Whenever I see this "lack of entrepreneurs who can scale narrative," I push back because it is untrue. If there is anything Nigeria doesn't lack, it is entrepreneurs. Let's acknowledge that some people had more advantages and a head start, and then deliberately created moats.

Before I left home for church yesterday afternoon, my son came to me with a problem he needed to solve. He wanted to connect a controller to his Mac to test the game he was building. We finally figured it out with a Nimbus SteelSeries I had bought for the Apple TV Arcade games. He “conned” me with that maneuver into getting him an Apple developer account for $99 a year. I was laughing as I left home. I had taken our cleaner who I discovered recently was the Cathechist of a local Catholic church to his own church in a neighborhood I had never been to in Togo. It was an eye-opening experience. I saw people living as we used to live in Nigeria some decades ago. This was another part of Africa we don't show online in the suburbs of a city. The boundary between rural and urban life. The thing that took my memory back to my early days in Nigeria was a shop selling granite and concrete grinding stones outside. I had not used one of those things since the 1980s. I was shocked that they were still being sold in a city with constant electricity. My first thought was, these are stone-age cooking implements still being used likely by another child at home in an Africa where my son was also able to build online games for the world. Then I remembered that I still had a small manual stone grinding mortar at home that I used for some meals like Afang. It was more traditional than stone age. It still bothered me though. The people who likely bought and used these things didn't so so out of choice but necessity. As I moved further, I saw bigger grinding mills that were engine-driven being sold. They were still crude and a far cry from my electric Ninja blender at home. The good thing was that they were locally engineered and manufactured. We at least moved forward a bit. The crazy thing is that while the electric blender is now very cheap at China Mall in Lome, these crude local grinding and food processing machines are more widely used because of the sheer demand for food and their durability. It took me into another rabbit hole again on what we need to build for the market. While my son was using an app called Blender at home to make animations and games, another kid who didn't have access to a blender would be using a grinding stone and both are still living in the same city. I started wondering how both could share experiences and context? Then it occurred to me that I was the bridge. I had experienced both worlds. I have used the grinding stone to cook and I helped build tech companies that have raised millions of dollars. I can help my son and also help the boy whose parents can only afford a grinding stone. I think I am now changing churches again and will be going with my kids to the my cleaner/cathechist’s church. I also need my kids to experience what life is like in most of Africa and not get lost into a virtual existence while being unaware of the reality all around them. Africa will grow and move forward but it will not do so until then grinding stone becomes largely replaced by the electric blender and then every kid has the opportunity to be able to build online with software tools like Blender.