In 198,2 the U.S. government split AT&T into seven telephone companies, plus Western Electric (later renamed Lucent), and NCR. Like with the breakup of Standard Oil, many of these pieces later merged back together, or were acquired by other telecom companies.

This all looks complicated and messy, but from a customer point of view, this transition brought us flat-rate, continent-wide, monthly phone service vs. whereas AT&T was charging us 10¢ per minute for calls across a city and over $1 per minute for “long distance” calls between states. And this breakup led to the proliferation of fax machines, broadband internet, and mobile phones, all technologies AT&T had working in their labs but which they decided were not needed by their customers.

In short, this breakup caused a surge in innovation, better services, and lower prices. Better, faster, and cheaper!

Better for customers, but what about shareholders? Well… like like with Standard Oil, five years later the value of each share of these collective parts exceeded the value of the original share of AT&T. So this breakup was good for shareholders too.

Twice in a century, breaking up a monopoly was a win-win.

Meanwhile, the last breakup like this was 44 years ago. Almost two generations! Why not?

As the name implies, what-if analysis keeps me up at night. There is always another possibility waiting to be discovered:

And there is no way to predict in foresight what will work in hindsight:

Speaking of hindsight, I write a lot about the forgotten past, especially ideas and changes to society that invisibly took place across my lifetime, or by grandparents’ lifetime:

I’ve been an entrepreneur since 1992 and have been teaching entrepreneurs since 2011, so occasionally those lessons how up here too:

I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours in the last decade trying to understand how money and economics truly work:

Finally, sometimes I tell stories from my life, especially those that seem a bit unbelievable:

If you still don’t know who I am:

LLMs don’t know more about the world than the TweetBook or YouTube algorithms do. The LLMs are taught in the same way as described, only with trillions of pages of text and images rather than just billions.

Where “taught” is again, just as described, with the teachers not knowing how to teach, until the answers are dropped on us humans, where sometimes we’re asked if we found the answer useful.

I’m not arguing that often the answers are not useful. But the more you know about the topic the more you realize that the answers are not as great as they seem.

A version of that question was asked on Quora and answered by Alan Kay, one of the innovators from Xerox PARC, the first visionary of today’s ubiquitous tablet computers, and prolific answerer on Quora.

His answer was great: Bringing “notebooks back from the future” are what the visionaries have always done.

I personally must have written at least three dozen business plans by now, on top of the thousands I’ve reviewed from my MBAs and fledglings. All the tech startup plans I’ve ever seen follow this pattern, aiming to pull the future forward.

But in my work in Africa, my business plans and those I’ve invested in tend to be quite different, instead often digging up an old, forgotten notebook from the past to reimplement it in the present. Four examples:

• Africa Eats mixing together lessons from American Research & Development (the world’s first venture capital company, founded in 1946) with Berkshire Hathaway (first bought by Warren Buffett in 1962)

• Tuesday Markets, bringing 100+ year old market making to “crack open” the capital markets for SMEs.

• TRUK, the anti-sexy business model of refrigerated trucks and cold chain logistics, novel to 1920s America, archaic technology to 2020s Africa.

• Nyota, whose frozen peas was the most Buffett-esque blog post I’ve ever posted. Such an old business model that half of my American readers are too young to sing the Jolly Green Giant jingle.

Maybe the switch from envisioning a new future to reusing the forgotten past is due to my half century of experience? I am quite tired of seeing nearly all of those envisioned futures fail to make life better.

A few weeks ago one of my posts started with:

A half century ago I was a small child watching The Jetsons future of flying cars, robot maid, and push-button jobs. All I got was the push-button job, but 104 keys to choose from on a keyboard rather than two or three buttons on a wall.

The Jetsons and the Flintstones were both on afternoon TV when I was a child. I watched both. One set in the distant future, one set in the stone-age past. Both with quite comfortable middle-class lifestyles. One with robots and push-button meals. One with dinosaurs powering the labor-saving devices.

So perhaps what the world needs is a bit of the future and the best of the past, mixed together. Notebooks from both the future and past. The best of what worked before coupled with a few inventions that actually make life better.

One might expect that the Amsterdam Stock Exchange of the 1600s would be even simpler than the dozens of small stock exchanges that dot Africa here in the 2020s. One would be wrong.

I know this because I just read Confusion of Confusions, a book written by an Amsterdam stock trader in 1688, which describes all of the activities of the stock traders of that era.

I knew that there were short sales in Amsterdam, as famously (in stock exchange lore) a trader named Isaac Le Maire made the very first short sale of a publicly listed company in 1609.

What surprised me is that by 1688 there was already a busy trade in stock options, in the put and call form still used today. And futures. And even some fractional share mechanism that was probably like the odd-lot trades in pre-digital exchanges.

Or in short, reading about stock trading in 1688 proves to me that it is possible for a small stock exchange to provide more than just trading long. The open question I’ll be solving in the next decade is how to bring the rest of these tools to the stocks and stock exchanges of Africa.

I wrote the first of these, Inside the Apple II4, three years ago, and then the second, Inside the Apple STAR, this summer. Each is a different success story, set in motion by one piece of foresight that was overlooked at the time.

Three aspects make this an excellent hobby for me, given the way I think:

1- As a serial entrepreneur and investor, I’ve been trying to predict the future since my university days. The February 1991 issue of BYTE Magazine caused me to start a software company writing software for PenPoint, General Magic, and other pre-iPad tablet computers. That is how I played a role in putting Graffiti on the Palm Pilot.

Over three decades later, I’m still honing my foresight. These what-if histories help me understand in hindsight, what the people at the time were overlooking in their foresight.

2- I grew up in this golden age of personal computing. An Apple II was my first computer, back when it was state-of-the-art. I owned a Mac in 1985, a year after it launched. I turned down a job offer after university from the company that invented the laptop. I wrote software for the first wave of smartphones. I was a software entrepreneur building a venture-backed company during the dot-com bubble.

I lived this amazing wave of technological change, and read all the industry press at the time, but pre-Web that was a trickle of the whole stories. Between archive.org and bitsavers.org I now have access to a thousand-fold more details.

Asking a what-if helps put a structure around that research, with a goal of documenting what I find as a fictional nonfiction story. Without that structure the research has no purpose, no direction, and no end.

3- I love to write. Inside the Apple STAR is the 20th book in my Kindle Direct Publishing bookshelf. Some were never published. Some were used within the Fledge accelerator and were never intended for public consumption.

Berkshire Africa is the best-selling of them all. I’d say it too is a fan nonfiction, but of a different sort. Rather than a what-if of what could have been, it is a what-if of what can be. Or in short, it is the playbook of Africa Eats, based heavily on the learnings from Berkshire Hathaway.

The Next Step is the book form of the curriculum I used to teach MBAs for almost a decade, and the core curriculum used at the Fledge accelerator.

Inside the _____ series looks like it will be at least a trilogy, as the day before I uploaded the manuscript another technology rabbit hole appeared.

Last year I discovered that one of my friends is my third cousin once removed, and a running joke in my house with my teenage daughter is that he is her closest living relative, outside the immediate family. Her third cousin twice removed, but he only lives a few miles away.

You and I are probably not third cousins, but no matter where on the Earth you live, we are no more than 30th cousins. But what if you didn’t live on Earth? If humanity were spread across the solar system, on which planet would be my closest living relatives? (Not counting the moon, as that is too easy an answer.)

If you skipped the video, then your answer is probably wrong.

I’ve seen this firsthand when teaching at my daughter’s school. No one ever told the kids how deep math goes. They get to fractions, decimals, and square roots, and have the first inklings of Algebra, without knowing that Geometry and Trigonometry and waiting for them just beyond the shadows. And even if you took Calculus and Linear Algebra in college, all of that is not even 1% of the known parts of mathematics.

Over in science, you might recall that the nucleus of every atom include protons. And except for hydrogen-1, some neutrons too. How many neutrons? There is no formula. The image above plots the ratio of neutrons to protons. The grey boxes are stable atoms. The other colors are atoms that can exist, but are unstable. There are theories that explain the why behind the colors, but it takes hundreds of pages to explain the true complexity behind the reality hiding underneath the simple story we were taught in Chemistry.

It turns out that very few things in life are as simple as we are taught. This same pattern of more complexity existing beneath the simple models we are taught in school is true in economics, sociology, and philosophy too. It is true in linguistics and archeology and every other study involving humans. And animals. And plants. And single-celled organisms.

Give it enough time, and it becomes true for the systems we humans create that are designed to make life simpler. For example, time zones:

The world is complexity, not turtles, all the way down.

Stop for a moment and give that a thought. You no doubt have some decisions to make today. You might even be working on making a big decision. What information are you missing that you would love to have now? Information you’ll likely only have in a few weeks, months, or years, after the decision is due?

Across my long career, I can’t think of any major decision when I felt like I had sufficient information. Making decisions with limited information is one of the hallmarks of being a successful entrepreneur.

From my experience, I’ll pass on two tricks that have worked for me:

A- Don’t fret over the lack of information. Unless it is easy to get more, do the best with what you have. Don’t get stuck in paralysis by analysis.

B- Look for patterns. I read a lot of history, especially stories of failure. The best way to not make a bad decision is to know what bad decisions others made before you.

The real trick to success isn’t making all good decisions. The trick is to not make too many bad decisions in a row. You can usually recover if you discover a mistake early enough to change it. You can usually recover even when that second idea doesn’t work either. It’s the third or fourth change that usually causes the actual failure.

That, or the really bad idea that your plans are correct.

For every invention of mankind, someone had to go first.

Anyhow… who gave us this quote about inventing vs. predicting the future?

The first known use was not quite as pithy. The 1963 book “Inventing the Future” by Dennis Gabor includes this quote:

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.

BTW, this pattern is quite common with famous aphorisms. They often get polished over time, and sometimes in that process end up switching their meanings. Truth is stranger than fiction.

A speech in 1979 included the variation, where Ilya Prigogine was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977:

I end on a note from Prigogine, who said that the way to cope with the future is to create it.

I still find the quote in the title to be the best form. The first use of that was apparently from Alan Kay, then-researcher at Xerox PARC. He claims to have first used it in an email in the early 1970s. A 1982 quote in an industry magazine has Kay saying:

At Xerox PARC the researchers’ maxim was “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” and Kay talked of the efforts made there to design a truly personal computer.

PARC is where windows, icons, and WYSIWYG was invented. And laser printers. And Ethernet. And what became PDF, Word, and Illustrator. All of which became their future, our present, through other companies. But that is a another story for another day.

Physics and energy storage keep those flying cars from reality. But we’ve been shown videos of robots first walking, then dancing, and doing factory work for over a decade, so how much longer before we all have robots cooking our dinners and cleaning like a real maid (not just sweeping up like a Roomba).

This is one of those cases where the marketers and technologists misinform us.

The reason we don’t yet have robot maids falls into Moravec’s Paradox, which Moravc summed up as:

"It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."
— Hans Moravec

Or from another angle, the uniquely human brain activities turned out to be the easier functions for computers, whereas the common brain activities we have with other animals turned out to be far more difficult than expected.

Why?

Mostly because of data. We humans have generated billions of billions of documents that we can use as training data for AI. We have no equivalent data for walking. Or for picking up a cup. Or for sweeping. Or folding clothes. Or cooking a meal.

It is as simple as no data, no AI.

And it likely going to stay that way until we truly understand how brains work, to the point where we can either tap into the information flow within a brain to record that data during those tasks, or given that understanding of brains we can build an artificial brain that can simply learn by doing, as we all do for those tasks.

So for now, take all the robot demos with a hefty grain of salt, as you’ll be cooking and salting your own dinners for many more decades.

Note too that Mike Scott is first and foremost President, and secondly CEO. By the time I started my first startup in 1992, my title was CEO, my co-founder was CTO, and we both thought it sounded odd that Delaware required us to assign ourselves the legal titles of President and Vice President.

Vice President seemed only to be used in Washington DC and at banks.

30ish years later, Africa Eats, incorporated in 2020 has never used the titles President or Vice President. The core management team are all CxO. Same with Tuesday Markets, incorporated in 2024.

Apparently, this switch came about in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, still ongoing when I started my first company in 1992, hence the feeling of anachronism when asked to assign a President.

Why?

It seems the vanguard of this change were the conglomerates. Each division had a President, and thus a new title was needed for the President of Presidents. Chief Executive Officer was coopted for that title. Analogous to how empires were a collection of kingdoms, each ruled by a King, and thus Emperor became the higher-ranked title above King.

The other C titles then followed, as Chief Operating Officer sounds more prestigious than Vice President of Operations. Chief Financial Officer more prestigious than VP of Finance or Comptroller.

Same jobs, fancier titles.

I wonder if there is a next level of titles we’ll see before the 21st Century ends? Any thoughts to share? Throw them in the comments.

For example, the story of Apple Computer is that it began with two cofounders, both named Steve. True, except that story leaves out Ronald Wayne, who left just 12 days after the company started. And it leaves out Mike Markkula, who wasn’t there when Jobs and Woz decided to build kits in 1976, but was there when Apple Computer Inc. incorporated in 1977.

I’ve been using Apple computers since 1981, when I was twelve years old. The first computer I owned was an Apple II Plus, bought used in 1983. Then a 128K Macintosh, in 1985. I’m still an Apple customer, writing this on an M3 Macbook.

Three years ago I discovered all of the old issues of BYTE magazine on archive.org and fell into a rabbit hole reminiscing nostalgically about the early days of personal computers only to be caught up in my typical “what if” questioning of what might have been.

Details on what I found and my what if scenarios are on my old blog, or eventually in my first fan (non)fiction book: Inside the Apple II4.

Something keeps pulling me back into this old rabbit hole, and three years later it led me to a neighboring hole… the true history of icons, windows, and the Apple Macintosh graphical user interface (GUI). Spoiler alert: the published history is again not the whole truth.

I’ll very likely end up with another fan nonfiction book and shorter blog posts, but what I’ve learned so far is surprising, not surprising, and more interesting than I expected.

Surprising: The official history is that the Lisa project came first, failed, and then the Macintosh. The real timeline is that the later-named Macintosh project was greenlit first and had more elements of the Macintosh GUI first. The original leader of the Macintosh was Jef Raskin, and he was the person who set up the visit by Apple to Xerox PARC that then inspired the Lisa team to implement windows, icons, and adopt the mouse.

Not surprising: The official history is a simpler story that also happens to match the ship dates. The Lisa first shipped in 1983. The Macintosh in 1984. The Lisa failed. The Macintosh (eventually) succeeded. So voila, rewrite history to have the Mac arrive second, learning from the Lisa mistakes.

Interesting: The Xerox GUI had far less in common than a 1983 Lisa or 1984 Macintosh than in any of the mainstream stories. The official story goes… Jobs and a few other Apple employees visited Xerox PARC once, were given a demo with graphics, windows, icons, WYSIWYG, etc., and then copied it and shipped it as the Apple Lisa. You can find the Xerox Alto manual online, and there are more differences than similarities with the Lisa or Mac.

Even more interesting, Xerox shipped the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981, which had a GUI based on the PARC research, but which too differed greatly from the PARC designs. Turns out the PARC researchers didn’t sweat the details because their software just needed to answer their research questions. It didn’t need to be usable by a corporate admin, analyst, or manager.

Wait… 1981 comes before 1983. The commonly retold story is that the Macintosh was the first computer you could buy with windows and icons. As the Lisa failed, Apple happily repeats that story, ignoring both the Lisa and Star. But in reality the Star shipped first. And back to the question of stealing UIs, the Lisa could and did play with the Star. Yet the Lisa/Macintosh GUI was different from that design too, in just about every important detail.

I’ll spare you those details, but the lesson here is… don’t believe the sanitized, simplified corporate histories in books, magazines, and movies. The world is far too complicated for any of those to be true. Consider those stories the fairy tale versions of the real story, because that is what they are.

Many of us point especially to the growing valuations (PE ratios) and say this market is a bubble. Especially in a global market with active major wars high oil prices, slower economic growth across the Global North, trade wars, and plenty of economic uncertainty. Bubble or not, rises in prices like we are seeing today are a sign of too much money seeking to few investments.

We’ve seen this many many times before in the last 400 years. The chart above is no where near comprehensive.

The lesson I’ve learned from reading or living through these moments in time is that the root causes are a mix of greed (primarily in the form of FOMO) and laziness. Laziness because the world is huge. There are 8 billion people and hundreds of millions of businesses.

There are millions of other investments beyond the Magnificent 7, but yesterday over 250 million shares traded in those seven stocks, with a total value of over $80 billion. Compare that against the statistics from the prior two posts: $7.2 billion invested throughout 2025 in Seattle startups, and $2.2 billion invested into startups/SMEs across all of Africa for the whole year 2025.

10x more traded in one day in seven companies, all of which are over-valued. What a waste of time, energy, and capital!

Noting that every one of those transactions included not only a buyer but also a seller. Those sellers had $80 billion to invest this morning. None of which spent today filling in the gaps of finance for startups in Seattle or Chicago or Atlanta, and none of which who probably spent a minute considering that far more money could be made investing in Africa with probably less risk vs. turning around tomorrow to buy a different over-valued company.

Starting top-down… less than 1% of all global venture capital is invested in Africa. Less than Seattle, Toronto, or the country of Brazil. Only slightly more than Sweden and Saudi Arabia.

But that capital isn’t invested evenly across the continent. It mostly flows to just four countries: Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, and Nigeria. Only $25 million in Rwanda helps explain why it’s been so hard to fund TRUK.

On top of that, it seems there are fewer and fewer funds “writing checks” each year.

The peak in 2022 in number of investors matches the peak of total investments, as seen above and again on the graph in yesterday’s post. The drop in funding since 2022 is a global phenomenon for venture capital, not unique to Africa.

Lastly, its been two years since I’ve seen a sector breakdown of capital flows. Back in 2024 around $100 million was invested into “Agri & Food.” The above infographic says $73 million for the first half of 2026. A few percent better but still about 1/1000th the capital that is needed to build a modern food/ag supply chain.

My answer always surprised them. I informed them the were misinformed. That America as a whole doesn’t have a working startup ecosystem. That only a few cities in the U.S. worked well for startups. And that Seattle, despite being the headquarters for startup successes such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia, along with the headquarters Starbucks and Boeing Aircraft, and despite having tens of millions of millionaires as alumni from those companies, Seattle had insufficient capital for our startups.

I informed them that, nonetheless, Seattle was doing better than the bigger cities of Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and beyond Austin, TX, and Boulder, CO, none of the smaller cities had any significant success with startups.

The reality is that the venture-backed startup culture written about in the business press is truly only functioning at scale in three cities: San Francisco/Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston.

Those are the only cities on the planet where there has been sufficient success funding, growing, and exiting startups that capital flows out to other startups in other cities. In other hubs like Seattle, Austin, and Los Angeles, there is insufficient local capital and the gap is provided from VCs in Silicon Valley.

I (co)founded four startups in Seattle, and joined a fifth in the middle of that run. My first was initially funded by me, then by a Singaporean Angel. The other four were funded by VC funds, all with at least one California VC participating in Series A, if not leading. That was the norm in the late 1990s and into the 2010s before I left that world to start Fledge.

If you are reading this then you likely know I switched my focus to Africa back in 2020. To demonstrate the vast difference in capital flows between America and Africa, above is the graph showing just funding for Seattle-based startups vs. startups across the whole continent of Africa.

My home city of 4 million people invests more money in its startups each year than all the countries of Africa, which total 1,500 million citizens. The commonality is that in both cases, most of this money is imported.

But then this weekend I was watching Michael Stevens and Hannah Fry discuss another cliche, “The End of the World is Coming” on their video podcast and one line Michael said (at 14:16) stuck out, “it wasn’t even that long ago that the tools you used every day were exactly the same tools your grandparents used.”

That is the opposite of this idea I’ve written about many times too, where we take for granted products, services, and processes today that were new to our grandparents’ generation or great-grandparents’ generation. That itself is a new phenomenon of the last 125 years, as there simply wasn’t that level of day-to-day or year-to-year change prior to the 20th Century.

Go back and reread Michael statement: It wasn’t that long ago that the tools you used every day were EXACTLY THE SAME tools your grandparents used. Despite might fixation on this “Generational Amnesia” (it has a name!), I had never thought about this from the perspective of someone born in the mid 1800s, and thus hadn’t realized this phenomenon itself was new.

Hannah and Michael continue on in their conversation about how that led to the modern perception of time being linear. In prehistoric times and perhaps until the 20th Century, time was more commonly thought of as cyclical. The seasons repeat. The generations repeat. The world doesn’t change perceptively generation by generation. It just keeps repeating, minus the occasional big change like an empire dissolving.

So on the scale of 125, it really is different this time. It’s just not the end of the world.

In short, this is an AI-driven app that runs in your browser, that looks like it is running Windows and apps, but where everything you see is created by the AI in the moments before you see it.

So, for example, there is no calculator app. But if you ask for a calculator, the AI generates a window that looks like a calculator. Still with no actual calculator app. If you press the buttons, the AI updates the screen as if there were a calculator. Press “5 ÷ 3 =” and the screen will correctly show “1.6666666667”.

Because every app is just created on the fly by the AI, in this OS you can describe any app you’d like to run, and it will run

The video shows more examples…

All of this sounds a bit magical (as it should, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) but if you fire up the “Internet Explorer” app, just as the AI is hallucinating apps, all the content inside the hallucinated browser is just more hallucinations.

Enter google.com and the AI generates a page that resembles, but isn’t Google. Search that “Google” and the resulting links are just hallucinations, as are the content of the links below that. It’s hallucinations all the way down.

The OS is nothing but hallucinations, all the way down. Which is the whole goal of vibeOS. Which is amazing that it works at all. But which is a clear and present warning to all of us that in a world of AI, every interaction we have henceforth with a computer could just be nothing more than hallucinations, all the way down.

It seems none of their management learned from history.

I was a teenager in 1984 when AT&T was broken up by the U.S. government. If you are younger than me (or not American) it is hard to convey how key AT&T’s services was to every home and every business. This was back before mobile phones, when a phone was tied to a place, not a person, and every place in America had a phone, if not three.

AT&T fought that break-up for a decade. AT&T’s shareholders were against it. But both management and shareholders should have asked for it sooner. One share of AT&T in 1983 was worth $60-$70. After the breakup each shareholder received a proportional set of shares from each of the “Baby Bells” plus NCR and Lucent, and the ongoing remnant of AT&T. Two years after the breakup those shares were worth $80-$90, growing to $500-$800 today.

Or in short, the break-up created value for shareholders.

Which may sound surprising, but go back 73 years before AT&T, to 1911, and the U.S. government broke up Standard Oil. In that case into 39 companies. John D Rockefeller owned 25% of Standard Oil and thus ended up owning 25% of each of the “Baby Standards”.

Two years after that monopoly ended, Rockefeller’s net worth had doubled. And I’ve seen anecdotal stories that say within ten years those companies were, in total, worth five times more than Standard Oil.

“Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes your the bug.”

Mark Knopfler wrote and sung those words in by Dire Straits’ song The Bug. True words for navigating life. But more interesting when you look at how cultures view being the bug.

I’m an American, raised by American parents, who in turn were raised by American parents. I have a very American attitude toward being the bug. It bugs me. It makes life feel overly unfair. And as an entrepreneur, it makes me want to find a way not to be that bug again.

That attitude isn’t commonplace around the world. If you grew up in Europe, you are more likely to expect to be the bug more often than the windshield. From everywhere I visited in Africa, that too feels like the norm.

That was one of my biggest lessons living in Mauritius last year. It’s a lovely country, but between the brain drain and culture norms, there is a dearth of people who see a problem and seek to solve it. That was visible in the lack of entrepreneurs, in my interactions with professors at the University of Mauritius, and in my conversations with the Economic Development Board, which is the government agency that is supposed to be actively making positive change in the country.

This American attitude of squashing bugs was evident in every one of the 10 countries I visited in my travels. Over and over again I noticed inefficiencies at retailers, restaurants, airlines, and hotels that were long-ago fixed at the equivalent American institutions.

Looking again at why I’m seeing more success at African startups than American starutps, another likely factor is the prevalence of this bug vs. windshield mindset. The long-standing American norm of fixing bugs means that there are fewer opportunities for new companies to bring a better product or service to market, as well as a higher bar of expectations. Africa Eats’ success stories include a potato and onion aggregator, a refrigerated trucking fleet, a company that sells seeds to farmers, and a chain of stores selling animal medicines. All four of those are the largest of their kind in their home countries, and often in their neighboring countries too.

Those were opportunities in 1926 America. Those are not opportunities in America today. But there are tens of thousands of such opportunities in 2026 Africa, where the windshields are not yet the norm.