😂😂😂 Someone posted their $1K MRR org chart yesterday. Here is the pre-revenue edition. @Founder_Wise

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Entrepreneurship is the only job where 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠 12 𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨 𝙖 𝙙𝙖𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙡 𝙗𝙚𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙙.

You can win every debate in your head, but the market only cares what you can deliver. Execute first, edit later.

The truth is, most people won't believe in your vision. That's your cue to build it anyway.

The secret sauce isn't a secret.

The Price of a Gigabyte Is the Price of Learning Ask a founder in Kampala whether she watched the recording you sent, and the answer I hear most often is some version of "when I get to Wi-Fi." The bundle on her phone has to last until the end of the week. A long video would eat a good share of it, so the lesson waits for a café, a friend's office or a Sunday at a relative's house with a router. Sometimes it waits for good. I design programs for founders, and I have learned to ask how heavy a lesson is before I ask how good it is. A trainer in Berlin would find that question odd. In Kampala it decides who finishes the course. Cheaper in dollars, dearer in a budget In 2025 the International Telecommunication Union priced a 5GB mobile data basket in each country it tracks. In Uganda that basket cost 6.07% of average monthly income. In Germany it cost 0.22%. For the same five gigabytes, a Ugandan gives up about 28 times the share of income a German does (ITU ICT Price Baskets, 2025; the ratio is mine). The dollar prices in the same table surprised me more. The Ugandan basket cost about USD 5.44 and the German one about USD 10.51 (ITU ICT Price Baskets, 2025). Data in Kampala is cheaper than data in Berlin. It costs more only against what people here earn, and income is the measure every household budget uses. The rest of the table complicates any story about poverty alone. India's basket cost 0.93% of monthly income, Nigeria's 1.56% and Kenya's 4.1% (ITU ICT Price Baskets, 2025). Two of those three come in under the UN Broadband Commission's target that entry-level broadband should cost less than 2% of monthly income by 2025, even on the larger 5GB basket (Broadband Commission, target set 2018). Lagos and Mumbai are hard places to build too, and founders there pay a fraction of what Ugandans pay to get online. Income explains part of Uganda's number. Some of the rest is policy. Across the world the pattern holds. The ITU's 2025 affordability figures show that people in low-income economies spend about 22 times the share of income that people in high-income economies spend on a mobile broadband basket (ITU Facts and Figures, 2025). I wanted Latin America in this comparison. The ITU rows pulled for this series cover India and three African markets and none from São Paulo, Bogotá or Mexico City, so I will leave those cities out rather than guess at them. A meter that runs on learning Data prices usually get discussed as a consumer issue, the cost of scrolling and streaming. For a founder they work more like a meter on learning, one that runs every time she tries to get better at her job. Think about what a first-time founder teaches herself in a month: how to price, how to file a tax return, how to build a cash flow sheet, how to run an ad, how to pitch. Most of that material lives in video. Free courses, recorded webinars and peer calls are free only to people with cheap data. Everyone else pays before they know whether the lesson was worth it. The meter changes behavior in small ways. Founders join calls with the camera off. They skip the second video in a series. They download the slides and leave the recording. They put off trying a new tool, because each trial burns megabytes. Each choice is sensible on its own day. Over a year they add up to a founder who learned less than she could have. The founders who most need online courses, peer communities and free tools are often the ones rationing data to reach them. Some of the sharpest founders I meet taught themselves most of what they know from free material online, and they paid for it with money their households could have used for something else. The price of a gigabyte quietly decides who gets the chance to become good at this. Ibukun Amosu (@amosuibk), a tech talent partner at The Intern Place who works on founder visibility across Nigeria and Ghana, wrote in September that African founders often end up "spending money you don't have just to keep the startup alive." The post went on: "The hard part isn't always the idea. Sometimes it's surviving long enough to build it." Data is one of those survival costs, paid in small amounts every day, and it rarely appears in a pitch deck. A Nigerian developer listed the same stack on X in May: bad internet, power issues, low trust, limited capital. People still build, the post said. They do, and they pay for every gigabyte of what they learn along the way. The payoff from fast internet is well measured. Hjort and Poulsen studied 12 African countries and found that the arrival of fast internet raised employment, firm entry, productivity and exporting (American Economic Review, 2019). Connectivity creates firms. Its price decides who gets to start them. There is a quieter cost too. Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao wrote in Science in 2013 that "poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks." In their experiments in the US and India, financial worry cost people the equivalent of about 13 IQ points on reasoning tests (Mani et al., Science, 2013). A founder who checks her balance before every download pays a small version of that tax many times a day. I can't put a number on it for Ugandan founders, because nobody has measured it. I see it in the founders I work with, in the pause before they press play. The tax on the meter The state takes its share on top. On 1 July 2018 Uganda introduced a levy of UGX 200 a day on anyone using more than 50 listed platforms, including the social media apps where many small businesses find their customers. CIPESA (@cipesaug), the Kampala ICT policy center, reported that Uganda lost about five million internet subscriptions in the levy's first year, and that the levy collected UGX 49.5 billion, 83% short of projections (CIPESA, 2021). On 1 July 2021 the government replaced it with a 12% excise duty on internet data, with 18% VAT charged on top (CIPESA, 2021). The excise was still in the Excise Duty Act at its consolidation on 31 December 2023. I have not verified its status since then, and I would welcome a correction from the Uganda Revenue Authority. The Act already contains an exception. Internet "data for provision of medical services" is carved out of the 12% duty (Excise Duty Act, consolidated 2023). Parliament has decided that some uses of data are worth more to the country than the tax they would bring in. Learning belongs on that list. January showed how much of the economy now runs on data. CEO East Africa Magazine (@CEOEastAfrica) estimated that the four-day internet shutdown around the election may have wiped out as much as UGX 24 billion in data revenue at Airtel and MTN Uganda. Michael Niyitegeka (@niyimic), Executive Director of Refactory and Country Manager for ICDL Africa in Uganda, answered: "Focusing on the telcos IMO is missing the wider implications of this on the digital enabled or dependent services or businesses." Telco revenue is the part of the loss somebody counts. The lessons skipped that week went unrecorded. I understand why a treasury reaches for data. It is collected through a handful of telcos, it grows every year, and Uganda needs revenue. Price is also one barrier among several. Phones, electricity and content in local languages matter as well, and cheap data alone will never turn a learner into a founder. There is a fair worry, too, that a tax cut could stay with the telcos instead of reaching customers. I accept all three points. The OTT levy still shows how the trade worked in practice. It shrank its own base by millions of subscriptions and raised a small fraction of what it promised. When rich countries priced their messages Britain once priced communication the way Uganda prices data. Before 1840, postage usually cost more than four pence a letter. The Uniform Penny Post cut it to one penny. In 1840, its first year, the number of letters sent in the UK more than doubled, and within ten years it had doubled again (Wikipedia, "Uniform Penny Post", accessed 2026). The government framed the reform partly as a way "to eradicate the abuse and corruption of the existing service." Korea ran the modern version. In the 1990s the Korean government was, in the OECD's word, in a "minority" in giving telecom providers low-interest loans to build high-speed lines. In March 1999 it launched Cyber Korea 21, a four-year plan that put broadband deployment and IT education in the same program (OECD, 2002). By mid-2001 Korea had 14 broadband subscribers per 100 people, against an OECD average of 2. By December 2020 it had 43 per 100, and 85% of those subscriptions ran on fiber (OECD, 2021). Both governments paired a lower price with a reason to use the service. Korea wrote IT education into the same plan as the cables, while most of its OECD peers were still waiting for demand to show up. It made the service cheap and taught people to use it at the same time. Britain made the letter cheap, and the letters came. Who should move first The Ministry of Finance and Parliament can extend the medical-services exception in the Excise Duty Act to data used by registered schools, universities and accredited training programs, then publish the revenue cost after two years so the trade is visible. Tie the exception to published prices, so the saving reaches learners. The precedent is already written into the Act. The Uganda Communications Commission can publish the price of 1GB and 5GB as a share of average income every quarter, next to the shilling price, so the public argument starts from the number households feel. Airtel and MTN Uganda can price learning bundles for accredited education sites and publish how many people use them. A telco that loses billions of shillings when the network goes dark for four days has a base large enough to carry it. Program designers, my own team at AVODA included, can weigh every lesson before sending it: text before video, audio that downloads once, sessions that run on a phone, recordings cut into short pieces. Funders can put a data allowance in the budget for every participant, next to the venue and the lunch. It costs less than a course nobody finishes. Founders can track data as a business cost and claim it as one. What gets counted gets argued about. If you run a founder program, a fund or a company that depends on people learning online in markets like ours, I can help you design delivery that works on a tight data budget and check whether it lands. Book a strategy call at cal.com/pirwot/strategy-call. What would you learn this month if a gigabyte cost you what it costs in Berlin? Sources International Telecommunication Union, "ITU ICT Price Baskets 2025 (mobile broadband, 5GB data-only basket)", 2025. itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/… International Telecommunication Union, "Facts and Figures 2025: Affordability of ICT services", 2025. itu.int/itu-d/reports/statis… UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, "2025 Broadband Advocacy Target 2", target set 2018. broadbandcommission.org/advo… CIPESA, "Uganda Abandons Social Media Tax But Slaps New Levy on Internet Data", 2021. cipesa.org/2021/07/uganda-ab… Uganda Legal Information Institute, "Excise Duty Act (Cap 336), consolidated to 31 Dec 2023", 2023. media.ulii.org/media/legisla… CEO East Africa Magazine, post on X on the shutdown's data revenue loss, 21 Jan 2026. xitter.cf/CEOEastAfrica/status/2… Michael Niyitegeka, post on X, 22 Jan 2026. xitter.cf/niyimic/status/2014335… Ibukun Amosu, post on X, 11 Sep 2026. xitter.cf/amosuibk/status/209842… Hjort and Poulsen, "The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa", American Economic Review 109(3), 2019. doi.org/10.1257/aer.20161385 Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function", Science 341, 2013. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… (full text for the 13 IQ point figure: shafir.scholar.princeton.edu…) Wikipedia, "Uniform Penny Post", accessed 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifor… OECD, "Broadband Infrastructure Deployment: The Role of Government Assistance", 2002. oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en… OECD, "Broadband policy and technology developments", 2021. oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en… Paraphrased and anonymised (private individual): xitter.cf/iamnelsonebuka/status/…

It’s a small man who gets his identity from belittling others.

😩😒

There’s nothing virtuous is praising poverty.

You can make your point without devaluing another persons opinion.