PhD is for jobs - entrepreneurship is a different animal.
Rack up credibility by building real product - money follows. If you ran and sold a startup in the past that is a good start.
Kenya AI startups: SamaSource (data annotation), Apollo (agric), AIfluence (marketing) - have all raise millions of dollars.
Say that with your PHd. This is not silicon valley. Or I just dive in? I last did AI in UON campus 20yrs plus ago. The course outline seem to be same - Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning
Papers are useless or for jobs. Raw skills and drive matter.