I’m Abdel(-ouahid) — Partner at EmergingTech Ventures, a VC firm backing B2B deeptech founders native to North and Francophone West African markets that global capital has long overlooked.
I picked up BASIC from a book at fifteen, in 2000, and went down to the metal soon after: assembly, cryptography from Caesar to RSA, how software comes apart and why. Not from courses — from the underground forums and channels of the time.
I trained as an IT engineer and spent my career in finance and investment instead. Since the early 2010s I invested in companies that had little to do with code; in 2018 a VC fund was forming, and I moved across.
That is the seat this publication is written from: evaluating which technologies actually convert into real business and real impact, sitting in the boardrooms of startups and companies absorbing the wave, and building the AI infrastructure our own firm runs on. I didn’t trade the engineering for the investing. I added one to the other.
Technology is changing the world. Humans are still running it. Calibrated is where I write what that seat shows me — what technology actually does to people, organizations and markets, not what it is supposed to do. Experiments I run. Systems I build. Positions I earned rather than read.
Every piece rests on something I did or watched happen, not on a book or a headline. Where I’m uncertain, I say so. Where I could be wrong, I say what would prove it. No hype. No roundups of what smarter people said. No forecasts I have no business making.
About one piece a month, in English. Free to read, no paid tier.
If that’s your kind of reading, subscribe.
