Stephen put out a note on Terra yesterday, and it gives some insight into the conversations we've been having about infrastructure on the continent.

For the first time in a long time, we are facing the reality that we simply can't leapfrog our infrastructure gaps. In an age where AI is redefining everything in ways more remarkable than the invention of the internet, we've suddenly found ourselves way behind: no water, no power, no data. And the road networks needed to build all of this are poor. We seem to be at a very big disadvantage.

But if you flip it, now is suddenly the best time to build all of those things. If we start from the fundamental belief that demand for compute is infinite, then investments in infrastructure start looking like they can deliver real commercial returns. Technocrats and bureaucrats can now see that there's never been a better time to drive incentives for public-private partnerships. What they did for telcos (arguably stretching it here), they can do for every key sector now. This is a great moment for investors close to governments to start making that case.

For founders, this means we can now attempt to build the hard things. Thanks to improving technology, it's getting cheaper to plan, predict, generate, and iterate productively. Don't confuse any of that for things automatically becoming easier. Building anything that generates real value is always hard.

So yeah, I'm excited about the future. I just hope it won't be a waste of excitement.