Mikal Khoso

Hey I’m Mikal Khoso

I’m a global citizen and have lived in 9 cities in 8 countries across 4 continents.

Professionally I’ve spent time as a startup employee, startup founder and venture capitalist.

As a venture capitalist I have invested over $150 million across 30+ startups.

As a startup operator I’ve been part of the founding team (employee #6) of an edtech company and was COO of a design studio with over 45 employees.

Lastly I’m an avid writer and write Emergent, a newsletter about the fastest-growing businesses in emerging markets. I also used to write Trajectory, where I followed my curiousity and analyzed emerging technology trends.

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My Writings

  • Jumia: Amazon of Africa?

    The Rise of African Ecommerce Overview 2020 was an explosive year for ecommerce globally, with ecommerce businesses seeing their revenues soar, profits increase and valuations climb. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend was Jumia, which saw its valuation soar from lows of ~$2.50 in March of 2020 to highs of $65 recently. Jumia…

  • The Green Revolution

    2020 was a tipping point for clean energy globally. Amid the chaotic news cycle of the pandemic, this fact was mostly lost. Decades of research, investment and advancement culminated in 2020 to decisively change the economics of clean energy and start what will be a decades-long effort to redesign and rebuild our energy infrastructure globally.…

  • Machine Learning and Archaeology

    Archeology is a relatively obscure but deeply impactful discipline. Archaeology is critical to our understanding of human history. Moreover, the discoveries unearthed through archaeological work impact and help shape other intellectual disciplines such as politics, geography, demographics and more. In many ways archaeology is a foundational discipline that creates the base of data and historical…

  • Optimizing Complex Systems

    Efficiency has been a critical concept ever since the industrial revolution. Increasing productivity and efficiency have been core assumptions and goals of the field of economics since day one. Increasing efficiency is a complex challenge and there are numerous ways to do so. Typically, efficiency can be approached at a unit-level or at a system-level.…

  • A Fourth Industrial Revolution

    The rumors of the demise of American manufacturing have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, American manufacturing is experiencing something of a renaissance. In 2018, the United States added 261,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector, mirroring an increase of 207,000 in 2017. This job growth has primarily been powered by small, high-technology firms working with cutting-edge…

  • A World Data Organization

    The Rise of the “Sovereign Internet” The original dream that guided the early days of the internet, a dream of a free space for communication and commerce, is slowly coming apart globally. The internet has shifted from a free space owned by users to one monopolized by giant technology corporations across communication, commerce and search.…

  • The Autoimmunity Crisis

    Across the world a health crisis is quietly brewing. Diseases of autoimmunity are soaring across the globe and particularly so in the developed world. An autoimmune disease is when otherwise healthy cells provoke an immune response and are attacked and destroyed by the immune system. Autoimmune diseases are particularly pernicious because they attack the body…

  • Short-Termism in Capitalism

    “Modern capitalism is plagued by short-termism and myopia.” “Shareholders are king and everyone else gets left behind.” “The public markets hurt companies more than help them.” This is the popular narrative today and to some extent it is true. It is true that modern capitalism does present numerous challenges for public companies. Quarterly reporting cycles…

  • American Isolationism

    Today the American intelligentsia is increasingly up in arms at President Trump’s steady and consistent reining in of US foreign policy, military and economic engagement with the world. Hundreds of news articles in publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others have lambasted these decisions and the long-lasting damage that they are…

  • Surveillance in Public Spaces

    The space for privacy has been rapidly shrinking in the last decade worldwide. In 2013 American whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information on a massive global surveillance campaign being conducted by the US government in partnership with the Australian, British and Canadian governments. Facebook and Google are capturing and storing ever more detailed information about users…

  • Cellular Agriculture and Global Meat Production

    Meat has for thousands of years been an aspirational and rare meal for most of the world’s population. But as the world has rapidly modernized and industrial agriculture has taken off in the last 100 years meat consumption has soared globally. Industrial meat production however is a highly carbon-intensive activity. As the world begins to…

  • The End of University Inc

    Universities have long been critical components of public life and deeply formative institutions in the lives of many. Unlike in most nations, US universities also play a very active role in economic activity nationally thanks to their high tuition fees, extensive real estate holdings and the base of consumers and renters they bring to many…

  • The Antitrust Hammer

    The technology industry has seen almost two decades of explosive growth after many observers predicted the industry had died after the Dotcom Bubble of 2001. In the last 20 years a generation of superstar startups have scaled and revolutionised how we communicate, transact, find information and what devices we own and use. A lot of…

  • A COVID-19 Endgame

    The historic COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the modern world has continued to rage for a year now, after it first started in Wuhan in November and December of 2019. Today, 56 million cases have been confirmed globally (a guaranteed understimate of the true case numbers) with over 1.3 million people having lost their lives to COVID-19. Global economies…

  • Can AI Create?

    In recent years artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have developed at breakneck speed. Today you find them across the economy doing everything from underwriting risk for new loans to language translation and helping diagnose cancer. Not only can machine learning systems do these tasks successfully, they usually do them orders of magnitude better than…