Village Coder.

A site-office container. The kind a crane drops onto a construction site, outfitted as a school, made very cheap, and made self-sustaining. Six computers built into each wall with fixed seating. A student makes a profile, logs in, and either picks up where they left off or starts a new subject. They go into a virtual classroom, learn the topic, get tested at the end of each module, get scored, get told what to work on, and go back through it until they have it.

Solar on the roof and a battery system inside, because power in Nigeria is unreliable. Satellite internet on the roof. The battery is deliberately larger than the computers need, so the surplus can be pushed back out to the village, and the Wi-Fi is open so the village can use the connection too. The whole thing ships on a standard container truck: put four stilts in the ground, drop it on top, open the doors, connect it, and it is live.

Children use it because it is free. It started as a code and compute school; a friend pushed me to widen it to general education, so that a child who cannot afford school can use it and a child who can is doing assignments or getting ahead. The ambition is to get the best teachers in the world to build the courses pro bono, little kids in a village in Nigeria learning from the best minds in the world, going at their own pace. Passing tests earns points, and points buy free browsing time.

Underneath it there is a talent layer. Per-account data shows how students are doing, which means the system can find the brilliant ones, go and get them, and put scholarships to other institutions in front of them. That is the actual point. I don't want to localise someone else's AI for Africa. I want Africans building African solutions, and that has to start with finding the talent.

While I was at Google I mentored high school students through iMentor. Schools where almost nobody goes on to college. The job was mostly to be standing proof that it can be done, and to explain what school is even for. These days I mentor and teach some of the coursework at Founders Institute, and I work with the founders in my angel portfolio. The rest arrives through LinkedIn and referrals. Mostly Black and minority founders, either first-timers or people who need the technical half.

It is hard as a minority founder to get good help or good advice, particularly from someone who looks like you and therefore understands the specific thing you are up against. So the policy is an open door. If you reach out I will at least try to help, or point you at someone who can.

What first-time founders get wrong about fundraising, in order. They don't understand the economics of the people they are pitching, a VC is a business deploying its LPs' money and has to beat the public markets by a distance, so you need to know a firm's principles and what kind of deal actually works for them. They are often working on the wrong idea, and wrong has a specific meaning: there are tons of great ideas, but a great idea is not necessarily a great business in your hands, at this time. Timing matters, and so does whether you are the right team for that problem, institutional investors see that immediately. And most skip customer discovery entirely: is this a painkiller or a vitamin, is it a real problem they still wouldn't pay to fix, would they actually pay, and is the person with the problem even the one who holds the budget?

I am not investing at the moment, and I have done a fair amount of work to slow the inbound, so this is not the page to pitch on. What I can still offer is the judgement.

I have raised into a crypto winter and watched every commitment evaporate in a week. I have shipped at Microsoft and Google scale. I have had to let everyone go. Within one conversation I can usually tell you whether you are the right team for that idea at this time, which is a more useful thing to hear early than a cheque you were never going to get.