Zero to One Beyond Silicon Valley, Dahilon Mohammed

San Francisco gives you one useful bias: almost everything can be rebuilt. Spend enough time here and even large, settled industries start to look temporary.

That is one of America’s real advantages. It is not that every startup is important. Most are not. The advantage is density: researchers, engineers, capital, customers, and people willing to believe a strange idea for long enough to test it. The United States is a crowded laboratory for new products.

The crowding has a downside. It becomes easy to confuse activity with progress. A hundred teams can build a slightly different interface for the same model while entire categories remain untouched.

Vertical progress is not tied to one place

The most useful idea I took from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One is the distinction between repeating what works and creating something that did not exist before. I think that idea becomes even more interesting outside Silicon Valley.

Exporting an American app to another country is not automatically zero to one. Changing the currency and the language is still copying. Real vertical creation starts when a product is built around the local constraints: identity, trust, regulation, distribution, infrastructure, and how people already behave.

White space is not easy space. It has less product competition, but often much harder real world constraints.

That is the opportunity. In markets where the full stack does not exist, a company can do more than win a category. It can help define one.

America still has unfinished verticals

Looking abroad should not become an excuse to stop building in the United States. America remains one of the strongest innovation systems ever assembled. U.S. research and development was estimated at $993 billion in 2024, with businesses performing 77% of national R&D. [1] The capacity is here. The question is where it is being aimed.

Biodefense is one place where the stakes are much larger than the amount of founder attention.

In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two Chinese nationals with allegedly conspiring to smuggle Fusarium graminearum, a fungus that damages wheat, barley, maize, and rice, into the United States for research at a University of Michigan laboratory. [2]

That case was an allegation, not proof of guilt. It was not a confirmed biological leak or attack. The nationality of the people charged is also not the lesson. The lesson is that moving biological material across borders, authorizing research, tracking samples, and monitoring high risk work are now national security software and infrastructure problems.

The federal government is responding. A 2025 executive order directed a revision of U.S. oversight for dual use research and potential pandemic pathogens, while a 2026 GAO review found that biosafety and biosecurity guidance still varies across countries and institutions. [3] [4]

Better sample provenance, access controls, audit trails, facility monitoring, early detection, and secure research collaboration are not glamorous products. That is partly why they matter. Hard infrastructure is usually less crowded than the newest consumer trend.

Africa’s financial stack is growing, not finished

The other side of this thesis is demographic. Africa’s population grew to more than 1.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach about 2.5 billion by 2050. More than one in four people in the world could be African by then. [5]

2.5B Projected African population in 2050

58% Account ownership in Sub Saharan Africa, 2024

Finance has made real progress. World Bank data shows account ownership in Sub Saharan Africa reached 58% of adults in 2024, up from 49% in 2021. About 40% of adults have a mobile money account, the highest regional rate in the world. [6]

Those numbers show momentum, not completion. Forty two percent of adults still do not have an account. An account also does not guarantee reliable credit, useful savings products, affordable cross border payments, insurance, or tools for small businesses. And “Africa” is not one market. Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have different rails, rules, and customer behavior.

The mistake would be to arrive with a grand plan to rebuild the entire financial system on day one. The better entry point is a narrow product that solves one frequent problem extremely well. It should be simple enough to explain, useful enough to become a habit, and reliable enough to earn trust.

Once a product earns that trust, it can expand. A tool for merchants can become a record of cash flow. A record of cash flow can support underwriting. Payments can lead to savings, insurance, payroll, or cross border trade. The first product is small; the system behind it does not have to remain small.

Use Silicon Valley as training, not a template

My education spans Addis Ababa and San Francisco. I do not see the choice as America or Africa. The same principle applies to both: find a system that matters, understand why it is still broken, and start with the smallest product that can change its direction.

In America, that could mean biodefense, energy, industrial systems, or government technology. Across African markets, it could mean financial identity, business infrastructure, logistics, healthcare, or entirely new categories built for a young and growing population.

The next zero to one company does not have to come from the place with the most startups. It will come from someone who sees a missing vertical clearly enough to build the first useful piece of it.

Vertical progress is not tied to one place

America still has unfinished verticals

Africa’s financial stack is growing, not finished

Use Silicon Valley as training, not a template

Sources