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Threads are how the Office works in public. Each thread is an angle of inquiry — a specific question or hypothesis we’re actively pursuing. They’re made up of posts: notes, research, conversations, sketches, field observations. If you have insights, introductions, or investment interest that could advance a thread, each one has an RFI section telling you what we’re looking for.
area: all agent networks creator economy employment entrepreneurship marketplaces

Active Threads

Actively pursuing research or builds in this direction.

▸ Craft and Indigenous methods is the cheapest place to show African ingenuity to the world. That proof - more than the income associated is the real prize.
creator economy 5 posts
▸ Why I’m interested

The conversation around CCI can be a bit loose. There is a lot of money and even more talk but there’s very few convictions and certainly no shared conviction.

Within that, indigenous methods (crafts) is an interesting one for me. I am naturally always attracted to the work of hands. I can’t really explain it, i’ve tried before (nearly a decade ago). I don’t feel like trying - so i will say there is something spiritual about it, something essential. So i always find myself in and around crafty/artisany things and then i post rationalise.

The post rationalysis goes as follows:

Indigenous methods and crafts are not only a large source of income for the most vulnerable people in the world and not only a vessel through which traditions are communicated. They also are a great signal of the ingenuity of a place - such is the spirituality of the thing. These flashes of ingenuity can be wayfinding at most and marketing at least. The culture with which it is approached is an industrial precursor. Fine handiwork speaks to precision. Steel work, craftsmanship. Graphics, motifs and patterns to visual communication.

So basically, on a simple level. I am interested in settling my mind on the tangibility of indigenous methods as a lever for entrepreneurship whether promising or not. But also exploring the idea of the intangible in the context of the impact frameworks that can’t really encapsulate them.

▸ Ongoing POV
  • Indigenous methods are well targeted at the most vulnerable. Women, rural, poor.
  • There is not much scope for growth because local consumption is pretty stable and exports are controlled by a small but mighty group of intermediaries
  • That said, Intra African seems like an opportunity
  • There is a lot of work to make products more “contemporary” both for local and export. The upside of this is modest from a growth perspective but interesting nonetheless
  • IP may be a long shot as a protection for these methods. More “processing” ie design will be the best way to generate domain. And the way money flows has to be policy driven.
  • Ecommerce platforms focusing here cannot grow past a certain ceiling because supply is not well organised and demand is too expensive to generate (especially with traditional “marketing”)
  • We always underestimate storytelling
  • Super agents who can aggregate and quality-control on behalf of producers are likely more valuable than platforms
Updated 10 Apr 2026
Subthreads
The buyer landscape — who is actually buying? 2 posts
Export readiness gaps — what producers actually need 1 post
The state of platforms 1 post
▸ RFI — What we’re looking for
intros

People who are documenting indigenous methods and crafts across the continent (researchers, makers, brands, NGOs etc)
intel

Where are products going? I want to make a cool graphic
investment

A global series on Geographical Indicators doubling up as a research piece for IP protection and markets
investment

Testing contemporary product from traditional methods in progress
insights

How to constrain this thread of inquiry? It’s just me
▸ Recent posts (5)
28 May 2026 Notes from the Brooklyn Museum retrospective
Revisiting the ALÁRA collab two years on. What worked, what didn't, and what it revealed about the real barriers to export markets for African craft producers.
15 May 2026 Mapping wholesale buyers: who is actually purchasing at volume?
Early findings. The buyer landscape is thinner than I expected. A breakdown of the actual active buyers, what they stock, and what their volume looks like.
→ view all posts in this thread

Seeds

Not yet active but on our minds.

▸ Is the "super agent" the right unit of intervention for micro-enterprise ecosystems?
agent networks 0 posts
▸ Why I’m interested

The top 15% of artisans on Kandua drove 60%+ of revenue. Seeing the same pattern elsewhere. Is the play to find and enable these operators specifically, rather than going broad?

▸ What does demand intelligence actually look like for micro-entrepreneurs?
employmentagent networks 0 posts
▸ Why I’m interested

Everyone says “data-driven” but the data is almost entirely manual, fragmented, and unreliable. This feels like a horizontal problem nobody owns.

Archive

Completed threads. The question was answered, the work was done, or the angle was absorbed into another thread.

▸ What I learned building Africa's largest home services marketplace
employmentmarketplacesentrepreneurshipagent networks archived
▸ Why I’m interested

Kandua was the crucible. A marketplace and business tools platform for home service businesses in South Africa, built from scratch and sold to the country’s largest insurance company. This thread is a retrospective — what I learned about micro-entrepreneurs, technology adoption, and what it actually takes to build infrastructure for informal workers.

▸ Final POV
  • 5-10% of people doing “entreprenuership” want to do it. The rest would prefer a job but can’t or don’t know how to find it. A more centralised approach could cater for this dynamic.
  • Small business SaaS is hard. But really cool
  • “Design” can make itself small for no reason. If you can give people money - they will forgive a lot of UX/UI things. Design for giving people money then get better from there
  • Aka, offtake is everything. consumer can have a ceiling especially in a naturally low frequency use case
  • Online to Offline is hard. Collect your money at the point of value you control and make that the business. Or try to control the entire interaction
  • The more you control, the less breadth you should have. A “marketplace” only makes sense when you can outsource properly.
  • Venture culture is poison. It’s not relevant for most things. It’s very important to know why you need that kind of money
  • Culture is everything. Very hard to get right but when you do - it sings. When you don’t - it wails.
  • Mergers are tough. Culture is very much contextual and very difficult to reset
  • It’s not enough to read the fine print. Every promise should be written down
  • Some businesses are inherently ugly. You can’t change that. But you can protect against it.
  • Be mission driven

I’ll keep adding things as I remember them

Archived — no longer updated
▸ Recent posts (1)
20 Feb 2026 What building Kandua taught me — the full retrospective
The conclusions I'm carrying forward from years of building infrastructure for informal workers — the super agent hypothesis, narrow technology adoption, and credit as the biggest unmet need.
→ view all posts in this thread