Jump First

Why Farming?

I am an economist by training.

I think that matters here, because when people hear that, they tend to imagine someone who lives in theory. Models. Forecasts. Graphs. A person interested in abstraction.

That has never really been my relationship with economics.

Economics, to me, has always been about systems. About what happens when people, incentives, infrastructure, policy, and constraint all meet in the same place. About why things work when they do, and why they do not when they don’t. About how outcomes are produced. About why two places with intelligent people and abundant effort can end up with completely different realities.

I am writing this in transit, on my way to Nairobi, with a first stop in Malawi for my mother’s tombostone unveiling – an event my father has put on hold till I was done with my MBA, and available to attend.

As I am on my layover in Istanbul, I am reflecting on the road that got me here.

I think movement does that to me. It loosens things. It lets me think across time.

And as I sit with this question of what my own big bet is, I keep finding myself returning to the same place.

Farms.

Big Bets

I am presently reading the book ‘Big Bets’ by Rajiv Shah – president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

I did not begin my life thinking I would end up here.

I remember resisting pure sciences very clearly. That path did not feel like mine. I also, if I’m being honest, did not particularly want social sciences either. At the time, I did not even know what social sciences were. My mother was the one who insisted that this was a good idea.

With her guidance, that is where I landed. I was selected to study social sciences at the University of Malawi.

Looking back now, I think that mattered more than I realized. Social sciences gave me a way of seeing that has followed me everywhere. It trained me to think systemically. It made it impossible for me to see one problem as only one problem. Nothing ever sits alone. Policy affects incentives. Incentives affect behavior. Behavior affects outcomes. Culture shapes markets. Infrastructure shapes possibility.

Once you start seeing the world that way, you hardly ever stop. I suppose this becomes my strength and very weakness as an entrepreneur.

My training took me into government. It took me into my own nonprofit work. It took me into entrepreneurship. It took me into the United Nations at headquarters level. It took me into the private sector and eventually into my MBA, where I have had to get much more granular about business models, about unit economics, about incentives, about business development, about how things actually move.

At every stage, I was learning a different language for the same basic question:

Why do systems underperform, even when effort is high?

Of Governments: How Systems Drift

Working in government was one of the first times I saw clearly that there is often a gap between design and reality.

On paper, things can make perfect sense. In implementation, everything meets friction. Budget. Politics. Human behavior. Administrative inefficiency. Timing. Capacity. Competing priorities. Incentives that were not obvious at the beginning.

You start to understand that systems rarely fail in dramatic ways. More often, they drift. They weaken at the edges. They underdeliver slowly. They produce outcomes far smaller than the ambition that created them.

That lesson stayed with me.

Building [Institutions]

When I went on to establish my own nonprofits and later build across different ventures, the question changed from observation to responsibility.

It was one thing to notice where systems failed. It was another to build within them.

That work exposed me to partnerships across sectors. Public partnerships. Private partnerships. Development partnerships. Cross-sector collaborations full of promise, and at times, full of contradiction. I got to see where these partnerships succeed and where they fail. I got to see what happens when people are aligned in language but not in incentives. I got to see what happens when people want outcomes but are working through structures that are not designed to produce them consistently.

Again and again, one thing became clear to me: effort is everywhere. Smart people are everywhere. Ambition is everywhere.

Consistency is not.

Execution is not.

Systems that compound are not.

A Global Lens and its Contradictions

When I joined the UN and began seeing these questions through a much more global lens, it sharpened the discomfort.

At that level, you are looking across countries, regions, policy frameworks, large development ambitions, international financing, institutional coordination, evidence synthesis. You see how much knowledge exists. You see how much has already been studied. You see how much expertise is available in the world.

And yet, outcomes remain deeply uneven.

That does something to your mind.

It makes it difficult to accept the idea that many of our most basic failures are failures of knowledge. I do not think they are. I think often they are failures of systems design, of incentives, of execution, of infrastructure, of integration.

By the time I got into my MBA, I was no longer simply interested in what should happen. I wanted to understand what makes outcomes actually move. I wanted to get closer to business itself. Closer to capital. Closer to how organizations grow. Closer to what scale demands.

And then America complicated my thinking further.

America and the Scale of Questions

Living in America has made me see business differently.

Not because America has solved everything. It has not. But because when infrastructure works, when systems talk to each other, when capital moves, when organizations are built to scale, you can feel the difference immediately.

You feel it in logistics. In productization. In speed. In the way entire sectors are structured around growth and replication. In the assumption that systems can be optimized, and should be.

As I moved through this environment, my perspective on Africa also evolved.

I started thinking more deeply about what business development actually means on the continent. What it means to succeed. What kinds of companies we have historically celebrated. What kinds of problems we choose to solve. What kinds of systems remain underbuilt. Where our real leverage is.

And I think that is part of why this question has found me now.

Make It Personal

There’s a section in Big Bets titled ‘Make it Personal’ where Rajiv talks about sitting with Dr. Norman Borlaug.

Borlaug worked at a time when famine was widely accepted as inevitable. Entire regions were expected to face mass starvation because food production could not keep pace with population growth. That was the trajectory, and it was taken seriously.

He changed that trajectory.

Through years of work in the field, developing higher-yield and more resilient wheat, and working across countries to support adoption at scale, he helped increase production at a level that prevented catastrophic shortages. The impact was not marginal. It was structural. Food systems shifted. Outcomes changed. Millions of people lived who otherwise would not have.

What stays with me is the level of commitment to the problem. He worked within the full system of agriculture, understanding that production depends on many interacting factors and that improvement requires staying close to those realities over time. The work was not clean or contained. It required iteration, coordination, and persistence across environments that were constantly changing.

He did this with far fewer tools than we have today.

That is where the discomfort comes in for me.

We now operate in a world with significantly more knowledge, more advanced technology, and a much greater ability to understand and model complex systems. The capacity to improve production exists in ways that were not available in Borlaug’s time. And yet, hunger remains present.

Borlaug’s work establishes something important. It shows that food systems are not fixed. They can be redesigned. Outcomes can be shifted when effort is sustained at the level of the system itself. That precedent exists.

There is also a question that followed him later in life, one that Rajiv brings forward in the book. It is a simple question, but it carries weight.

Did I do everything I could?

I think that is the question that reframes everything. It moves the conversation away from what is possible in theory and toward what one chooses to take responsibility for in practice.

Borlaug’s work also introduced new pressures. Increased production relied on inputs that carried environmental and structural implications. Systems adapted, and new challenges emerged. That is the nature of working at that level. Change in one part of the system creates movement in others.

It does not diminish the significance of what was achieved. It clarifies the nature of the work. Large-scale change is complex, continuous, and evolving.

For me, this is what makes his work relevant now. It is not a historical reference. It is a demonstration of what it means to engage with a foundational system seriously and at scale.

The precedent is there.

The tools have evolved.

What remains is the question of how we respond.

Questions in Istanbul

At the moment, I am writing this from the airport in Turkey.

I am sitting in the IGA lounge, taking in the beauty of it all. The flow. The design. The movement. The sense of support embedded into infrastructure. And my immediate question is simple:

What does Turkey export?

That is where my mind goes now. To outputs. To systems. To the relationship between infrastructure and economic identity. To what a country is able to produce consistently, competitively, at scale. To what sits beneath that ability.

This moment in the airport opened something up in me.

Because it brought me right back to the question I have been circling for months now, perhaps years if I’m being honest:

What is my big bet?

At the end of my life, what do I want to be able to say I contributed to?

Not everything. I know life is never just one thing. I will likely do many things. Build many things. Write many things. Start many things. But there is still the question of what sits at the center. What kind of contribution would feel undeniable?

For me, the answer is becoming clearer.

Why Agriculture

Of everything I could do with my life, why this?

Why agriculture?

Because food is foundational.

That may sound obvious, but I think we often fail to live as though we actually believe it. Food sits underneath everything. Health. Education. Labor productivity. Household stability. Trade. Rural livelihoods. National resilience. Climate adaptation. Social peace. Even imagination. It is difficult to think boldly about the future when entire communities are negotiating survival through inconsistent production systems.

And beyond that, I think I have reached a point where I simply cannot reconcile myself to the persistence of hunger.

It is 2026. Hunger should not still be a thing.

Not with the knowledge we have.
Not with the science we have.
Not with the tools we have.
Not with the data we have.
Not with the technologies now available to us.

That does not mean the problem is simple. It is not. Agriculture sits at the convergence of climate, logistics, labor, water, data, land, infrastructure, finance, and decision-making. But that is also precisely why I keep being pulled toward it. It is foundational, and it is systemic. A change there reverberates outward.

Agriculture is one of the clearest places where systems either deliver or fail in public.

You can see it.
You can measure it.
You can feel its absence.
You can trace its consequences.

And I think, for me, that matters.

There are many other things I could choose. Things that would be easier to explain. Easier to commercialize quickly. Easier to package. Easier to make neat. I have built in those directions before. I know what it looks like to build things that are more legible to the market.

But this stayed.

Because once you begin to understand food systems as systems, the scale of the opportunity becomes impossible to ignore.

Why This, Specifically

Agriculture alone was not the whole answer for me.

The second question was how.

And I think that is where my own path became more unusual.

Because I was not interested in entering agriculture sentimentally. I was not interested in romanticizing the land. I was thinking as an economist, as a builder, and increasingly as someone trying to solve for scale.

My own life forced part of this question on me. I live and work across borders. I have built teams across borders. I understand what it means to manage complexity remotely. I understand coordination. I understand operations. And when I started thinking seriously about large-scale farming, one of the first things I understood was that I did not want to build a system that depended entirely on my constant physical presence.

That mattered to me.

Because once you ask how you manage complex production environments without always being there, you start asking different questions. You start asking what kind of visibility is required. What kind of intelligence is required. What kind of tools are required. What kind of feedback loops are required.

And then the problem stops being only agriculture.

It becomes infrastructure.

Why Cyber-Physical Infrastructure

Cyber-physical infrastructure is my choice because the problem we are dealing with is physical, and our intelligence must be able to act inside physical systems.

Farms are physical systems. Crops are physical. Soil is physical. Water is physical. Machinery is physical. Weather meets land in the physical world. Production happens there. Losses happen there. Yield happens there. Labor happens there. Food security happens there.

A report cannot move through a field.
A dashboard cannot inspect a crop.
A spreadsheet cannot respond to changing physical conditions on its own.

So for me, the question became: how do we build systems where intelligence is embedded closer to the point of production?

That is what led me toward cyber-physical infrastructure.

Toward systems that can sense.
Systems that can model.
Systems that can simulate.
Systems that can feed information back into decision-making before a mistake becomes costly in the real world.

I am interested in digital twins because visibility matters.
I am interested in simulation because decision-making matters.
I am interested in autonomous systems because labor, efficiency, and scale matter.
I am interested in integrating them because fragmented intelligence has limits.

This is the part that feels truest to me: data becomes much more powerful when it is structurally connected to action.

And that, to me, is where cyber-physical systems become meaningful. They are not a trend line. They are not a branding exercise. They are a way of redesigning how production environments learn, adapt, and improve.

My Life’s Work

I think what is becoming clearer to me is that this path is not random. It is the convergence of everything I have done.

Social sciences trained me to think systemically.

Government showed me how systems drift.

Building my own institutions showed me the difficulty of execution.

Development work showed me how often effort and outcomes fail to align.

The UN gave me the global lens.

My MBA sharpened my thinking around business, incentives, markets, and scale.

My exposure to technology and platform thinking stretched my understanding of what is possible.

So when I say I am choosing agriculture, I do not feel like I am abandoning the rest of my work.

I feel like I am arriving at the place where all of it meets.

My Big Bet

My big bet is simple.

By 2050, hunger should not be a thing.

I do not mean that as a slogan. I mean it as a design constraint for my life.

I know the world is complex. I know politics exist. I know climate exists. I know institutions move slowly. I know all of the reasons this sounds too large, too idealistic, too difficult.

I also know that many of the tools required to radically improve production systems already exist in some form. The question is whether we are willing to build with the seriousness the moment requires.

For me, that seriousness leads back to farms.

To production.
To infrastructure.
To systems that learn.
To systems that make better decisions before costly mistakes are made.
To systems that increase resilience and productivity in a world that can no longer afford incoherence in foundational sectors.

I think “Jump First” is the right subtitle because that has been the rhythm of my life more than I realized.

I have often moved before everything was perfectly clear.
I have often chosen the path before all the evidence had neatly arranged itself around me.
I have often had to build understanding by moving through the thing.

That is not recklessness. That is how many real systems are learned. You move. You observe. You refine. You adapt. You get closer to the truth by entering the terrain, not by standing outside it forever.

That is true of entrepreneurship.
That is true of systems change.
That is true of farms too.

You do not wait forever to begin.

At some point, you jump.

Defining ‘Why’

So, why agriculture?

Because it is foundational.
Because hunger remains a moral and systems failure in a world that already knows too much to excuse it.
Because food production sits underneath too many other outcomes to be treated as secondary.
Because I believe this is one of the clearest places where better systems could change everything downstream.

And why cyber-physical infrastructure?

Because I am no longer interested in intelligence that sits outside the system.
Because I want systems that can see, learn, adapt, and support better decisions in the real world.
Because physical problems require embedded intelligence.
Because the future of production will belong to environments that are more aware, more connected, and more responsive than the ones we inherited.

I think that is my answer.

Not a complete answer. I suspect I will spend years refining it. But clear enough.

Clear enough to keep building.
Clear enough to keep betting.
Clear enough to know why this, of all things, found me.