Interesting story. I once pitched @smartfarmai to someone managing one of the biggest farms in the SE of Nigeria. The owner lives abroad this was the guy running things on the ground. The condescension in his voice was unmistakable. You could tell exactly what he was thinking: that AI, or our projected hardware build, was going to become some kind of inspection tool that would expose him and his people for skimming from the owner. That’s exactly how it felt on that call. He even went on to tell me how workers had destroyed CCTV cameras installed on the farm, then asked what would happen if farmers destroyed our device, and what if staff refused to use a web tool for record-keeping as if that isn’t a policy issue for farm management to enforce. He wasn’t asking questions to understand the product. He was building a case for why oversight doesn’t work, because oversight wasn’t in his interest. But I’m not someone whose spirit you can crush easily. We went back and forth, talked it out. And his final answer? “When smaller poultry farms adopt your product, that’s when we’ll adopt it.” I just laughed and shook my head. You know who actually took a chance on us? A 60,000-bird farm in Tanzania. Their farm manager worked with us even though we weren’t making money from them. But I learned so much about running a poultry operation worth millions of dollars in value even as someone who owns a farm myself. A whole different country believed in what we were building before the big players at home would even give us a real conversation. A few months later, around January or February this year, we got invited to @AntlerGlobal. We made it to the second-to-last stage. We didn’t get into the program, but the lessons we took from it have shaped everything we’ve built since. So when people come out complaining about startups taking foreign money, I have to ask if you don’t want foreign capital shaping your ecosystem, then fund it yourself. Create special economic zones. Build real policy frameworks that help local companies grow. But no, they won’t do any of that. And then when a founder raises money, you want to cry CIA. What exactly did you do to help these companies?