In 2023, I moved with one of my closest friends from Oaxaca City and Mexico City. We are both trained anthropologists; while she was conducting Fulbright research on gender-based violence, I was working at the marketing consulting firm Column Five. Each day, we bridged the gap between the urgent issues surfacing from her interviews with community organizations and the growth strategies of some of the world’s largest tech brands. We experimented with applying those strategies to her work, knowing that USD$15 could sometimes transport a mother and her children from a dangerous situation…yet even that small sum was difficult to source at the scale we encountered. We were constantly grant-writing for American and European organizations—a time-intensive and arcane process.

Later, in other travels, I encountered different versions of the same dynamic: uncollected waste piling on the banks of thermal rivers between Guatemala and El Salvador; imbalanced negotiations between mining companies and the displaced rural Indigenous landowners in the Andes; suffocating pollution in Hanoi from the runoff of gas-powered motorbikes. Each problem was unique, but to me they share a common insight: small amounts of capital can be deployed to drive value-generating activities—businesses—arising directly from solving clear problems.

Between San Francisco’s capital abundance (what I’m coining the “Luma diet”—being fed daily at tech events) and the capital absence of the stories above, inhabiting these disparities often feels absurd. But there’s a method to the madness, a network of folks who are negotiating with one another. As an anthropologist, approaching this as a network problem underpins the inception of 0-k.

This is not a charity problem

What would it take for an investor in San Francisco to back a profitable but cash-strapped agritech business in rural Kenya without ever boarding a plane? How could USD$15 reliably reach a survivor group in Paraguay, without being eroded by fees and delays? Why should ventures in Hanoi, Lombok, and Jinja remain invisible to global markets simply because they operate outside established investment geographies? And why, when local entrepreneurs are ushering in unbridled development, are we still letting buzzy space ventures (literally) blow up dollars?

A great starting point to these questions is to isolate knowledge as a form of capital and track it as it flows. A disparity in flows of money is similarly reflective of a knowledge disparity. The actors in question here are the builders (organizations, entrepreneurs, small business owners) and funders (investors, charity vehicles, private equity in

• shared language & shared network

• insurance structures & assurance guidelines

• market metrics & models

Thinking towards a solution

The disparities outlined above cannot be closed with the frameworks that produced them. A common response is philanthropic transfer of funds, which meets immediate needs but leaves allocation mechanisms, verification standards, and market access structures unchanged. This section introduces perspectives for maneuvering within uneven markets and asymmetric networks:

• mapping the capital-deployment spectrum;

• treating knowledge as mobilizable capital with standardized;

• verifiable telemetry;

• reading ecosystems through network topology and trust pathways;

• and analyzing currency-bridge economics and programmable finance primitives.

Mapping the capital-deployment spectrum is one way to make these disparities legible. Every funding model operates within a set of constraints: what level of return it targets, how much risk it will tolerate, what level of transparency it requires, and how far geographically it is willing to reach. Philanthropy and grants sit at one extreme—accepting high risk and no expectation of return, often with minimal reporting requirements—while venture capital sits at the other—seeking high returns, demanding rigorous diligence, and concentrating in established markets. Between these poles are hybrid models like blended finance, which use public or philanthropic money to de-risk private capital, and impact investment, which targets measurable outcomes alongside moderate returns. Placing these models on a spectrum makes clear why many high-potential ventures in under-served markets never receive funding: they fall into a structural gap where capital must be both profitable and able to operate in contexts with low existing transparency and high transaction friction.