Four streams. Not everything.

The list

Overture Residency is not an open brief. Founders can arrive without an idea. They cannot arrive without a problem set. The four streams are work, connectivity, local market productivity, and inference and compute. Each has a situation and a definition of evidence.

Work is getting work and changing it — unemployment and transition as one problem. Connectivity is useful access on prepaid and intermittent signal. Local markets is the operating system of a small firm — formation and operations, not another lender. Inference and compute is serving models and data at low latency in high-demand, low-resource environments — answers that do not have to go to a foreign region and back.

What is not a stream

Job boards. Learnership mills. Another LMS. A fibre pitch. A neobank. A dashboard nobody operates. “We will partner with a telco” with no product. Another foundation model. A US-region API with a local landing page. A GPU cluster with no power story. Impact, as a word, standing in for a buyer.

If a founder brings an adjacent problem, it can enter. It has to be as concrete as these four. We would rather do four things that can produce a company than twenty that produce a workshop.

How we will update this

Later letters will report on the streams as they are used: which problems founders actually picked, what customers said, what continued after Residency. Until then, treat this as the map, not the score.