Siddhartha Parmar / Writing
Writing
Essays by Siddhartha Parmar
Written from operating experience in Zambia. Six arguments on infrastructure, energy, space, conservation, product design and AI.
- Africa's Next Infrastructure Won't Look Like RoadsInfrastructure · 6 min read. We keep sequencing development in the order it happened somewhere else. The binding constraint here is not movement. It is information and power at the edge.
- Building Data Centres Beside HydropowerEnergy · 7 min read. Rural mini-grids fail for a boring reason. Nobody buys enough power. Compute is the anchor customer that fixes the balance sheet.
- Why Satellites Matter More Than FibreSpace · 6 min read. Fibre moves data somebody already has. Zambia's real deficit is observation. Nobody knows, week to week, what is actually happening on the ground.
- Adventure Businesses Are Conservation BusinessesConservation · 5 min read. Conservation funded by grants is fragile. Conservation funded by an operating company that needs the resource intact is durable.
- Design for Load SheddingProduct · 5 min read. Almost every product assumption imported from elsewhere breaks here for the same reason. It assumes continuity. Power, connectivity and cash are all intermittent.
- What Actually Breaks When You Deploy AgentsAI · 7 min read. Agentic AI demos beautifully and fails in specific, repeatable ways. After running them across five companies, here is the list nobody puts in the keynote.