out of my depth, and visibly inexperienced. Not being young and exceptional, but simply a person.

An almost-delusional sense of belief

I think one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed as someone who didn’t grow up in Ghana is how optimistic I am about the country’s future. Sometimes I wonder if that’s simply because I haven’t lived here long enough to become disillusioned. I occasionally browse r/ghana on Reddit and read the long, profanity-laden rants about “what a sh*thole this country is.” There’s some... very impassioned stuff on there.

I’ve always been comfortable admitting to huge ambitions because I’ve never really understood the alternative. If the future is uncertain, what do you gain by believing that change is impossible? If you believe change can happen, at least you think you have a shot. If you believe it can’t, you’ve ruled yourself out before you’ve even started.

I think a certain degree of naivety is surprisingly powerful when you’re trying to build something new. Many founders make what initially looks impossible become reality, and I suspect a lot of them had an almost-delusional sense of belief. At the same time, I don’t think founders should be delusional about everything. As I’ve written before, I think there’s an important distinction between being stubborn about the vision and being stubborn about the method. You can be relentlessly committed to where you’re trying to go while constantly changing how you get there. If you’re delusionally attached to the method instead, reality eventually catches up with you. Or you commit fraud. Whichever one comes first.

I think about it in terms of knowable and unknowable questions. Some questions have objectively correct answers. It is probably safe to say that President Mahama is not going to suddenly grow wings and fly tomorrow. I wouldn’t bet my career on that. But other questions simply cannot be answered ahead of time. Will Ghana eventually modernize and standardize large parts of its procurement infrastructure? Will it experience decades of rapid institutional development? Nobody knows. There is no objectively correct level of optimism about an unknowable future.

When I face those kinds of questions, I choose the assumptions that make me most effective. That doesn’t mean ignoring reality or pretending constraints don’t exist. It means believing enough in the possibility of change to justify trying. I also think Ghana has many reasons for optimism compared to many other countries. In the United States, many systems are incredibly difficult to change because they are deeply entrenched. Pharmacy benefit managers, for example, persist not because they’re universally loved, but because too many incentives and vested interests depend on them. In Ghana, the challenge sometimes is that there isn’t yet a reliable system to replace a broken system. Convincing someone to try a better solution for a process that already frustrates them is often easier than convincing someone to give up a system they’re already benefiting from. And I think there’s something genuinely hopeful about that.

Ghana is highly dependent on imports, and much of what you find in supermarkets is imported. For example, Ghana has plenty of chickens, but chicken at the supermarket is surprisingly expensive (around $12/kg). Why is this?

I learned that Ghana doesn’t have much of the infrastructure needed to process chicken at a large and standardized scale. Producing chicken for supermarkets requires standardized processing, slaughterhouses, and cold-chain infrastructure, all of which are capital- and energy-intensive. Ghana also has more layer chickens, which are raised for eggs, rather than broilers, which are raised for meat. As a result, much of the frozen chicken sold in supermarkets is imported from countries like the United States and Brazil. However, you can often go to meat markets, like Kaneshie or Agbogbloshie Market, where you can choose an animal and they butcher it for you. Without the same processing, packaging, and cold-chain requirements of supermarket meat, this can be much more affordable.

This leads to a high cost of living in Ghana. In fact, the cost of living is similar to the US for a similar quality of life. For example, the prices at cafes, restaurants, and supermarkets can often be similar to the US, even when wages are lower. This is not the case in many other places. For example, in Taiwan and much of Southeast Asia, the same amount of money often buys you a substantially higher standard of living than it would in the US.

Will all African companies become fintech companies?

I’ve seen this thesis floating around for years: that eventually, every major African technology company will become a fintech company. This is currently true—fintech has disproportionately dominated Africa’s unicorns and largest technology companies. And I can see why. Financial infrastructure across the continent is deeply fragmented, creating opportunities for innovation. This has shaped our thesis behind Niora as well. Although we currently work in healthcare, I’ve always thought of Niora as a procurement and financial infrastructure company rather than a healthtech company.

Firstly, owning physical inventory in many African markets can be risky and expensive. I’ve started noticing from the amount of stress involved in managing the produce in my own kitchen. Oh no, the power just went out. Will my dumplings survive the night? Are the ants going to eat my potatoes if I leave them out? I wonder if there will still be tomatoes after the flooding…. I can barely manage an inventory of fruits, vegetables, and frozen dumplings, how do you think I would manage millions of dollars in physical goods? When electricity, roads, cold chains, warehousing, security, and transportation are not guaranteed, every physical asset is a liability that you have to store, protect, move, and sell.

The second challenge is scale. Africa is not a single market in the way that the United States or China is, nor does it have the economic integration of the European Union. It is 54 countries with different regulatory systems, languages, currencies, infrastructure, and consumer cultures. For a company selling physical products, entering a new market can mean establishing new distribution networks, navigating a different regulatory environment, adapting to local consumers, and building market presence almost from scratch. That makes scaling a physical business across the continent fundamentally challenging between countries. Software and financial products certainly aren’t immune, but physical goods make the cost of crossing borders particularly difficult to ignore.

However, that doesn’t mean the future will only be fintech. I think fintech has had a particularly strong wedge in Africa because many markets have exactly the kinds of problems that make new financial technology genuinely useful. In the US, I don’t feel particularly compelled to try a new fintech platform or use stablecoins. If I need to send someone money, the existing options generally work well enough. In Ghana, I voluntarily signed up for a new remittance platform because, after enough battles with ATMs, bank transfers, and transaction fees, I was willing to try anything.

But the coordination problems across African markets extend far beyond moving money. They exist in logistics, where fragmented delivery networks make it difficult to move goods efficiently. They exist in energy, where unreliable infrastructure creates opportunities for new ways of coordinating generation, storage, and distribution. They exist in trade, where businesses must navigate fragmented markets, currencies, regulations, and supply networks. So my thesis is that Africa’s next generation of large companies will be coordination companies: businesses that take problems created by infrastructure scarcity and market fragmentation and solve them through some combination of software, finance, aggregation, and networks. Fintech was simply the first place to start.

Understanding work ethic, workaholism, and incentives

Stanford students have a certain reputation: they don’t sleep. They do problem sets on planes, pull consecutive all-nighters, and still show up to parties. They maintain a social life, keep their grades up, work on insane side projects, and pursue ambitions to change the world, all powered by some combination of caffeine and sleep deprivation.

Unfortunately, this is not me.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I have never, ever been able to work like this. I go to sleep at 11 p.m. every night. I can’t work on planes or in cars. I can’t work properly when I’m tired or sick. I have never pulled an all-nighter, and I don’t stay up late—least of all for parties. My body has apparently decided that whatever ambitions I may have, they will have to fit within regular waking hours.

At Stanford, this actually became a mild insecurity of mine. I often felt less productive than the people around me because I simply didn’t have the same capacity for workaholism. My body always found a way to collect its debts. If I stayed up too late one night, the next day, I would be exhausted, incapable of doing anything useful, and left with approximately the mental bandwidth to doomscroll for several hours.

However, as I’ve gotten more familiar with my own working style, I’ve realized that I work with high intensity and narrow focus. I tend to go all in on one priority at a time. In high school, I was nationally ranked in science competitions, made an internationally recognized documentary, ran a blog with hundreds of thousands of visitors, served as student body president, and graduated valedictorian. How did I do all of that?

The answer is that I never actually did all of it at once. I worked in seasons. At any given point, there was usually one thing I cared about intensely, and I would direct nearly all of my attention toward doing it exceptionally well. Then, when that chapter ended, I moved on to the next thing. I’ve realized that this is still how I work. I don’t typically miss deadlines or wait until the last minute. I don’t typically half-ass several things simultaneously. If I’m going to half-ass something, I prefer to be honest that I probably don’t care about it at all.

I think this is relevant because I constantly see advice online about copying the routines of successful people. Wake up at 5 a.m. Take cold showers. Work 20-hour days. Follow the exact morning routine of a billionaire, and perhaps you, too, will become a billionaire.

But copying behaviors without understanding the logic behind them is lazy and ineffective. Instead, I’m much more interested in designing around my own psychology. I like finding ways to trick myself into doing the things I already know I should do. For example, I don’t follow much conventional personal finance advice to calculate what percentage of my income I should save every month or maintain an elaborate budgeting system. Instead, I have a simple rule: whenever my checking account exceeds a certain amount, I move the excess into a savings or brokerage account, where I mentally classify it as money that no longer exists. So rather than copying a supposedly optimal system and forcing myself to conform to it, I try to understand my own behavior well enough to design systems that make the desired outcome happen naturally.

And perhaps this is why I think about institutional systems design in much the same way. Instead of trying to convince hospitals why paying on time is good for them, I’d much rather just design the incentives around them to make paying on time the only logical choice.

At Stanford, if you walk down the hallway of a dorm or apartment complex, you’ll see people suddenly pull out their phones and stare intently at their lock screens to avoid making eye contact with their neighbors. We are that afraid of other humans. In Ghana, I’ve adjusted to a much more human everyday culture, where relationships are much more present in everyday life. I greet my neighbors when I see them, and there is a strong “I know a friend” culture, where things often get done through referrals and personal connections. For example, I had to make around eight in-person visits to the MTN office because of a systems error while setting up my SIM card. The problem was only resolved when one representative finally felt bad for me and called a friend who could actually escalate the issue. Otherwise, I suspect I would still be returning every few days to hear, “It’s not working. Come back tomorrow.”

Many systems continue to operate through personal networks, so knowing how to build and maintain relationships is therefore an important social skill. I’ve noticed this even in small interactions. People check in on one another more often, sometimes for no particular reason. Someone will send you a message saying, “Good morning, how are you?” There is no request coming in the next sentence. They are not warming you up before asking for a favor. They genuinely just asking how you are doing.

I’ve noticed the same dynamic in our work. One of my team members encouraged me to visit pharmacies in person and introduce myself as the founder to discuss implementing our system. In the US, I would never expect this to work. I would assume that I’d be told, “Sorry, I can’t help you,” and directed toward an email address where my message could be professionally ignored. But I agreed to try it, walked into pharmacies, introduced myself, and we actually secured several partnerships that way.

I think part of the reason for this is that there is low trust in formal systems, which makes personal relationships highly important. Many digitized and bureaucratic systems are still unreliable, so people learn not to depend on them entirely. I realized that I had started adapting to this myself when I refused to submit my visa extension application online. I was convinced that if I sent my application through the online portal, it would be delivered directly into the depths of hell at the Ghana Immigration Service and never see the light of day again.

However, I think there’s a lot of potential to build technology around this culture. People often assume that trust and personal relationships can only work at a small scale, and that they will eventually be replaced by more formal alternatives, such as credit scoring, digital marketplaces, and stronger legal enforcement. But I don’t think that’s true.

Reputation and group accountability are powerful levers. Court enforcement may be inconsistent, but reputational damage within a network can be a very real and concrete deterrent. If someone relies on relationships with friends, colleagues, and customers for nearly everything in their daily lives, the possibility of losing access to that network can sometimes matter more than the distant possibility of a court punishment.

And there are ways to make this kind of trust grow beyond word-of-mouth. The information behind word-of-mouth networks can be documented. Who has this supplier worked with before? Do they deliver when they say they will? Do they fulfill their commitments? Do their customers continue working with them? Perhaps the opportunity in technology isn’t to replace relationship-based systems with supposedly more sophisticated ones. Maybe it’s to take the information that already makes people trust one another and allow that trust to travel further than the immediate network of people who already know each other.

Accents and Ghanaian English

It’s funny that, throughout my time working in different English-speaking countries, I’ve developed slightly different versions of my own English. For example, during my time working at the University of Cambridge, I picked up words like “holiday,” “queue,” and “flat.”

The same thing has started happening to me in Ghana. I’ve noticed that I now have a slightly different texting style when I’m talking to my Ghanaian friends and colleagues compared to my American friends. I’ve gotten used to the politeness of Ghanaian English: adding “please” to everything, using the 🙏 emoji, and saying things like “at your convenience,” “kindly,” and “I’ll revert.” Americans, in comparison, use a lot of exclamation points and say things like, “Okay, sounds good!” and “I’ll circle back.”

My spoken English can be a challenge as well. I’ve been told several times that I speak very quickly and my accent is hard to understand. Once, our team was meeting with a director at the Ministry of Health, and unfortunately, I could not understand the director, and the director could not understand me, even though we were both speaking English. My team member had to translate English into English between us.

Growing up as an immigrant, I’ve always been conscious of accents. When I first came to the US, my parents were very deliberate about making sure I didn’t pick up their grammar and accent. As I grew up, being able to speak what my friends and family in Taiwan considered “perfect” English felt like a superpower to me. This shaped my interest in how accents affect the way people are perceived. I deliberately worked on developing an American accent—paying attention to things like tone, register, pronunciation, and rhythm, and still refusing the California vocal fry.

I don’t think most people realize that the way I speak today is, to some extent, a conscious choice. When I’m tired, I can hear the difference: my pronunciation becomes less crisp, I occasionally use the wrong word, and I lose the clarity of my accent. I still pay attention to this because accents and speech patterns undeniably shape how people interpret you. Before someone knows anything else about you, the way you speak can signal where you grew up and how you were educated. My latest observation is that British English seems to travel well across different English-speaking environments. So perhaps my next project will be developing a British accent.

Making Ghanaian-Taiwanese fusion cuisine

I’m notoriously a lazy cook. I think I take after my mother, who is the original self-proclaimed lazy cook. To clarify for the both of us: a lazy cook. Not a bad cook.

I normally put very little effort into my meals. My daily menu rotates between some variation of gari, rice with eggs and cabbage, or pasta with tomatoes and minced meat. I cook to feed myself, and I generally consider any further culinary ambition unnecessary.

However, this week, I was walking home after a day of partnership meetings when I ran into one of our research collaborators from Trust Hospital. We got to chatting, and he ended up showing me his favorite place to get kenkey. I had already tried fufu and banku, but kenkey was still on my list. He very kindly bought me some for dinner that evening, and I ate it with chicken and shito. It was an excellent dinner.

I had some kenkey left over the next day and was trying to figure out what to eat with it. Somehow, this led me to the idea of making a Ghanaian version of a Taiwanese scallion pancake (蔥油餅)—or, more specifically, its breakfast version, dan bing (蛋餅).

Traditional Taiwanese scallion pancakes are made from dough layered with scallions and oil, rolled out, and pan-fried. Dan bing is a common Taiwanese breakfast food that pairs the thin, chewy pancake with an egg. So, I decided to turn the leftover kenkey into a batter, cook it into a pancake, and added an egg on top to make my own version of dan bing. The result was essentially a kenkey breakfast pancake.

And it turned out quite well! I was very proud of myself for creating my first piece of Ghanaian-Taiwanese fusion cuisine. Perhaps I could even start expanding my culinary prowess, into, you know, maybe using more than one pan sometimes….

I wanted to start documenting my time here for two reasons. First, I like talking a lot. Usually, my friends and family bear the brunt of my long rants and unsolicited observations, so I thought perhaps it was time to share the burden with the rest of the world. Sorry.

Second, my path from Stanford to Ghana has been somewhat unusual. I left Stanford during my third year to work full-time on a company in Ghana—a country I had never been to before we began working here. I want to write honestly about what that actually entails: why I did it, what building here looks like in practice, what I’m learning, and how my theories are changing along the way.

A brief introduction: I’m Adeline. I was born in Taiwan and raised between Taiwan and the United States. Despite being fairly young, I’ve ended up working or living in the United Kingdom, South Korea, South Africa, China, Mongolia, Thailand, and a few other places. Most of my work has involved difficult, long-horizon systems problems: antibiotic resistance, procurement systems, logistics, and the institutions behind essential services. I had been conducting research at Stanford, and ended up starting Niora Systems, a procurement infrastructure company building transaction and coordination systems for health facilities in emerging markets. You can read more about our work here.

For now, here are a few adventures from my first week of moving into an apartment in Accra.

Understanding the skepticism around online ordering and payments

This week, I tried to buy a frying pan from Melcom Online. When I placed the order, the website said it hadn’t gone through, but my card had still been charged. So I called customer service, and they directed me to the IT manager for Melcom Online. He seemed to be driving home from work, and he said, “Oh, the ordering function is broken right now. And so is the email function. But don’t worry, I’ll work on it tomorrow.” I thought, this guy seems to have a lot of chill for the fact that the ordering function is broken on a major national retailer site. Eventually, I did receive my frying pan through a chain of phone calls, WhatsApp messages, documents, and a healthy dose of confusion. But I also learned to never casually pay for anything online.

This made me think about how we build the payments system for Niora. We’ve already started noticing how sensitive institutions can be around payments. Many pharmacies and health facilities still rely on checks or manual bank transfers, and there is understandable skepticism toward online payments because of scams, failed transactions, and situations much like my frying pan. At the same time, someone eventually has to introduce the habits that make better systems possible. People don’t use checks, cash, or manual transfers because they have some deep emotional attachment to them. They use them because the alternatives are worse, unreliable, or can’t be trusted yet. So the priority for us is to build payment systems that are reliable enough that people are actually willing to change their habits for it.

Spending unproductive time

I’ve been spending far more time on daily tasks and mundane chores than I normally would. This includes going to the market, buying water, sitting in traffic, or simply sitting around doing nothing during a blackout.

Normally, I would consider this time “unproductive.” But the more time I spend being unproductive, the more I wonder: do we really need to be as productive as we think we do? For one, I think there are pockets of humanity and connection that emerge from this unproductivity. I’ve gotten into the habit of having daily conversations with my market ladies about crops and fuel prices, and I’ve actually learned a lot from them. I’ve also decided that carrying heavy jugs of water home counts as exercise. More broadly, I think that in the age of AI, the challenge is becoming less about the sheer number of hours we put in and more about using it effectively and creatively. If technology continues to increase how much we can accomplish in a short period of time, perhaps we don’t need to optimize every minute of our lives, but rather being able to output higher quality work with the inputs we provide.

I’ve also been enjoying the process of finding my go-to market ladies and developing a rhythm in my everyday shopping. At this point, I have a mental map of the best vendors in my area. I have my go-to tomato lady with the freshest tomatoes, my go-to egg lady with the largest eggs, and my go-to produce lady who slightly overcharges me, but it’s okay because she tells good stories. One day, I got lazy and decided to buy my eggs from a different vendor. When I got home, I discovered that not only were the eggs extremely small, but I had also received only 11 eggs instead of the 12 I paid for.

I was devastated. I have since stayed loyal to my egg lady.

How to be a successful founder in uncertain environments

One question investors are always trying to answer is: Why are you the best founder for this?

I find this to be a curious question. The answer usually involves some combination of unique insight, experience, or network. But I think most of these things are still proxies. Leading a startup successfully depends heavily on judgment and live decision-making, not just where you started. Your starting position matters, but it is not deterministic of where you end up. Because of this, I often wonder: what are the most generalizable traits that actually determine whether a founder succeeds?

This question is particularly interesting to me as a young, foreign founder. I think about it as a vector of starting position and velocity. My starting position was certainly not the highest for the work I’m trying to do. But the skill I have the most confidence in as a founder is my speed of updating, which I think of as velocity in this analogy.

I’ve always had a sparring, debate-oriented personality. I form opinions quickly, argue them with conviction, and am equally willing to change my mind when someone presents logic that makes more sense. I think this has given me an unusual combination of high conviction and low ego around having my ideas challenged. To me, debate is a way to improve an idea, not prove that I was correct all along.

I try to operate the same way on the ground. I don’t need our first idea to be correct, and I treat operational reality as feedback for figuring out what to change. We recently started getting our first real implementation feedback. As we started integrating with inventory systems and collecting hospital inventory data, we’re encountering all sorts of realities that challenge our assumptions about the most feasible way to design our systems.

For example, we initially built a drug-mapping system to identify different inventory naming conventions and improve procurement recommendations. Once we started working with real hospital data, the mapping system kept failing. Drug names were too inconsistent, messy, and difficult to standardize perfectly. We could have been to keep improving the mapping system until it reached near-perfect accuracy. However, I started thinking of a different approach: How can we design the system so that it is less dependent on perfect mapping in the first place? I think this distinction matters. When reality contradicts your assumptions, you can either keep forcing reality to fit your system or redesign the system around reality. My philosophy is that we shouldn’t become attached to making a particular approach work simply because we already built it. Sometimes the better answer is to engineer around the constraint entirely.

I think one of the most useful skills in uncertain environments is the ability to distinguish signal from noise, then update and act quickly based on what you learn. If you have high velocity, you can travel remarkably far over time even from a weaker starting position. Conversely, a strong starting position with low velocity can become less valuable the longer the environment continues to change. That’s why I think velocity deserves more weight in how we evaluate founders.

Anyways, those were some of my reflections from this week. There is a lot ahead for us, and I’ll be writing about the progress we make along the way. For now, my life in Accra seems to involve building procurement systems, learning about markets and institutions, and becoming emotionally invested in the quality of my eggs.

I’ll be sharing more here each week. Feel free to follow along.