The $3 Billion Moment: Why AI Is the New NFL and Why the Future Depends on Girls

Last week, at a startup event, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks.

The speaker asked:
“Why are AI salaries leaping from $100 million to $3 billion valuations overnight? Why does it feel like madness, when we’ve seen it before?”

Silence. Then a hint of recognition.

He said, “Think about the NFL. The NBA. The MLB. Soccer. Every time a new game changes the world, a few players get offered impossible sums. The field expands. The money follows.”

Then he asked a deeper question.

“What’s the one thing all these sports have in common?”

Someone said, “They’re global. They have massive audiences.”
He smiled.
“True. But look closer. They were built for boys.”

The professional sports era was the age of men at play.
Now, the AI era is the age of minds at play and this time, everyone can get on the field.

Female AI scientists, founders, and engineers are having their breakout moment. But if we want this industry to truly scale, in creativity, in ethics, in impact, our education systems, investments, and mentorships must include girls.

This isn’t just a fairness issue. It’s a growth strategy.

The last revolution was won with muscle.
This one will be won with mindshare.
And humanity only wins if everyone gets to play.

When a market explodes, pay attention to who gets invited to play.

The Hidden ROI of Time

Every founder I meet talks about funding, hiring, scaling.
Few talk about time allocation.

Yet, time is the single universal currency equally distributed, rarely optimized.

Let’s zoom out. Globally, the fastest-growing founders aren’t just betting on AI or climate tech. They’re betting on where they spend their hours.

And here’s a niche signal that’s quietly shaping outcomes worldwide:

Microgrids.

Not the headline grabbing kind that power entire cities. The invisible, softwaredriven energy webs popping up across Africa, Southeast Asia, and rural America.

They’re built by small teams who combine fintech, IoT, and community design and they’re flipping the economics of access. In parts of Kenya and Pakistan, microgrids now outcompete traditional infrastructure in reliability and profitability.

Why should founders care?

Because the future of distributed everything from power to compute to capital depends on how we design systems that thrive without central control.

Microgrids are the metaphor.
They’re teaching us how to build companies that are:

• Local-first but globally resilient.

• Autonomous but interlinked.

• Resource smart instead of resource-hungry.

Founders who study these edge systems aren’t just reading the future they’re rehearsing it. If you want better outcomes, stop following the spotlight. Start following the shadows that’s where the next decade is quietly taking shape.

The Man Who Built the World’s First Viral Brand

How a potter turned clay into culture and invented marketing as we know it.

Before Instagram.
Before luxury brands.
Before the idea that a product could signal who you are, there was Josiah Wedgwood.

The year was 1760. England was industrializing.
Wedgwood was a humble potter in Staffordshire, a craftsman with one bad leg and an obsession with precision.

He didn’t just want to make pottery.
He wanted to make taste.

And he did something no one had ever done before:
He turned a handmade object into a social idea.

He created elegant ceramics that looked like nothing else on the market clean, minimalist, almost futuristic for their time. But beauty wasn’t enough.
Wedgwood knew that in order to sell aspiration, he had to manufacture desire.

So, he invented the marketing playbook centuries before Madison Avenue.

He gifted his best wares to Queen Charlotte then branded himself “Potter to Her Majesty.”
Instant virality.

Every noble family in Europe wanted what the Queen had.
Owning Wedgwood wasn’t about owning pottery.
It was about belonging to an idea of refinement.

He built showrooms that functioned like early Apple Stores, spotless, minimalist temples of design. He published illustrated catalogs the world’s first product drops and offered “money-back guarantees,” unheard of in the 18th century.
He pioneered mass customization, precision production, and global exports before anyone had the language for it.

Wedgwood didn’t just sell cups and plates.
He sold status, identity, and modernity.

Within decades, his brand became a global phenomenon, from London salons to the American colonies. He built the first scalable fusion of art, science, and commerce.

And here’s the kicker:
His great-great-grandson?
Charles Darwin.
Evolution, it seems, ran in the family.

Lesson for founders:
Wedgwood didn’t chase customers he created believers.
Every brand that wins today still runs on his formula:
Design something timeless. Tell a story that makes people feel part of history.
And make sure it looks good enough for royalty, even if the royalty is now an influencer.

From Lagos to Lisbon: The Rise of Shadow Talent Networks
How global talent liquidity will redefine hiring.

Every founder says the same thing: “It’s hard to hire great people.”

But what if that’s no longer true , you’re just looking in the wrong markets?

Across Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and small-town Asia, a quiet revolution is happening. Not in venture capital. Not in code.

In how humans organize around opportunity.

They’re called shadow talent networks. Informal clusters of skilled workers developers, designers, operators who collaborate across borders without being tied to companies, job titles, or recruiters.

They live on Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp. They run on crypto wallets, Airtm, and Deel. They don’t wait for job offers; they build liquidity pools of talent.

From Lagos to Lisbon, these networks are rewriting the hiring map.
And they’re doing it faster than any HR platform or university ever could.

In Nigeria, a design collective runs global product sprints for three startups a month.
In Serbia, engineers form pop-up “guilds” that swarm a build, ship, and dissolve within weeks. In Colombia, translators, community managers, and content operators are forming hybrid cooperatives that outprice agencies and outperform them.

Here’s what founders need to understand:
The future of hiring isn’t about jobs, it’s about liquidity.

Talent is becoming a tradeable, flexible asset.
Your next engineer might work from Nairobi and invoice through Lisbon.
Your next marketing lead might be part of three parallel projects and outperform full-time staff.

For founders, this unlocks a new kind of scale: liquid teams that expand and contract with the problem at hand.
But it also demands a new kind of leadership one that measures trust, not tenure.

The companies that win won’t be the ones offering the highest salaries.
They’ll be the ones building the strongest gravity wells cultures so compelling that talent flows in, stays long enough to build something great, and then flows back out, richer in experience.

This is the new talent economy.
It’s not on LinkedIn. It’s not on job boards.
It’s alive in the shadows.

The Strength of Weak Ties , And How I Built a Dinner Series to Live It

Here’s a paradox every founder misses: your closest friends are terrible at introducing you to new ideas, opportunities, or talent.

Back in 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter explained why in his paper The Strength of Weak Ties. Close friends share the same information as you weak ties, casual acquaintances, people you barely know, are the ones who carry fresh insights, hidden opportunities, and unexpected perspectives.

This struck me hard a decade ago. I realized that in my own network, I was mostly cycling through the same people brilliant, yes, but often redundant. I wanted exposure to new perspectives in a structured way, without it feeling transactional or intimidating.

The solution? A budget-friendly, low-stress rotating dinner series, built around weak ties.

Here’s how it works:

1. Start small: Invite 5 people from completely different walks of life a trapeze artist, a con artist, a nun, a Pakistani rapper before he was famous, a low-flow gas valve inventor. Including me, that makes six.

2. Chatham House Rule: Everything discussed is free to use, but identities stay private. No retribution, no social politics.

3. Rotation: After the dinner, everyone votes for one guest to stay. That person then invites four new people to the next dinner. I remain the constant “patron,” running the series over time.

4. Repeat endlessly: The dinners continue, growing your weak-tie network week by week, without forcing effort beyond the first event. I have had this going on for about 10 years.

At first glance, it’s boring. But it’s the best boring thing I’ve done for personal and professional growth. Over the years, people return, new faces appear, and the perspectives become exponentially richer.

I’ve met innovators, teachers, religious leaders, and storytellers who would never intersect with my day-to-day world. Every dinner stretches my thinking, challenges assumptions, and exposes me to ideas I couldn’t have discovered in a coffee meeting with the same people I already know.

Weak ties aren’t just about hiring or deal-making. They’re about learning, growth, and perspective.
If you create structured ways to regularly expose yourself to people outside your immediate network —even in something as “boring” as a dinner you accelerate your personal and professional evolution.

Micro-action this week:
Start your own six-person dinner. One evening, one rule: learn something unexpected. No agenda, no CVs, no LinkedIn. Just ideas. Let the network expand from there. Leave your bias at home!

Do it. Trust me. You’ll be surprised how fast this “boring” hack can reshape your thinking. But first read the paper and read issue 53 where I detailed the practice.

Work Backwards From Your Friction

Instead of automating what’s easiest, spend time doing the things that slow you down the most.

• The areas you hate , vendor disputes, contracts, bug triage often hide the biggest ROI opportunities.

• First-principles: friction = asymmetric insight. Solve it yourself, and you see the cracks no one else notices.

This is why co founders rock. In the lowest moments, when you are ready to surrender, some one should be there to hold the line, and on their days of doubt, your should be there to do the same

Bonus! Thought of the week

The map is not the territory, but it’s all you have.

Markets, trends, and signals are approximations , never reality. Your ability to act decisively depends not on perfect information, but on how you interpret and act on imperfect maps. Judgment is the only tool that turns uncertainty into scale. TAM, SAM, SOM, CAC, LTV, ARR they’re numbers, not truth.

Contrarian Take: 

This is so simple yet so pervasive in every thing we do. When you start your day, park the things that make you angry and focus on the things that hold you back. Its not easy, you need people/networks around you who are honest with you about the limitations you can not see.