read time: probably longer than your commute - grab a tea
september – when i promised myself i’d “just focus on finals”
i came into my last year of uni with the kind of vow every over-extended 21-year-old eventually makes: no side hustles, no startups, no shiny distractions, just graduate.
didn’t last a month.
grades no longer gave me that stomach-tightening, nose-to-the-grindstone panic they used to. interviews for commodity-trading schemes? ghosted. “safe” master’s options? felt like concrete shoes. so i started sniffing around the edges of tech that still felt hard, still felt frontier.
One-week in Eastern Congo interviewing mercenaries, UN washed-officials, idols (de Merode ;) and profitable tech in nature looked impossible enough.
the accidental nature nerd origin story
Confession: I was never the “dude-with-zoology-posters” kid. My plush-lion phase lasted maybe three photo albums, tops. I grew up chasing Wi-Fi bars, not butterflies. So when friends hear I’m hanging cameras in the jungle they’re like, “new Pablo DLC?” Same energy as when your buddy from accounting suddenly starts doing Iron-Man triathlons. Weird flex but okay (foreshadowing maybe).
Rewind to September. Senior year of my math-comp-sci degree. I sell off every side hustle (RIP greasy spoon food-analytics SaaS) and promise myself:
This year = monk mode.
No startups, no ski trips, no 3 a.m. Figma benders. Just grades.
That lasted… eleven days. Then I did what every totally-not-distracted student does: priced out mountaineering expeditions on Google Flights. Fast-forward to 5 700 m on Aconcagua, tent zipped shut against a white-out, me scrolling Twitter courtesy of a shiny pizza-box called Starlink. Twenty Chilean pesos per megabit and I’m binge-watching Narcos above the cloudline. Brain goes ding!
“Wait. If I can crush Netflix up here, why are conservationists still hiking three days to swap SD cards in busted camera traps?”
That was the lightning bolt. Thank you, Elon, snowstorm, and my inability to enjoy Márquez on a Kindle.
san francisco - two weeks of terror & clarity
i crashed at Founders Inc. (“Hogwarts for builders”) hoping to polish a SaaS for restaurant chains again. one week in, heart rate flat-lined - zero joy. everyone around me was shipping B2B features; i kept doodling jungle sensor pods.
missionary > mercenary - that’s the campus mantra. it stuck. still, with midterms looming and family sanity on the line, i flew home. unfinished, embarrassed, but carrying the seed.
p.s: sf was actually beautiful, ill talk more about it someday.
the 3 a.m. email that changed everything
on my birthday, 03:00, insomnia. i cold-email Microsoft’s AI for Good lab (“hey, i might have a park in Congo that’ll test your new SPARROW edge units —- wanna talk?”).
reply in five minutes: “let’s jump on a call.”
momentum unlocked.
next step: find a park crazy enough to host prototype hardware. enter Salonga National Park, DRC - 36 000 km² of swamp forest, bonobos, forest elephants, zero cell signal. the director answered in Spanish (lucky break) and said yes.
why edge-ai in the jungle even matters
real-time telemetry = proof
if a park can stream HD video of a living bonobo family or measure carbon flux daily, it can finally sell biodiversity credits, eco-tourism, and research access instead of begging for grants.
deterrence through visibility
Poachers hate cameras. rangers love instant gunshot alerts. same device, different ML model.
ego, not monolith
the hardware is a solar-powered Jetson Orin Nano brain with a Starlink mouth. plug in thermal cams, acoustic mics, micro-lidar, whatever the research question demands. swap sensors like iPhone lenses.
content flywheel
24/7 live feeds → AI-edited shorts → TikTok & Twitch → fandom → funding. nature becomes Netflix, and the forest pays its own rent.
july - boots in the mud
i’m writing this from Yokelelu base: a half-built deck, generator fumes, mosquito buzz, but full bars (Starlink dish arrives tomorrow). our Microsoft units are still in customs limbo - Congo logistics roulette - so i’m hacking together sacrificial prototypes from surveillance cameras and scavenged solar panels.
first mission:
— position five rigs along the bonobo habituation trails
— train models to flag movement patterns (lateral knuckle-walk vs human gait)
— notify trackers via pings
if we pull that off without a device getting repurposed into a village water bucket, we’ll expand to Iyono’s elephant mineral bay and start 3-D mapping clearings with the Flip drone.
why i’m all-in
Because the planet’s “protected” areas are broke. Because humans protect what we can measure. Because climate models, carbon credits, and biodiversity bonds are starving for ground-truth pixels.
Also, honestly, because I’m addicted to ridiculously hard problems that smell like diesel and mud. The defense industry waved six-figure signing bonuses. I chose this because it feels like building internet infrastructure for the other 85 % of Earth that doesn’t have a Starbucks - yet.
If we nail this, parks stop operating like charities and start acting like data-rich utilities. Rangers get body cams, not IOUs. Local kids learn Python instead of ivory routes. And maybe - just maybe - when we start terraforming Mars we’ll know how to keep ecosystems profitable enough to survive.
what’s next
august: devices clear customs (manifesting).
september: live-stream the first bonobo troop; cut a trailer; test pay-per-view.
october: hardware v2 design sprint in Europe; raise seed.
2026+: 10 000 units, every biome, zero black boxes left.
if it works, awesome - we’ll have built the telemetry layer for Earth.
if it fails, at least the ants got a fancy new bucket.
epilogue - bonobo troubleshooting handbook
Yesterday a juvenile bonobo yanked the ethernet, stared at the blinking LED, and tried to eat the RJ45. I swear I felt seen. We all just want connection, right?
Anyway, thanks for reading my jungle ramble. Time to sign off before the satellite constellation dips below the horizon and my draft gets eaten by packet loss.
Catch you in the next episode - maybe titled “just tried to teach an elephant to reboot linux and now my keyboard smells like mud”.
Peace ✌️