Why I Wrote Your City Sucks!

Lagos taught me my first lesson about infrastructure before I knew the word for it. My parents were part of the great migration to the city in the 1960s and 1970s, when oil money was flowing and the government was building bridges, highrises and stadiums. Then I watched what came next: "a lesson in how quickly the dreams of one generation can become the maintenance nightmare of the next."

Every seat at the table

I trained as an engineer in Nigeria, then spent six years at Barking Power Station in London, working on commercial operations for a 1,000 MW gas plant and the trading systems behind roughly 250 MW of its power. That is where I learned that a power plant is a machine, but also a set of contracts, schedules and people who have to trust each other's numbers.

After my MBA at Chicago Booth, I founded Power2Switch, the first user-centric retail electricity marketplace, and grew it across five states until it was acquired by Choose Energy. At Clean Energy Trust, I sat on the other side of the table, leading the investment process behind five cleantech companies.

Then came water. "I founded a water technology company, Varuna, on the simple premise that no one should unknowingly drink water that is dangerous for them." We raised $3.7M and built a 30-person team across four countries. Selling into municipal systems taught me more about urban infrastructure than any textbook could.

Most recently, as Director of Cleantech Innovation at RWE in the US, I led the work that secured RWE's place in the $500M DOE Long Duration Energy Storage Consortium. Today I'm a co-founder of AsimovGrid, where we match excess grid capacity and water rights to large-load demand, and I advise utilities, developers and investors as a Principal at Asha Labs.

The lesson that kept repeating

Operator, founder, investor, corporate innovator. Different seats, same pattern. The projects that failed rarely failed because the engineering was wrong or the money ran out. They failed in the permitting office, the council meeting, the procurement process, the handoff between agencies that didn't talk to each other.

"The most important problems we face are not technical, but human."

That is what I mean by soft systems.

Why a book, and why now

Because the stakes keep rising. Cities are being asked to carry a new generation of infrastructure on soft systems that were already failing. The AsimovGrid tracker of community opposition to data centers now counts more than 135 cases across 38 states.

And because a feeling isn't enough to change anything. You can't take a vibe to a city council meeting. You need numbers. So I built the METRO Score, the Municipal Evaluation of Trends, Resilience, and Outcomes: a 0–100 health index built on 15 metrics. I ran it across 1,499 US cities. The median city scores 48.5.

What I hope you do with it

Read it, argue with it, and take one idea to your own city council meeting. Then tell me what happened.