ON October 16, 2025 Deel — a six-year-old start-up founded by two young entrepreneurs — announced a US$300-million Series E round at a US$17-billion valuation. Twelve days later, Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica, triggering one of the most destructive climate events ever endured by a small island state.

The juxtaposition is instructive. Deel, born in 2019, now generates over US$1 billion in annual revenue. Jamaica, with a gross domestic product (GDP) just over US$19 billion, now faces a nearly US$9-billion recovery challenge. The comparison is not meant to trivialise a history of national complexities by equating us to a start-up. It is meant to raise a deeper question: What does it take to build exponential value in a world defined by climate volatility — and why shouldn’t Jamaica adopt the urgency, ambition, and innovation mindset that drives the world’s most successful high-growth enterprises?

In this moment, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness finds himself in a role similar to a crisis-stage chief executive officer (CEO) managing immediate stability while reimagining long-term strategy. No well-thinking Jamaican aware of our history can hold the current Administration responsible for the scale of devastation we now confront. But its legacy will be defined by how it responds.

The recently announced US$6.8-billion recovery package from development finance institutions is meaningful, but it is overwhelmingly debt. Debt may stabilise the present, but it cannot transform the future. Jamaica needs something more catalytic: investment targeted at industries capable of producing durable, compounding returns — sectors that transcend the limits of our domestic market, such as technology and digital services, climate-resilient value-added agriculture, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy systems, an evolved tourism sector, and the cultural-creative industries that already give Jamaica global resonance.

Excellence Must Become National Policy

The centrality of technology to Jamaica’s transformation cannot be overstated. Technology is the most powerful wealth engine in human history. When Apple became the first publicly traded trillion-dollar company in 2018, it was considered a generational anomaly. Today, there are 11 multi-trillion-dollar companies — nine of them technology firms. The lesson is unmistakable: Industries built on creativity, data, intellectual property, and scalable digital infrastructure generate outsized, compounding value. If Jamaica is serious about rising incomes and building resilience, technology must become a national economic doctrine — not an inspirational talking point.

But capital and technology alone are insufficient. Jamaica must unlock something we have long constrained — the freedom for our people to create, experiment, imagine, and build without being crushed by bureaucracy, pessimism, or cultural suspicion. Nations that generate exponential value treat creators, innovators, and thinkers as indispensable infrastructure.

Jamaica has no shortage of creativity — our music, culture, design, ingenuity, and improvisational brilliance are world-renowned. What we lack are the systems that convert this raw talent into enterprise.

Artificial intelligence (AI) further expands the imaginative and entrepreneurial capacity of our people. It gives every Jamaican — whether farmer, musician, artisan, student, or small business owner — access to capabilities that once required large teams or overseas networks. With AI a single creator can design products, prototype ideas, automate operations, and market globally with the efficiency of a far larger enterprise. If creativity is Jamaica’s greatest natural resource then AI is the machinery that refines it into scalable economic value. The next Jamaican unicorn may not emerge from a factory or a corporation but from a single creator empowered by AI to transform imagination into global enterprise.

This is why Jamaica must begin treating its citizens as the founding team of a national start-up — trusted with autonomy, supported by enabling institutions, and equipped with tools that allow ideas to scale. That requires easier business formation, modern IP protections, national digital literacy, incentives for experimentation, and financing that rewards risk rather than punishes it. Our greatest multiplier is not land or minerals, it is the capacity of our people to generate ideas. The ambitions our island holds for its citizens must grow significantly.

Hurricane Melissa did not create Jamaica’s vulnerabilities — it exposed them. For decades Jamaicans have lived in a state of economic trauma shaped by low productivity, bureaucracy, crime, corruption, and the friction that makes earning a dollar harder than reasonable. Too many families lived in precarious conditions — board houses, pit latrines, and informal settlements — long before Melissa flattened them. Their resilience, while admirable, reflects survival, not prosperity. Rebuilding these conditions would condemn us to repeat our past.

The global response has been extraordinary, and we are grateful, but aid is temporary. The world will move on. Jamaica must rebuild on its own terms. Melissa has revealed that Jamaica possesses remarkable global goodwill — a form of soft power we must convert into long-term investment rather than dependency. “Build back better” cannot be a call for marginal improvement; it must be a national commitment to dignity, to modern infrastructure, and to climate-resilient engineering. Incrementalism cannot be the organising philosophy of a nation this exposed to risk.

What Jamaica needs now is a renaissance of ambition and productivity. Western communities, hardest hit by the storm, need new pathways into meaningful work — not short-term substitutions, but durable opportunities. Agriculture must evolve into climate-smart farming, hydroponics, vertical agriculture, and value-added export production. Our civic culture must evolve as well. Jamaicans are famously proud, yet there remains a disconnect between the pride we proclaim and the collective discipline needed to maintain a world-class society. Melissa, however, has unified communities in ways rarely seen in decades. Unity is a rare currency. If harnessed, it can help Jamaica rebuild not only its infrastructure but its social contract.

At the centre of this transformation must be Jamaica’s visionaries. Every nation that has leapt forward — from Singapore to South Korea to Rwanda — has done so because visionaries were empowered to challenge entrenched systems, build boldly, and disrupt stagnation. Jamaica needs individuals who refuse to accept mediocrity as destiny, who confront dysfunction with creativity, who see possibility where others see limitation.

The best institutions in the world bet on winners, yet our culture too often shuns winners as “too full of themselves” instead of embracing their winning traits. It is no accident that our Diaspora thrives wherever systems enable excellence. Jamaica must create those conditions at home. We must also shed the illusion of scale — the idea that an island of three million is inherently too small for excellence. Bermuda, Cayman, Barbados, and Aruba — all smaller or similar in size — offer their citizens a far higher standard of living. Our size is not our limitation; our systems and expectations are.

And so the question before us is simple but profound: Are Jamaicans allowed to dream and have nice things? Are we allowed well-engineered roads, clean public spaces, modern digital government, world-class infrastructure, seamless public services, and globally competitive industries? Or will we continue settling for the minimum viable version of our country, built on the quiet assumption that excellence is too expensive and un-Jamaican?

We have been given a painful reset — but also a blank canvas. Deel built a global enterprise from an idea in six years. Jamaica does not need to mimic a start-up, but it must adopt the mindset of one: experimental, ambitious, agile, and committed to unlocking the full potential of its people. What we choose to build on this blank canvas will define our future for generations.

Kirk-Anthony Hamilton is an architect-turned-entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder of the Infiniti Partnership and creator behind platforms including Tech Beach and the Visionaries’ Summit. He holds a professional Master of Architecture and is a leadership in energy and environment design accredited professional (LEED AP). He has worked on pioneering hospitality projects across the Caribbean, Latin and North America, and parts of Asia.

Kirk-Anthony Hamilton