I grew up in Germany. I studied and worked in London. For eighteen months, I have lived above a garment factory in Tiruppur, an industrial town in Tamil Nadu.
The default question is why. The short answer is that you cannot build for an industry you are new to by visiting it. You have to sit inside it long enough that it stops performing for you.
When I was working on African government technology initiatives from London, I flew to Lagos for ten days. That already showed me some things you couldn’t learn remotely. Before founding DAITA, I spent six months visiting more than forty garment businesses across eight countries. That gave me a map. It did not give me fluency.
Fluency requires staying. A factory tour shows you a clean version of the work. 10 days show you what goes wrong. A year shows you the problems that sit below the problems.
For the last year and a half, I have probably done over one hundred fifty factory visits. That includes the research and the onboarding sessions. What does not show up in a count is the rest: sitting in people’s homes, sharing meals, attending weddings, becoming over time not a visitor but a familiar face from inside the industry. During this period I have also travelled across Asia to see how the work is done in other countries, so that what I am learning here has something to stand against.
The best AI software in the world is built out of San Francisco and London. I will not pretend otherwise. But building for an industry without being absorbed in it first is prone to friction, to misses, to a quiet dissonance between what the product does and what the work actually needs. Immersion is what closes that gap. It is an up-front investment of sacrifice into a long term strategy that creates not just a great product, but a company that can transform an industry. The decisions we make for years will be shaped by the rooms I have sat in, the meals I have shared, the conversations that only happen with people you have stayed with long enough to be trusted by.
For investors, this is the part that matters. You cannot build the best software for a complicated industry without living inside it for a while. The founders who do this absorb things that never surface in a market report or tour. The ones who do not end up building something that looks right from a distance and feels off on the floor.
The principle underneath it: depth is a function of proximity, and proximity has a price tag denominated in time. Eighteen months, and counting.
