Between 1970 and 1994, the South African state was one of the most demanding, technically literate customers on earth. It produced world firsts, the Casspir, Ratel, G5, Rooivalk, a passive radar lineage the CSIR still licenses today, at a rate wildly out of proportion to the size of our economy. Then it stopped buying and within a decade the innovation output collapsed.

Today the state spends an estimated R800 billion ($50 billion) a year. It gives its national innovation agency a parliamentary grant of R1.2 billion. It’s roughly 666 times more powerful as a buyer than it is as a funder and for thirty years it has optimised the smaller number.

THE BENCHMARK

It’s clear that what’s been tried isn’t working, you can’t cut ‘n paste last years budget into last years programmes to fill an innovation blackhole. None of it touches the number that actually moves the needle. The impact doesn’t shows up in places if you know where to check. Domestic patents granted fell from 694 in 2019 to 513 in 2022. South African startups raising any funding fell from 78 in 2022 to 25 in 2024 (much like our youth unemployment challenge, it’s hard to calculate how many more startups have altogether given-up raising funds). Gross expenditure on research and development sits at 0.62 percent of GDP against a National Development Plan target of 1.1 percent, a target the country never got close to achieving. According to sources Kenya could run a higher research intensity than South Africa does.

_{Sources: patents, R&D-to-GDP ratio and the Kenya comparison from the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) / Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, 2024 Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators Report. Startup funding count from Technology Innovation Agency, Annual Performance Plan 2026/27, citing the African Tech Startups Funding Report 2024.}

THE EXHIBIT

THE HONEST TWIST

Historical evidence points somewhere which is a place we would all like to forget. South Africa’s most productive innovation era was underwritten by an apartheid state’s arms programme, made possible by sanctions and executed through secrecy. Nothing about that regime is worth recovering. The mechanism it accidentally proved is the catalyst we should look at replicating. A state that buys hard technology at scale, from domestic firms, against real problems, with a deadline, produces disproportionate innovation. Israel, Singapore and South Korea run versions of this on purpose. South Africa ran it by accident, then dismantled it and never replaced the demand it removed.

Money alone won’t fix the innovation gap either. The State Information Technology Agency’s own regulator found that one in four tenders it processed never resulted in an award, and the oldest open matters have sat in adjudication for more than 400 days. A small engineering firm or software startup running on eighteen months of runway does not survive a sales cycle like that, however large the budget that has been set-aside.

One percent of what the state already buys is five times what the entire venture capital industry invests in a year. It’s not new money, it’s money allocated to a different supply chain.

EXISTENTIAL ENGINEERING

There is a very specific incentive inside that history than guaranteed off-take and it deserves its own name: existential engineering. A commercial R&D budget optimises for margin and quietly walks away the moment the number stops working. Existential engineering does not have that option, because the person designing the thing is also the person staking a lot more than money on it working.

“You design for profit. We design something that carries our sons to war.”

That line is attributed to an Armscor-era engineer, from an interview by an international journalist and it draws the distinction better than any strategy document I could write. It is not a forcing function; the government can legislate back into existence. Nobody would ever want the awful conditions that produced it. But the underlying principle survives the removal of the war: demand backed by consequence produces a different quality of engineering than demand backed by a grant application and a guaranteed off-take purchase order. What we can put in front of a department is a named sponsor, a deployment deadline and a customer who actually has to disclose and live with what gets built. That is the smallest surviving fraction of the same mechanism and it is the part a national regulation can actually reach.

We are no-longer in a political war, we are now fighting an economic war. A war which impacts all South Africans, especially entrepreneurs.

THE DIAGNOSIS

This is not a funding gap in disguise and I don’t think it needs a new institution. I’d be sceptical of anyone who tells you it does. It is a demand engineering problem. The Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) already runs a Small Business Research and Innovation programme, the South African name for the American SBIR model that puts a statutory share of existing agency budgets to work buying from small firms. It exists, it has a name. It has very limited funds but absolutely no obligation binding any department to use it.

There is also a closing window. The Public Procurement Act 28 of 2024 already permits an organ of state to advance innovation through procurement. The regulation that defines how, the document that turns that permission into a rule departments must follow, was published in draft on 16 April 2026. Public comment closed on 15 July 2026. As of this paper’s publication in August 2026, the Minister of Finance has not yet signed the final text. Once it is signed, this window does not reopen for another decade.

THE SO WHAT

Three bodies in this ecosystem have an actual seat at the table and each should read this differently.

SAVCA already runs the industry’s policy and regulatory affairs function and publishes the numbers this report cites. It is the only body structured to convene a formal industry submission rather than a scatter of individual comments. Operation Vulindlela and the Presidency have the delivery authority to add this as a reform area, the way they already have with energy, logistics and telecoms, and a track record, roughly R500 billion in private investment unlocked, that makes the ask credible rather than aspirational. The SA SME Fund already sits inside the capital this regulation would activate, R3.5 billion under management across fifteen VC funds, and does not need convincing that capital was never the constraint.

If you sit inside one of these three, this is written for you specifically. Comment, add context or tell me where my argument is wrong. For everyone else managing a fund or an LP allocation, this week’s action is a simple portfolio audit. Pick a relevant company and ask a single question: Are you built to sell to government as a customer or would it take a year just to find the right department? Most have never been asked this question as the strategy would be akin to ‘startup sales suicide’.

THE ASK

As with any good startup pitch it should end with a specific ‘Ask’. Ours should be Sign the General Public Procurement Regulations with the innovation set-aside intact: 0.25 percent of qualifying procurement in year one, rising to 1.0 percent by year three. That phases from R2 billion to roughly R8 billion a year, nine times the Technology Innovation Agency’s entire current grant and none of it is new money. It is the same R800 billion the state already spends, redirected.

Put the R1.2 billion TIA gets today next to what the state was once willing to commit. Defence spending alone ran at four to five percent of GDP through the early 1980s, a different base to a modern budget line, but the direction is not subtle. TIA’s entire grant is roughly 0.04 percent of the R2.67 trillion the state will spend this year. Whatever the country once judged worth funding at scale, it now funds at a rounding error.

_{Sources: South African military spending as a share of GDP, mid-1960s to late 1980s, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database and World Bank military expenditure indicator (series MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS).}

South African’s innovation industry stalwarts: Ketso Gordhan, Adrian Gore, Melvyn Lubega, Alison Collier, Pieter de Villiers, Keet van Zyl, Matsi Modise, Adrian Dommisse to name a few top of mind, know this problem better than most people who will read this.

What’s been done? What still needs to be done? What are we missing?

Good Health,

Will

_SOURCES

_{1. National Treasury, Director-General procurement transparency instruction, February 2026. 2. Technology Innovation Agency, Annual Performance Plan 2026/27, presented to the Portfolio Committee on Science, Technology and Innovation, 28 April 2026. 3. Public Procurement Act 28 of 2024; draft General Public Procurement Regulations, published under section 63(1) of the Act, 16 April 2026 (exact Gazette number not independently confirmed for this specific notice; do not quote a Gazette number without checking National Treasury’s own listing first). 4. CSIR, Annual Report 2024/25. 5. SA SME Fund, Endeavor South Africa and SAVCA, venture capital study, July 2026. 6. National Treasury, 2026 Budget, total consolidated government expenditure R2.67 trillion for 2026/27. The 0.02% TIA-grant-to-total-budget comparison is calculated by Co.lab from this figure and source 2. 7. The Presidency, Operation Vulindlela progress reporting, roughly R500 billion in private investment unlocked to date, 2026. 8. National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) / Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, 2024 Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators Report: domestic patents granted, gross R&D expenditure as a share of GDP, and the Kenya comparison. 9. SIPRI Military Expenditure Database and World Bank military expenditure indicator (series MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS): South African defence spending as a share of GDP, mid-1960s to late 1980s.}

I read the paper this week and haven’t stopped thinking about it, because it lands directly on a bet I make for a living: who to back.

Here’s the setup. A Harvard group built matched puzzles, each with a right answer, where the clues needed to solve them are split across a team so no single person holds them all. Each group gets a leader. The leader’s job is to gather information from the team, manage everyone’s time, and make the final call. That’s most of what leadership actually is, stripped of the theatre.

They ran two versions of the same design. In one, the leader worked with three human teammates. In the other, the leader worked with three AI agents standing in for them. Same structure. Same difficulty. Different followers.

The results held up in both versions, which is the first interesting thing. A good leader (one standard deviation above average) solved 53% of the puzzles. A bad leader (one standard deviation below) solved 10%. More than half of what a team achieved came down to nothing but who was leading it. Not the puzzle. Not the team. The leader.

Then they checked what actually predicts a good leader. Not age. Not gender. Not education. The strongest predictors were fluid intelligence, reading people accurately, and decision-making skill.

Separately, and this is the sharper finding, they found that leaders who rated their own performance accurately contributed more to their teams than leaders who didn’t. Knowing your own level, correctly, is itself a skill that shows up in the outcome.

And who puts their hand up to lead in the first place? The overconfident. Not the accurate. The confident. The paper reproduces this finding twice: willingness to lead correlates with overconfidence, in both the human and the AI version of the test.

Sit with that for a second. In our market we call the willingness to lead conviction. We back the founder who sounds certain, holds the room, tells the best story. And historically we’ve had a decent excuse for pricing that story so highly: measuring the alternative meant a lab, a trained research team, and a week of coordinating everyone’s schedules.

That excuse just got expensive to defend. The AI version of this test cost $23 to run and needed no scheduling at all. The human version cost $114 per person and needed two researchers coordinating a room full of people at the same time. A method that used to require a university lab now runs on a laptop.

We have been pricing conviction like it’s rare. It just got cheap to check whether it’s earned.

Before you stake the next round, the next hire or the next board seat on someone’s certainty, what’s actually stopping you from testing whether it’s calibrated?

If this kind of work interests you, writes about it directly, along with AI, labour markets and the future of work, on his Substack, Forked Lightning (forklightning.substack.com).

Worth a subscribe.

1. Two Maps of the same continent

Two maps top and bottom. The top West/East map is about connecting resource zones to ports for export. Its primary goal is blunt: get resources to ports faster. Twelve corridors, each tagged to a resource - minerals, oil and gas, timber, agriculture and each pointed at a coast.

The bottom African map is about connecting people, markets & industries across Africa. Its primary goal: connect countries and building industries. Eight corridors, each tagged to a verb - integration, industrialisation, agri-processing, jobs and skills, innovation. The lines run inland and across borders, not out to sea.

Same geography. Opposite optimisation. One map is built to move raw material out. The other is built to add value before it leaves. That single difference is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and is measurable.

2. The Delta, Defined

“Delta value extraction” is the gap between what a region earns shipping a raw resource out and what it would earn moving up the value chain before exporting. The cleanest illustration on Earth sits inside these maps.

That number - UN Economic Commission for Africa, on a BloombergNEF study - is the whole argument in two line. It is captured downstream: refining in China, cells in Asia and Europe, packs and cars in Germany, China, Texas, and Detroit. Africa keeps the mining margin, which is small. The world keeps the processing and manufacturing margin, which is enormous.

The global battery-precursor segment is worth about $271 billion. The combined cell-production and assembly segments above it are worth about $1.4 trillion. Africa is anchored to the bottom rung of a five-times-taller ladder. Cobalt also prevent corrosion in jet engines and space systems.

And here is the part that breaks the usual excuse. A 10,000-tonne battery-precursor plant costs about $39 million to build in the DRC. Three times cheaper than the same plant in the United States and below China ($112m) and Poland ($65m). Raw materials are 85% of a precursor plant’s running cost and the DRC already has the raw materials and the hydropower. The delta is not a resource problem. It is a logistics infrastructure problem.

3. The Extraction Model - Lobito

The flagship of the EU/US map is the Lobito Corridor: a 1,300km railway from the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola into the cobalt and copper of the DRC and Zambia. Backers have committed over $6 billion, with the total bill expected to pass $10 billion. The EU put in an initial €116 million through Global Gateway and is mobilising more than €2 billion in total; the US development finance arm has signed loan packages of $553m and $753m.

The motivation is stated, not hidden. Secure critical minerals for the energy transition and defence, and route them to the West without passing through a Chinese-controlled logistics node. China owns or holds a stake in 15 of the DRC’s 19 cobalt mines. It is a supply-security play first and a development project second. The map’s own caption says so: Get critical resources to ports faster.

The ledger for Africa:

To its credit, the EU’s own Lobito programme now lists “critical raw materials with value-addition rather than pure extraction” among its aims. Whether the steel that gets laid serves it is the open question.

4. The Integration Model - AfCFTA

The bottom Africa map is the physical representation of the African Continental Free Trade Area - the largest free-trade area on Earth by membership, 54 countries, 1.3 billion people. The World Bank’s 2020 modelling is the anchor: full implementation could lift regional income by $450 billion (7%) by 2035, raise it as high as $571 billion under deep integration and pull 30 million people out of extreme poverty.

The composition is the point. Intra-African trade is only about 15% of the continent’s total - against 67% inside Europe and 59% inside Asia. But the trade that does happen between African countries is roughly 45% manufactured goods, while Africa’s trade with the rest of the world is 80–90% raw commodities. Africans sell each other finished things. They sell the world rocks.

That is why the integration map matters for the delta. A regional market is the demand that makes value-addition bankable. You do not build a battery-precursor plant for an export queue. You build it for a market.

The ledger for Africa:

5. The Ledger, Side by Side

6. The Verdict

These are not rival maps. They are the same steel asking a different question. A rail line into the Copperbelt can carry raw ore to a ship or feed a precursor plant on the way. The track does not care. The policy around it does.

The extraction map is real, funded and moving. The integration map is mostly modelled and stalled - $292 billion of its prize is locked behind customs reform that has not happened.

So the honest read is not “extraction bad, integration good.” It is this: the capital is being deployed on the extraction logic and the delta is being defined by whoever pours the concrete first.

The prize is not the cobalt. The prize is 97%. Whoever owns the delta wins. Right now that is not Africa - and the corridor you choose to build is the clearest signal of whether that changes.

Bottom line. Build to move rocks and you sell the world a discount and you enrich a few for a few years but enslave your kids, grandkids and great-grand kids for another century.

If you build to move markets and you keep the margin and lay the economic foundation for a positive long-term future. Like most things in African history, the map is the strategy.

On the Numbers

Two distinctions worth keeping clean. The 70% / 3% cobalt figure is widely cited and traces to a 2021 UN ECA / BloombergNEF framing - directionally solid, but a single lineage, so treat “3%” as an order of magnitude, not a decimal.

The $450 billion AfCFTA figure is a modelled projection contingent on full implementation (World Bank, 2020), not a recorded outcome - the real-world number depends entirely on execution. Everything else here is drawn from named institutional sources below.

The Update (6 June 2026)

Guinea’s President Mamady Doumbouya. As the leader of the world’s top producer and holder of the largest bauxite reserves (estimated at 7.4 billion tons). Guinea supplies 74% of China’s imported ore. His administration is aggressively enforcing policies to ensure the country retains more value from its mineral wealth. Bauxite is the primary ore for aluminium.

Key aspects of the bauxite sector under Doumbouya’s administration include:

• Refining Mandates: The government requires foreign mining companies to submit proposals to build domestic refineries. Doumbouya has also ordered these firms to process the resources locally and share revenues with the country.

• Permit Cancellations: The administration has canceled over 50 mining permits for companies that fail to comply with the country’s revised mining code, tightening control over the sector.

• Sector Growth: Driven largely by major operations, Guinea’s bauxite output has seen a significant surge, including a 25% jump in production during the first quarter of the year.

Your move Kinshasa, Lusaka, Luanda & Pretoria?

P.S. I will be writing and publishing more of these ‘Green Papers’ please share by replying or adding a comment what you liked about this and/or what industry or market you would like to read more about.

Good Health,

Will

Sources

1. World Bank, The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects (2020). $450bn / 7%, intra-African exports +81%, 30m out of poverty, $292bn from trade facilitation.

2. UN Economic Commission for Africa & BloombergNEF, Producing Battery Materials in the DRC (2021). 70% of cobalt / 3% of value chain; $39m precursor plant; $271bn and $1.4tn value-chain segments.

3. Atlantic Council, What to know about the Lobito Corridor (2024). Investment scale, China’s 15 of 19 cobalt mines, route detail.

4. European Commission, Lobito Corridor: building the future together. €2bn+ mobilisation; transit time; “value-addition rather than pure extraction.”

5. OECD, Background Note - The Lobito Corridor (2025). >$10bn estimate; beneficiation case; precursor-plant cost comparison.

6. UNCTAD, Facts & Figures / Economic Development in Africa Report. Intra-African trade ~15% vs Europe 67% / Asia 59%; commodity dependence.

7. LSE, Understanding African trade (Prof. David Luke). Manufactures ~45% of intra-African trade; 80% commodities to the rest of the world.

8. ECFR (2025) and Al Jazeera (2026) on Lobito financing under the current US administration: $553m and $753m DFC packages.

The full 1994 → 2044 leaderboard, colour-coded by sector.

What does it tell you when the most valuable company on Earth wasn’t on your list at all?

In November 2019 I built a forecast. The biggest companies in the world in 1994, in 2019, and my call for 2044. I tracked the migration - fossil fuels out, technology and digital in - and I put my neck out on names. This past weekend I updated it with live numbers. June 22 2026. The halfway bell.

Some of it I called. Most of the value went somewhere I never looked.

What I got right

I put “Elon Inc - SpaceX / Tesla / Hyperloop / Boring” at number two for 2044. On June 12 this year SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq at a $1.77 trillion valuation, closed its first day up 19% and sits at $2.44 trillion today. Add Tesla’s $1.5 trillion and Musk’s empire is already a ~$3.9 trillion entity - roughly where I parked it for 2044, eighteen years early. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta - all still at the top, exactly as listed. I was right about the faces.

What I got completely wrong

Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world today, at roughly $5.1 trillion. It does not appear anywhere on my 2019 list. Not at fifteen. Not as a maybe. The company that won the decade I was forecasting was invisible to me - because the thing that made it win, the generative-AI build-out, hadn’t happened yet.

That’s not a flaw in the forecast. That’s the lesson of every forecast.

The pattern I missed is the whole story

Read the June 2026 top fifteen top to bottom and it clicks. Nvidia sells the GPUs. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are the hyperscalers buying them. SpaceX now ships compute, robotics and Grok. TSMC is the only fab that can make the chips. Broadcom does the custom silicon and the networking. Aramco sells the energy the data centres burn. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make the memory the GPUs can’t run without.

Sit with that. The value didn’t go to the visionaries at the top of the stack. It went to whoever owned the one layer everyone else had to pay through. Nvidia doesn’t sell AI. It sells the toll booth on the only road to AI. So does TSMC. So, increasingly, does whoever controls the electricity.

Why the US, why tech

Three things compounding.

Software and now models have a marginal cost near zero - the same to serve one customer or a billion - and network effects mean the gap between first and fourth widens over time, it doesn’t close.

The toll road itself, Nvidia’s chip-and-software stack, is American. The chips are fabbed in Taiwan, the memory in Korea, but the margin pools in California.

And the US has the deepest capital markets on the planet. SpaceX raised the thick end of $80 billion in a single offering, for a company that made $18.7 billion last year and lost $4.2 billion at the operating line - a price one IPO veteran said zero math justifies. Capital is itself a moat. America has the most of it. When four hyperscalers commit around $650 billion of capex in a single year, that isn’t a market. It’s industrial policy run by five private firms.

What this means for everyone else

Honest first. My 2019 forecast had “Africa / India / EM,” “China Inc” and “Asia Inc” pencilled into the 2044 top ten. The June 2026 board has zero African names, zero Indian names and - the striking one - zero mainland Chinese names. Alibaba and Tencent, which I had at seven and eight, have fallen clean off. The concentration didn’t just hold. It intensified and it localised. The toll roads are being built in three or four countries. Everyone else rents access.

Now the useful part. You are not competing with Nvidia. No owner-operator is. The mistake is reading this board as “you’ve already lost.” The toll-booth logic that built Nvidia runs inside every vertical and every regional market. The bottleneck in your industry - the one layer your competitors and your customers all have to pass through - is your Nvidia. You don’t need the global compute layer. You need the chokepoint in your patch.

And here’s the asymmetry nobody had ten years ago. The same models the hyperscalers are spending $650 billion to train cost you a subscription. A fifty-year-old owner-operator now runs with the leverage of a company ten times the size, minus the headcount. The gap between you and the giants has never been smaller. The window is open now.

The two founder lessons:

1. Value creation - build the toll booth, not the destination.

Destinations are winner-take-all and you probably won’t win them. Toll booths - the boring, indispensable, high-margin layer everyone routes through - compound quietly and get acquired. Ask the one question that matters: what in my business can my market not work around? Own that.

2. Liquidity - the exit itself has changed, and SpaceX is the proof.

For twenty years the IPO was how you raised money. SpaceX flipped it: it stayed private to $1.7 trillion and used the listing as a liquidity event, not a fundraise. Alphabet has held about 4.9% of SpaceX for years, a stake now worth roughly $105 billion, and still can’t simply sell it - lockups, liquidity limits, a tax hit. Liquidity is no longer one event you wait two decades for. It’s a sequence you design: secondaries, partial sales, structured exits. Built to exit. Designed to win - but design the liquidity. Don’t just pray for the IPO.

My revised 2044 call

Three bets.

1. The constraint moves from chips to energy.

Aramco at nine is the canary. By 2044 the most valuable company may be whoever bundles power and compute - a hyperscaler that went vertical into generation, or a power company that happens to compute.

2. Nvidia gets disintermediated by its own customers.

The hyperscalers are already designing their own silicon, which is half of why Broadcom is at eight. The toll collector always gets routed around by the people paying the most tolls. Still top five in 2044, probably. Not number one.

3. The list will contain a company that barely exists today

The way Nvidia was invisible in 2019. OpenAI and Anthropic are both racing to go public as I write this. One likely makes the top ten. But the real winner of 2044 is probably a name neither of us could write down right now.

I’ve put the full 1994 → 2044 board - colour-coded by sector, so you can watch the migration happen - at the top of this piece. Look at your own industry’s version of it. Then tell me: in your market, who owns the toll booth - and is it you?

Good Health,

Will

*If you would like to be updated in 2044 about the outcomes of this forecast, Please subscribe & connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/willgreen :)

This is the fourth edition of a series that began as a simple idea: that the most important conversations in African venture capital were not happening on conference stages or in published reports. They were happening in a WhatsApp group at seven in the morning, between a fund manager in Nairobi and a development financier in Amsterdam. They still are.

The source of this analysis is the Africa Investor Group, a living and breathing braintrust of 681 key ecosystem players: limited partners, venture capitalists, angel investors, development financiers, ecosystem builders, founders and reform-minded technocrats. Spanning every continent, this community operates with one aligned mission - to fund, scale and shape the future of African enterprise.

What follows is not a traditional book. It is a mosaic of conversations, carefully curated and respectfully quoted. It serves as a barometer of the investment climate and a collective intelligence snapshot of how the room thinks, argues and ultimately converges on conviction.

The central theme of this edition is discipline: discipline in capital allocation, in governance, in the language of the room itself. The most-used word among 681 members, after the ever-present “africa,” is not “unicorn” or “raise” or “exit.” It is “capital.” The room has become what it always aspired to be - a forum not of dreamers but of allocators.​

Whether you are a new entrant into the African innovation space or a seasoned operator, this edition will serve as your compass for where the conversation is heading and why it matters that you are part of it.

“This community is investment infrastructure for venture capital in Africa.

This book is the collective ‘hymn sheet’ from which we all sing from.”

Download a free copy of the book here: https://www.bit.ly/AfricasCC4

Good Health,

Will Green

Cape Town, June 2026

P.S. If you would like to book a deep-dive on the African Innovation or Investment ecosystem you can reach out to me and my team here:

https://www.bit.ly/m/willgreenwork

I know how busy inboxes are these days and it’s a privilege to be in yours.

I promise to be quick and give you something of value.

Good Health,

Will

P.S Please fwd this onto 1 business owner friend that will find value in it too.

Please reply with any feedback to this new newsletter format.

All links mentioned in the video below

Your Company Exit Score: https://will-lasvudl7.scoreapp.com

1. Plan your Exit; Live your Legacy LinkedIn Video: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7342842513973469184

2. Book a Meeting: https://bit.ly/m/willgreenwork

In every economy, every market, every ecosystem, there’s a currency underneath the currency.

Trust.

People define it differently:

When trust is high, people move faster. They sign quicker. They introduce you without fear. They forgive small mistakes. They take your call.

When trust is low, everything slows down. More meetings. More paperwork. More “just checking in”. More doubt. More defensive behaviour. More hidden costs.

That’s the thing most people miss.

Low trust isn’t just a feeling, it’s a tax.

And high trust isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a speed multiplier.

You can see this at every level.

• In countries: stability and certainty attract investment.

• In companies: strong internal trust reduces politics and friction.

• In deal flow: trusted people get the first look, the best intros, the benefit of the doubt.

This is why trust matters more than ever right now. Institutional trust is fragile globally and people are pulling into smaller circles of “known and safe”. That makes personal trust and reputation even more valuable.

Trust is intangible but it compounds

Trust is intangible, like happiness or success.

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

But unlike happiness or success which oscillate, trust tends to compound.

It compounds through consistency. The boring stuff.

• Do you show up, no matter the circumstance?

• Do you do what you said you would do, on the day you said you would do it?

• Do you follow through when there’s nothing to gain immediately?

That’s why trust has a compounding curve. Every kept promise is a deposit. Every missed promise is a withdrawal.

Over time people don’t remember your intentions. They remember your pattern.

The uncomfortable truth: Trust starts with self-trust

Most people talk about trust like it lives “out there” with other people.

I think it starts closer to home.

Trust is also about whether you can depend on yourself.

• What promises have you made to yourself and honoured?

• What have you broken, why did you break it and what did you change for next time?

Because business trust is fragile when personal standards are negotiable.

When no-one is watching you, who do you represent and don’t want to disappoint?

Your kids. Your team. Your future self. Your family name. Your community. Your God. Your Ego. Your own standards.

That’s the real baseline.

Trust under pressure is the only trust that counts

Trust is easy in peacetime. It’s expensive in wartime.

The environments that expose this best are extreme ones. Fire services. Emergency response. Combat units. Places where you don’t get to pretend.

When the wind changes and the fire turns, what happens?

You don’t rise to the occasion. You default to your training.

That is why “trust” is identity under pressure. The version of you that shows up when it would be easier to disappear.

Two-part trust test

If you want to measure trust in any relationship, business or personal, look at two things:

1. Reliability: Do they do what they said they would do?

2. Friction response: What happens when something goes wrong?

Anyone can look good when things are easy. Trust shows itself when the wind changes.

My takeaway

Trust is not a feeling. It is a track record.

When trust goes up, speed goes up and costs go down.

When trust goes down, speed goes down and costs go up.

That’s not motivational fluff. It’s how ecosystems actually function.

I’m building a trust engine every week.

Join me.

Will

www.linkedin.com/in/willgreen

P.S. If this resonates and you want to connect, let’s chat.

People I’m currently engaging with are:

1. 20+ years industry experts with big problems worth solving (have $20k+ annual R&D, tech, marketing budget to co-invest)

2. Private company owners curious about valuations, M&A, exit/continuity planning (have time and $2k+ to invest in this process)

3. Startup founders looking for experienced advisory board members (have a small advisory budget and/or ESOP)

4. Strategic partners, buyers or investors with a proven win-win model to discuss

Otherwise follow and connect with me here and on LinkedIn.

Some ‘Trusted’ Sources for the research of this post (😜):

https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer

https://www.iidmglobal.com/elearning/business-book-summary/id132043-the-speed-of-trust.html

“Life is lived forward but understood backward.” A Swahili Proverb

8 things that I reflect on from 2025 that I will carry forward with me into 2026.

1. A Ritual, Not a Community

I didn’t build a network. I built a repeated behaviour.

A fixed cadence. A physical constraint. A shared cost (time, effort, discomfort).

That turned strangers into peers and peers into trusted collaborators.

Evergreen principle:

Rituals create trust faster than platforms.

2. Trust That Survives My Absence

At the moment the community continued without me, it crossed a line.

That’s the real test:

• Does it require my energy?

• Or does it carry its own momentum?

Evergreen principle:

If it works without you, it works.

3. Diagnosis Over Motivation

The work that consistently mattered wasn’t inspirational.

It was diagnostic.

Naming the real problems founders and owners avoid:

• deciding alone

• weak marketing and sales systems

• no continuity planning

• no strategy

• misaligned advisors, partners and staff

• undocumented IP

• energy leaks

• lack of clear counsel and consistent accountability

This content also doesn’t chase attention. It attracts people already in motion.

Evergreen principle:

Serious builders don’t need motivation. They need mirrors.

4. Independent Sounding Board Positioning

I consistently rejected:

• cheerleading

• performative optimism

• generic advice

And leaned into:

• pattern recognition

• uncomfortable truths (with a well timed and curated question)

• long-term consequence thinking (hard when you are chasing monthly cashflows)

Evergreen principle:

The most valuable advice is often the least comforting.

5. Energy as the True Currency

What compounded fastest wasn’t time or money.

It was energy.

• Consistency beat intensity.

• Small costs beat big budgets.

• Reliability beat charisma.

• Put a ‘stake’ in ‘energy vampires’.

• Like attracts like, curate your community.

Evergreen principle:

Energy compounds when protected.

6. Storytelling as Infrastructure

Origin Stories wasn’t content.

It was a container.

A place where:

• context mattered

• humility mattered

• beginnings mattered

• resilience shared mattered

It proved that stories, when hosted properly, can become platforms.

Evergreen principle:

Culture scales through containers, not commentary.

7. Adjacency Without Dependence

I stayed close to institutions (accelerators, investors, ecosystems) without being absorbed by them.

Supportive.

Independent.

Conscious of Fair-value shared

Evergreen principle:

Proximity creates leverage only if independence and respect is preserved.

8. Long-Horizon Thinking

Exit thinking wasn’t framed as success.

It was framed as transition.

What happens after liquidity matters more than the event itself.

It’s not the end of the book, when one chapter ends another begins.

Evergreen principle:

The real game starts after the win.

What I Intentionally Did Not Optimise

This is as important as what I built.

• I did not optimise for reach or virality.

• I did not over-systemise trust.

• I did not scale before meaning was clear.

Evergreen principle:

Not everything that grows should scale.

My Filters

I say yes to:

• consistency

• trust-first systems

• long games

• people who show up early and often

I say no to:

• performative urgency

• hollow growth

• energy drains

• hype without receipts

The ‘Golden (Green)’ Question

“If everything disappeared tomorrow would you continue to build what you are building?”

That’s the test.

Evergreen truth:

Build what you’d rebuild again.

Finally, it’s much more fun (and better) building together than alone.

To all my current and future partners, I looking forward to the fun, value and energy we will create together in 2026.

Onwards & Upwards, Together!

Have an awesome 2026 wherever you are reading this.

Good Health,

Will *Et al

*Et al. is an abbreviation for the Latin phrase “et alia,” which translates to “and others.” It is commonly used in academic writing to avoid listing the names of all the authors of a work with three or more authors. Any piece of writing that I publish with the assistance of an AI tool carries this acknowledgement ‘Et al.’ All these thoughts and inputs are my own, I just needed a bit of help with the output especially with structure and brevity :)

If you would like to work with Will & his team please explore this link: https://www.bit.ly/m/willgreenwork

When you look closely nature is the original intelligence system.

3.8 billion years of trial and error, experiments, collapses and comebacks. Nature already solved most of the puzzles we think AI is cracking for the first time.

What are eight things humans can learn from nature when it comes to AI?

Thoughts shared by an academic Zoologist and career Technology Entrepreneur and Angel Investor ‘dabbling’ in AI.

1. Diversity wins, Monoculture dies.

A coral reef survives because it’s messy; fish, sponges, weeds, predators all tangled up. Take away that mess and it bleaches into nothing.

AI built as a single model, a single owner, a single perspective? That’s brittle. Monocultures always snap.

2. Energy matters more than bragging rights

A hummingbird’s brain runs on crumbs of sugar water, yet it threads through storms like a fighter jet.

Our AIs burn through megawatts just to spit out a half-decent analysts research.

Nature shows the real flex is efficiency, not brute force.

3. Cooperation > Domination

Bees and flowers didn’t sign contracts but they figured out win-win-wins. Same with fungi and trees underground and for the 100 trillion healthy microbiome bacteria in your gut and on your skin.

If we build AI to “take over” we’ve missed the point. The future is symbiosis: machines amplify, humans steer. Otherwise, it’s just empire-building with silicon and a handful of trillionaires (ChatGPT: “What’s a collective noun of Trillionaire?” 😜 My case in point.)

4. Growth without limits = Cancer

Nature already has a word for unchecked expansion. The Big ‘C’, Cancer.

When one system gobbles everything for itself the whole organism dies. Same with companies racing to scale AI “bigger and faster than anyone else.” That’s not strategy that’s unsustainable sickness.

5. Learning is local, not central

Ants don’t crown a king to plan their routes. They solve by doing billions of tiny tests together. Bees dance to share ‘pollen maps’ to fellow hive dwellers. Out of that noise comes order.

AI today is too centralized. One brain in the cloud, controlled by a handful of people. That’s fragile. Distributed, messy, node-by-node learning is how you get emergent resilience. Just ask a hawker on VI bridge in Lagos or a kota food seller outside a primary school before lunch break in Soweto. Innovation in local conditions de-centralised is where the AI signals will be strongest.

6. Death clears the path for renewal

The most biodiverse Cape Floral Kingdom, Fynbos relies on fire to regenerate it. Every ecosystem relies on decay. Mortality keeps systems honest and in check.

AI has no natural death cycle. It hoards, accumulates with memories that never forget. Maybe we need machines that can let go. Or even “die” on purpose.

I don’t think so, the long-term incentives are not aligned on both accords.

Our biggest socioeconomic and geopolitical risk?

7. Context creates Intelligence

A raven’s brilliance makes sense in the sky. A dolphin’s in the sea. Intelligence is never general; it’s always specific and contextual. Nature with Nurture.

AI built without context is like an African Penguin dropped in the Tankwa Karoo desert to attend AfrikaBurn. Smart, but useless and thirsty.

8. The humilty ‘bit’ we keep missing

Every ecologist knows: tug on one string and you’ll find a thousand others attached. Systems are deeper than we grasp.

Anyone promising they’ve “solved AI safety”? Sorry. That’s hubris dressed up as a marketing narrative. The best we can do is monitor, adapt and stay informed.

As soon as you see an ‘AI player’ as an ‘referee’ or worse a ‘rule maker’ get on your keyboard and warrior-away on your socials and share your worry.

Wild lessons from unlikely ‘actors’

Viruses are tiny, invisible, yet they topple empires and shut down world trade and economies. AI’s viruses are adversarial prompts; one weird input and the whole thing collapses.

Mycelium: the underground internet of forests where fungi share info and resources like a giant hidden cloud.

Bird swarms: no CEO bird, no org chart, no flight path or traffic control tower. Just coordination through simple rules. Imagine AI that graceful.

Closing thought

If we’re brave enough to learn from nature, AI might play along with the orchestra instead of drowning it out like a drunk heavy metal drummer.

If not, well; we already know what happens when one species thinks it owns the stage. It ends badly and becomes the new playbook for a James Bond villain.

Mind you all the AI technorati bros have double downed on the PR and charm offence to build their image as the hero.

Public Hero or Bond Villian?

You be the judge.

Will et al

P.S. What is your companies biggest problem worth solving with or without AI?

https://www.linkedin.com/m/willgreen

In the relentless world of entrepreneurship, time and energy are the most precious currencies.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve learned first-hand to fiercely protect both. The concept that has guided me is what I call the “fair value exchange,” a principle introduced to me many years ago by my ‘Silver Fox’ mentor, Paul Hartnady. He explained that every social contract, every coffee, every meeting - carries an implicit exchange of value. The challenge is to ensure that the investment you make yields a meaningful return.

The Hidden Cost of Coffee Meetings

Consider the ubiquitous coffee meeting. On the surface it’s a simple gesture: a chance to connect, catch up or explore opportunities.

But for entrepreneurs each invitation demands a careful calculation.

• How long will it take to get there?

• Is there genuine alignment or is it just a social nicety?

• Will this meeting move the needle for my business or personal growth forward?

The key for any entrepreneur is to be very clear about your goals and how you will measure and account for your investment in time and energy in people.

The reality is that every “yes” comes at the expense of something else, the focused time needed to build your business.

Learning to say “no” is not just a productivity hack; it’s a survival skill.

Calendar Ping Pong and Decision Fatigue

My aversion to traffic and what I call “calendar ping pong” the endless back-and-forth of scheduling only sharpened this perspective.

This involves aligning two people's different calendars and expectations, and then arranging transport to a convenient coffee shop.

This negotiation can drain decision-making energy before the meeting even begins.

The process is exhausting and the return is often questionable.

Reinventing the Meeting: Will Green Walks

This frustration led me to create Will Green Walks, a weekly ritual that reimagines the networking meeting.

Every Friday, from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. I dedicate five hours to meeting new people, not in a coffee shop but on the mountain.

Here’s the equation: it takes me half an hour to reach the mountain, another half hour to prepare by reviewing the backgrounds of those I’ll meet (thanks to a simple form they fill out), then an hour and a half of walking and talking, followed by a coffee, an hour to shower and then prep for my next meeting. The out-of-pocket cost, coffee for the guests I host, rusks, petrol —averages about $2 per person, roughly the price of a Cape Town coffee.

Attendance varies: in winter, 7 to 12 people join; in summer, anywhere up to 80 people meet me weekly.

The return on investment? Immense. I meet a diverse array of people I’d never otherwise connect with and the quality of conversation are unhurried, energised by movement and nature—far surpasses that of a typical coffee meeting.

In fact, I estimate each walk delivers the value of five traditional coffee meetings, a fivefold return on my investment of time and energy in the fair value exchange.

Scaling Value in the Age of AI

This approach to fair value exchange isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about scaling impact. As a solopreneur, I used to weigh every travel and entertainment expense against the opportunity cost of not building my business.

Today, the advent of media platforms and technology, along with people, empower busy entrepreneurs to scale smarter, not harder.

Specifically now, in the era of agentic and generative AI, we’re on the cusp of a world where ten-person teams can build $100 billion valued companies, which will be commonplace in the future.

An Invitation to Innovate

After 113 walk-and-talk conversations with over 800 people, over the past two years, I’ve seen firsthand how rethinking the value exchange can transform not just networking, but the very fabric of entrepreneurial life.

I’m eager to hear from others: What are your examples of this fair value exchange in your business? How have you reimagined the way you invest your time and energy for maximum impact?

As I look forward to building the next $100 million startup with the people I meet on the mountain weekly, I invite you to share your stories and strategies for the benefit of myself, my community, and those who also read this article. 🙏

Will

I have been asked by a few people to share some advice on creating a company worth exiting. I was challenged by my friend Paul to convert this wisdom into a live event on LinkedIn. (Thanks Paul!)

Below is my first Live Event converted to a podcast and the recorded event from LinkedIn.

If you have 30 minutes (15 minutes on 2x speed), worth a watch/listen on LinkedIn or Spotify.

Let me know in the comment if I should record an Exit Series?

https://www.linkedin.com/events/planyourexit-liveyourlegacy7342842513973469184/comments/

In this video I share some actionable advice for exit planning for entrepreneurs.

The importance of having an exit-focused mindset, understanding the various types of exits and preparing for due diligence.

Some practical step including building a strong exit team and the significance of having clean financials, legals and IP.

Finally I talk about 'life after an exit' and the role of exited entrepreneurs in fostering a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Takeaways

• Entrepreneurs often work in their business, not on it.

• Having an exit-focused mindset increases the likelihood of a successful exit.

• Reverse engineering your exit strategy can de-risk your business.

• Clean financials are crucial for a successful exit.

• Exit advisors can significantly increase the value of your exit.

• A clean cap table is essential for attracting acquirers.

• Acquirers are interested in innovation and strategic fit, not just revenue.

• Preparing for due diligence should start well in advance of an exit.

• Life after an exit can lead to new opportunities in entrepreneurship.

• Building a strong network of advisors is key to a successful exit.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Exit Planning

04:34 The Importance of Mindset in Exits

06:38 Building to Exit: Strategies and Scenarios

12:28 Understanding Exit Types and Their Implications

18:43 Valuation Insights and Factors Influencing Exits

22:01 Common Pitfalls in Exits and How to Avoid Them

25:45 The Role of Advisors in Successful Exits

28:39 Life After the Exit and Future Opportunities

Fearless Girl Statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street.

Photo by Anthony Quintano

I’ve been very curious about the impact AI will have on current and future careers and ventures and also how incumbent corporates can participate better in the innovation economy which is progressing at a breakneck speed. This article is the result of this exploration.

Enjoy!

Will

Corporate Exits & Career Entries

Building Shareholder Value & the Workforce of the Future

At its core, a public company’s trajectory is dictated by its share price. This price, however, is less a reflection of past performance than it is a bet on a future story. The narrative that captivates the investment community the analysts, the funds, the market-makers is one of relentless innovation. This story is told through announcements of new products, market expansions, and strategic acquisitions that signal a robust R&D pipeline of innovation, new products and new improvements that keep current with the latest trends.

Companies can build this pipeline organically through internal R&D and corporate innovation, or they can buy it. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) offer a powerful shortcut, allowing a corporate giant to acquire nimble innovators in specific niches that benefit the product or the business that is public, instantly integrating new technology, intellectual property, and market share.

The calculus for a successful acquisition is brutally simple: the subsequent increase in the acquirer’s market capitalization must vastly outweigh the price paid for the target company. Considering Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion, MSFT shares gained $150 billion, a 20x return on investment!

For private companies and startups the lesson is clear. The ultimate goal is to achieve maximum shareholder increase in the least amount of time, with venture capital and private equity funds chasing a net annual internal rate of return (IRR), after fees, of over +40%. The most direct path to this outcome is to build the very thing a public company needs to fuel its narrative. The strategy is not just to build a great product, but to build a company that is an irresistible acquisition target, effectively back-engineering your success by solving a strategic problem for a future buyer.

The Human Capital Crisis: AI and the Looming Skills Chasm

While boardrooms strategize over market share, a tectonic shift is occurring in the labor market. In the US, where current unemployment stands at 3%, the CEO of AI research company Anthropic forecasts a potential unemployment rate of 20% due to AI and forecasted job destruction. This projected job destruction is creating unprecedented anxiety for parents contemplating their children's futures.

The traditional education system is dangerously unprepared for this new reality. It remains geared towards favoring more traditional professional career types, with curricula that move at a glacial pace, unable to keep up with the rate of change.

Meanwhile, the most valuable new skills such as prompt engineering are being learned faster and more effectively on platforms like YouTube and through hands-on experimentation.

This creates a profound mismatch. The demand for structured intern programs, job shadowing, apprenticeships and entry-level employment will be in more demand than supply. How do we bridge this chasm between an obsolete educational model and the urgent needs of the future economy?

The Catalyst: A Privately Funded Revolution in Education and Innovation

The answer lies at the intersection of these two challenges. The future belongs to a new, privately funded model of apprenticeship that merges education with venture creation.

Imagine a system where successful entrepreneurs and investors channel their capital and wisdom into creating structured innovation programs. In this model, young, ambitious individuals don't just learn; they build. They become part of a venture studio, working alongside seasoned mentors to develop and launch new businesses from the ground up.

Consider the model shared by Julien Uhlig from Ex Venture Academy: while he charges clients $400 an hour for his expertise but venture academy associates learn from him for virtually free. The catch? They are practically building real businesses while they do that, applying their lessons in real-time. This completely de-risks the innovation cycle.

This symbiotic ecosystem offers a powerful solution for all parties:

1. For Venture Builders: They gain access (and energy) to a pipeline of smart, energetic, and cost-effective young talent at a lower cost than traditional employment. This human capital becomes their R&D engine, stress-testing ideas and building the very products that will become the attractive M&A targets discussed earlier. It is a strategic calculation of input costs versus potential revenue and a massive exit.

2. For Young Apprentices: They bypass the theoretical confines of traditional education and gain priceless, real-world experience (and wisdom). They are not just preparing for the future job market; they are actively building it, developing a portfolio of skills and accomplishments that makes them immediately valuable.

I believe this is the ultimate structure for the next decade. On one side, entrepreneurs must build with an exit in mind, creating disruptive innovations that incumbents must acquire to stay relevant (and boost their share prices). On the other, we must build a new talent pipeline, an artisan system for the digital age, that equips the next generation with the skills to thrive.

The question is no longer whether you will be disrupted by these forces, but how you will participate. Will you build the company that gets acquired or will you build the talent that builds the future? The most visionary will find a way to do both.

Will Green

www.bit.ly/m/willgreen

I don’t know about you but the last 5-months of the year has felt like 5-years.

There has been so much distracting noise that it’s hard to focus on what’s important, real and what’s not.

Just to be upfront, the goal of this newsletter and future ramblings are a ‘personal review’ of what I’ve seen to try make sense of it all.

In the process this may help you filter the signals from the noise. Just remember that you are not alone on this journey.

1. Under Your Control

You only control 3 things: Thoughts, Actions, Attitude.

With all the media noise in countries far from your own. I’m constantly reminded of the Stoic philosophy Dichotomy of Control.

“Some things are up to us, and some things are not.” – Epictetus

Only focus on what you have control of. Ignore everything else.

2. AI as your Assistant (not your co-founder)

We have seen this movie before, a $20 monthly subscription for $200-1,000 enterprise value today. Habits are being formed, be careful not to outsource your brain or business fully to your favourite GenAI company. Life and business happens in cycles. Be aware of your unique skills and abilities. While these tools are today cheap to build, ship like a mad-person!

3. AI as your Coach

I love how the memory of these GenAI tools (I’ve got a ChatGPT premium sub) can provide self-awareness and highlight blindspots so you can focus on these and improve on them.

A 5-month prompt:

“Based on all my used of ChatGPT over the past 5-months. If you were to suggest where my interests and blindspots lie, what would you conclude under these categories? 1. Financially. 2. Professionally. 3. Vocationally. 4. Intellectually. 5. Generally”

Enjoy the output!

4. Your Southern Cross / Northern Star (For my Global North friends)

Being aware of your ‘Purpose’ and ‘Values’ is so important in this AI, ‘hype cycle, doom scrolling’ world.

Japanese wisdom I have found to be incredibly valuable to simplify things.

I regularly check in with my ‘Ikigai’ and schedule ‘Misogi’.

Ikigai (生き甲斐) Japanese noun meaning “a reason for being.”

It’s the intersection of: What you love, What the world needs, What you can be paid for, What you are good at.

Mine is currently:

Misogi (禊) Shinto purification ritual.

In its traditional form: A spiritual cleansing practice using cold water (like standing under waterfalls or ocean immersion).

In its modern version: A mental/physical challenge you do once a year that scares, It must have a real risk of failure.

The goal: redefine your limits, flush ego, and return to life stronger and more alive.

Ikigai = Daily soul compass.

Misogi = Yearly ego rinse.

Here is a Misogi challenge I created for myself and others who want to challenge themselves: Stoic Misogi Challange

5. Annual / Monthly / Weekly Reviews

To stay ‘on track’, it’s so important to set goals and review them.

Here are the tools that I use for this purpose.

• Annual: Year Compass

An annual exercise and free tool/framework to review and plan your years. No better time than now if you haven’t :)

• Mid-Year: 1st Half & 2nd Half (from Phil Libin, founder Evernote, All Turtles)

Divide your year in 2 halves like a sports event, with a break in-between each in Dec/Jan, June/July. Define what you want to achieve professional and create an A-team around you to achieve these goals. If the A-team helped you achieve the goals, invite them back for the 2nd half.

• Monthly: Personal Board Meetings (from Grant Webster, thanks Grant!)

Conduct monthly board meeting for yourself. This is to keep you accountable and review what went well, what could be improved and changes to take into the next month. If possible have an accountability partner / Coach to review this with.

• Weekly: Walk & Talks (WGW)

Weekly walk in nature with yourself or a group to review the week that was and plan for the upcoming week.

In Cape Town, on Strava or interested in starting your own Founder Walk in your city join us!

However do allow for unstructured play and serendipity. I’m curious about ‘Engineering Serendipity’, we can chat abut it when we meet. :)

6. The Future of Education (for your children and grandchildren)

With children in school, I’m deeply interested in this topic and I’m sure you will be too?

Here are two resources to review and share if you find valuable, Top 100 Ted talks are such a great cultural artefact and curiosity sparker in young and old alike.

Top 100 TED Talks

I went down ‘An AI researching rabbit whole (AARRW - same noise a pirate makes)

These are the 50 future ready careers, review with a healthy pinch of salt.

50 Future Ready Careers

7. Finally, Work Backwards

A reminder for anyone who is building a business to take stock and ask what the ultimate goal is. Working backwards from this desired outcome is great advice and I’ll looking forward to hosting an Exit webinar on LinkedIn for founders.

If you are interested you can read and like this post, I’ll add the details on it later this week.

Founder Exit Planning

May the next 5 months be as productive, peaceful, healthy, fullfiling and value creating as your last.

Good Health,

Will

P.S. Connect more with me here https://www.bit.ly/m/willgreen

The strongest companies are born in the strongest communities.

Africa’s diversity across people, places, and cultures is not just our identity; it’s our superpower. It’s what gives African innovation the resilience and creativity to shape solutions the world hasn’t yet imagined.

Our greatest challenges are, in fact, our greatest opportunities. If you solve a billion-person problem, and you will build a billion-dollar company.

On 6 April 2023, I took a simple walk up Lion’s Head, Cape Town. I was just avoiding traffic and catching up with a new founder. I didn’t realize it was the first step of a journey that would change how I supported Africa’s entrepreneurial future.

70% of entrepreneurs experience mental health challenges at some point in their journey. Research shows that walking in nature especially alongside others isn’t just good for physical health; it’s profoundly healing for the mind.

What started as a single walk soon became a weekly 5:55am ritual: a way to decompress from the week and to connect over real conversations with other business people. Like building anything: a company, a network, a community it takes intention, time, and consistency.

Some mornings, especially during the Cape winters the weather isn’t perfect and motivation easily falls away. But knowing others will be there and showing up anyway makes all the difference.

A simple weekly habit has become the foundation for building trust, resilience, and real connections. What began with a handful of early adopters has now grown into a community of over 700 people that regularly attracts 40 people per walk.

It’s become a “thing”, a movement of sorts. But it was never about me. It’s always been about the community. The people who walk share a few common traits: curiosity, optimism, and a belief in the power of the collective.

Over the past year, we’ve welcomed a wide mix of entrepreneurs, founders, investors, students, international visitors, digital nomads and even an Uber driver. 

We’ve hosted special walks for the likes of Google for Startups, VC4A, Lekker Network, Unique Summit, Global Startup Awards, as well as angel investor groups, venture capital firms, and their portfolio companies.

Today, no major tech event in Cape Town feels complete without a WGW on Friday 5:55am, a simple tradition that has become part of the city’s entrepreneurial event calendar.

One walk is the equivalent of five coffee meetings with at least 10 people but with more depth and presence. The breadth of topics we’ve explored on the mountain has been extraordinary. The relationships formed along these trails have been just as profound.

I’ve learned as much as I’ve shared from my 25 years experience from building high-growth, scalable companies but also constantly humbled by the wisdom and life stories others share.

One story that stays with me is of a South African herd boy, whose talent for maths sharpened by counting livestock was spotted by a teacher. That chance recognition earned him a scholarship to study in Cape Town, where he qualified as an accountant and later founded a company helping schools better manage their resources. Walking in nature reminds him of those early days tending to his cattle, dreaming under big skies.

Another favourite story is of a couple who had their first ‘date’ on my walk and are now happily together and pregnant living together in Dubai.

The positive stories from the community never cease to amaze me. 

What 100 mountain summits has taught me about the future of entrepreneurship from Africa.

Resilience isn’t something we need to teach, it's already woven into the fabric of daily life here.

From power cuts to the scarcity of growth capital, entrepreneurs learn early that creative problem-solving isn’t a luxury, it's a necessity.

Supportive and safe communities for entrepreneurs to meet face to face to discuss their fears, problems and solutions together is more important in cultures where failure is not celebrated. 

Collaboration beats competition. Every time. The challenges we face create fertile ground for innovation with real socioeconomic impact.

I’ve also learned that “birds of a feather flock together” has little to do with demographics and everything to do with mindset, energy, and attitude.

African business culture is deeply relational. It takes time to build trust far more than in faster-paced transactional markets. But when that trust is earned, it lasts a lifetime and often spans far beyond a single venture.

Time away from technology, surrounded by like-minded people in nature, is absolute gold.

It creates the space for generosity, open-hearted conversations, and the kind of collective energy that builds movements, not just businesses.

Never judge someone by what they wear on the mountain.

You might be walking next to a dollar billionaire or someone on the verge of changing the world in ways you can’t yet imagine but she can.

In the end, it’s not just my story. It’s our story.

Don’t just talk the talk. Walk the walk.

Will

Will Green is a global startup advisor, angel investor, ecosystem builder, and the founder of the global “walk and talk” community, WGW (Will’s Green Walks).

www.bit.ly/m/willgreen

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willgreen_youve-invested-5-6-7-years-of-your-most-activity-7292040915462811648-Mps5

Green Paper: I’ve published these research papers for my clients and curiosity (let me know if you are interested in any of these)

1. Top 50 Most Valuable Companies & Scenarios relating to US Financial and Foreign Policies.

2. Global Technology in Mining - A Market Overview.

3. Global Orthopaedics Market Access.

4. The World's Largest eCommerce Day - China's Single Day (11.11).

5. Africa Innovation Investor - A Continent Overview.

6. African Health Tech Companies.

7. Africa FinTech M&A Opportunities.

8. South African Top 150 Innovations & Top 50 Tech M&A's.

9. Africa Technology Exit Database.

Will Green Walk (WGW) Friday morning Lion’s Head Summits: January 2025

2024 was a year of quantity. 51 summits with over 400+ people. 2025 will be a year of quality. Connecting people in our community and creating real win-win value!

Highlight of January: MIA Team Walk & Sunny summer summits. (A reminder for the wet winter summits).

Participants: 54 +

Number of walks: 3

Companies Signed-up: NSPYRE, Immobazyme, Lifewisemedical, Abby Health, Smollan, Abantu Coaching / Nova - Mentis, Finance Fusion, WizWeb, TKProjects, Material Ventures, Studio Nouveau, Feed Me Seymour, Oribi, CVTS, Cavu, Anything is Possible, KAVVU, Applause.team, CatalyzU, CreatorConnect, DeepLabl.ai, MIA Healthcare Technologies, 54 Collective, UCT, Enygma Ventures, Great North Road, Founders Yard, FROM GARAGE TO GROWTH, NTAVHAVUTISA Pty Ltd, Filics, Lesaka Technologies, Fuel Connect, Alpha Crest Finance, BioCertica, KEE Investments AG, Mindjoy, Toros Jewellery, Growth Media, Three Peaks & Cloud Quote.

Countries Represented: 7 (South Africa, United Kingdom, Brazil, Kenya, Germany, Guatemala, Switzerland).

Who Joined? Startup founders, ecosystem builders, investors, corporate leaders, SMEs, graduates, advisors, podcasters and more.

What’s the Ask?

Invite someone from your network you know would benefit from being part of this community. You can even join them for a walk. The perfect excuse to ‘catchup’ with another ‘A-team’ person you can’t find a day/time to meet with them. Friday @ 5:55AM - 8:30 AM: [www.bit.ly/WillsGreenWalk]

Diarise Thursday 6th March, I have been invited to share ‘The WGW Story’ at The Fugard Theatre at PechaKucha Cape Town event. Each speaker is given 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide to tell their story. There will be 9 other speakers, so it will be an entertaining night out and an opportunity to meet other WGWalkers. I will share ticket links when it has been confirmed.

What’s your Ask? Is there anything that I could assist you and your company with in January? Do let me know.

“A great investment of time. Easy to speak to different people as you walk up as hiking order changes after group regathers. Typically speak in groups of 2 or 3 so everyone is involved in a conversation (not left out of a big group). Doesn’t impact work day in terms of time - get back home before 8:30. And incredibly beautiful and fun!”

Tim, AskYazi.com

“Hiking up Lions Head with Will in the early morning is a superb experience! You start ‘early bird’ at 6am with a small or larger group of fellow hikers, who are committed to making a meaningful contribution through their work. The vibe is relaxed, with easy conversations that make the climb just as enjoyable as the awesome views waiting for you at the top. Will creates a laid-back atmosphere where everyone feels at ease to share and connect. He’s friendly and open-minded and willingly shares his expertise and passions. Getting to the summit while the sun rises over Cape Town is pure magic, with stunning views and a real sense of achievement. Thank you for this unique support structure. It is a gift and Friday treat!” Claire, Maverickaccelerator.com

“Awesome way to meet and get to know the community, tech space & Cape Town. Thank you Will!” Regina, Jersey

Podcast: In the Engine Room (CapitalEngine.io)

Podcast: Fathers & Founders (Will Green)

Spotify:

Apple:

Thanks for reading!

P.S. What’s currently keeping you up at night and why?

What are you most excited about in 2025?

Connect and DM me on www.linkedin.com/in/willgreen

Here is a summary of the key slides and takeouts. If you want a detailed

Talk and presentation all inspired by the book I wrote with my ‘co-author’ and through my experience ‘walking the talk’ with my community of 500+ of Will’s Green Walker (#WGW).

In order to build a community you need 5 ingredients:

1. Place - a location (physical or virtual) where people can gather to swap ideas and build together.

2. Principle - a shared purpose with social contracts that self select the right audience and behaviours. Knowing who you are and what your purpose and values are is the first step to defining your communities purpose and principles.

3. People - a place without people has no energy. Humans crave belonging and connections and like attracts like. Define and attract your tribe of energy.

4. Partnerships - in today’s world, buying a cup of coffee is nice but creating a collaborative fair value exchange win-win that adds sustainable economic value is a must.

5. Time - play the long game, show up regularly. Only the consistent survive.

Enjoy!

Will

I Grow Founders, Connect People, Build Value

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