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. The latest official release, published in February 2026, estimated U.S. research and development 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 April 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that a former Indiana University researcher had been sentenced after pleading guilty to smuggling biological material into the United States. Samples of E. coli DNA had been concealed in a clothing shipment from China and sent for university research. [2]

His nationality is not the lesson. The lesson is that a mislabeled package bypassed normal border controls and entered a university research workflow. Moving biological material across borders, authorizing research, tracking samples, and monitoring high risk work are now national security software and infrastructure problems.

A February 2026 GAO review found that biosafety and biosecurity guidance still varies across countries and institutions. It also documented the controls that matter before work begins: risk assessment, training, access management, inventory controls, facility safeguards, and incident reporting. [3]

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. In July 2026, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa said the continent was home to more than 1.5 billion people and was expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. More than one in four people in the world could be African by then. [4]

2.5B Projected African population in 2050

~50% African Union members with instant payment systems

Finance has made real progress. A March 2026 World Bank report found that nearly half of African Union member states had implemented instant payment systems. It also found that high compliance costs, unclear licensing for nonbanks, and other policy barriers still limit adoption. [5]

That is infrastructure, not completion. A payment rail does not guarantee reliable identity, useful credit, affordable cross border settlement, 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

I started learning in Addis Ababa, spent part of my childhood in the United States, then returned to Addis Ababa. Now I attend college in San Francisco. Moving between both places made the choice between America and Africa feel false. 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