Now
A sporadically updated log of what I’m reading, exploring, and thinking about. My Now page is more stable than a Twitter feed, yet less permanent than an About page.
2026 — The Long Game
This year the word is intentionality. Intentional about learning – not just tools and frameworks, but cultures, languages, and people. Intentional about earning – turning the skills I’ve built into wealth, and filtering out the unwanted streams and low-impact assets that eat attention without compounding anything.
It’s been a while since I’ve been a beginner at anything. Somewhere along the line, competence became the default setting, and that’s a comfortable place to stagnate. So this year I want to spend more time operating in the beginner zone – the “I’m just figuring this stuff out and don’t know much yet, but I’m sure gonna learn” zone. That posture is where the fastest learning happens, and I’ve missed it. Two quests make it concrete this year: learning to fly a plane, and learning Chinese.
The thread holding it all together is delayed gratification. I’ve been familiar with the concept for years, but 2026 is the year I’m actively relearning it – reminding myself of it daily. If I’m going to hit the targets I’ve set, the goals I’ve put out for myself, then I have to be willing to wait. Compounding only works for those who can leave things alone long enough to let it.
The practical shape of all this is a decision I made for 2026: I’m not renewing anyone’s contract at the end of the year. Before that happened, I made sure everyone landed somewhere good – recommending people into teams that needed them, and where I could, getting them hired outright. So now it’s just me at the company. But I’m a technical founder with years of SOPs, everything we learned and refined, and I can break all of that into an AI system and inject myself into a team as an independent contributor. I come in, solve the problem, and I’m out. Five days. Two weeks. A month if I really like the problem. For greenfield work, brief me and that’s usually enough; for brownfield, I spend about seventy two hours gathering context, then plan it, then sprint it.
I still keep a few lieutenants for special ops – the projects that run long, or need another engineer I trust. What’s changed is that nobody has to sit on payroll waiting for work, and I don’t have to build an organization around work that doesn’t exist yet. To hold up under it, I’ve started treating my body like an athlete’s – food, routine, exercise, even my mind – because I have to be the highest performing person on any team I join.
When I was growing the company, everything felt like progress: every hire, every office, every new country, every client. But each of those was also another dependency – more operations, more management, more payroll, more things that needed me. I don’t regret any of it; it’s where I learned to think the way I do. It just wasn’t taking me where I thought it was. I spent years trying to become independent by growing a company. Ironically, I became independent by ungrowing one.
2025 — Playing it safe
2025 was a normal year. Cool, regular, steady. Looking back from 2026, the honest note I’d write myself is that I played it safe. I leaned on the comfort zone – maybe not as much as I could have, but more than I’d have liked. If there’s one thing I’d do differently, it’s simple: take some bigger bets, come what may.
The part I’m glad about is that I made a lot of videos and content, which was very new to me. Working in a format I’d never really touched before was the one place I genuinely stretched, and it’s the thread I want to pull harder from here.
2024 — The quiet year
This was the year it all came apart, and somehow the year I’m most grateful for. The pipeline that had always felt endless finally stopped. Projects stalled, deadlines slipped, and a couple of clients running mission critical software on us took us to court. That taught me the hardest lesson in consulting: reputation is the only currency you have. I was never the smartest engineer in the room – what I had was trust, built years before I ever started a company. Once projects started failing, that trust was the first thing to go. Eventually the money ran out, people had to go home, and we shut the company down. I later dissolved the US company too, a Delaware C Corp that was all filings and overhead. The advice was simple: just dissolve it. So I did.
Then came the quietest stretch of my career. I had maybe ten thousand dollars left, and I wasn’t looking for work, raising money, or trying to start anything. On weekends I’d turn on Bolt and Uber and drive, and that covered food, electricity, coffee, the small things. I was living on about a thousand dollars a month. The rest of the time it was just me, my laptop, and silence. I genuinely thought I had failed. I’d gone from bragging about payroll to nothing, and I kept my head down.
I wasn’t entirely on my own, though. My friend Michael at Effect Studios quietly helped me stay afloat through that down period, and in return I was always glad to take on part time consulting across most of their projects. That kind of thing you don’t forget.
What I couldn’t see was that I was building a different muscle. I was just making apps for fun again, the same reflex that had produced ChatKJV, without thinking about money at all. Three people stayed in the Slack, more friends than employees, and we kept shipping because we liked building things. Somewhere in there I learned to time a trend and build fast enough to catch its tailwind, to let the trend do the marketing for me. I didn’t have a name for it then. Now I do: engineering as marketing. I also learned to look at any piece of software as a system, break it into parts, keep what matters, ignore what doesn’t, and ship. None of it felt like progress at the time. All of it was.
2023 — It all comes together
This is 2023… Q1 was tough. In January, our team worked on GovTech Election Intelligence. Given my existing expertise in building enterprise data solutions, this was a no-brainer. However, as a company, we lost some major partnerships and didn’t retain clients, which led to some layoffs and organization restructuring.
The feedback was that clients loved us in the idea stage – our team could bring thought leadership to even the craziest projects. However, after delivering the MVP stage, we didn’t excel at grunt/repetitive tasks, so it wasn’t a good business decision to retain us afterward.
While all this was happening, a chatbot I built, ChatKJV, went viral, leading to other AI experiments like ChatKitab and LabAI, with more to come.
So, I’ve decided to rally the Tecmie team around an AI vision, one that will empower humans to excel in their respective vocations by leveraging AI. AI won’t replace humans; humans who excel at leveraging AI will… Q2 is still a work in progress, but you’ll be hearing from me soon!
2022 — Nue Beginnings
With a diverse background that includes navigating the startup world, completing a world-class MBA program, raising funding for ideas, managing investor relations for a VC-backed startup, and building my expertise in various aspects of product development, my CV was quite full. In the early days of startups, being a generalist is often the norm.
As a free agent amidst uncertainty, I found solace in my company, Tecmie. It still had client retainers for some of the school portals and apps we had built, with about five retainer agreements still renewed.
Before the startup I had always been consulting, so I figured I’d do better experimenting on my own. I reached out to a few people in my network, relationships built over years, and the gigs started coming in. This was the Web3 and NFT boom, and there was a lot of money in the system – I started closing five figure deals. I even incorporated a Delaware C Corp just for the consultancy, with absolutely no idea what I was doing. Delaware. C Corp. Taxes. Filings. I should have known better.
I also set up shop across Ghana, Nigeria, and Rwanda, leaning on my Pan African network because that was my real edge. The work was interesting – a lot of Web3, crypto, and NFT based software, most of it normal software with a wallet on top. I kept hiring, and eventually we were twenty two people: lawyers, engineers, frontend, backend, operations. I remember bragging on WhatsApp about the payroll, because for the first time it actually felt like I was running a company. Before long I split it in two – a consultancy that paid the bills, and a venture arm where I actually wanted to spend my time, building.
I decided to revive Tecmie with a new vision, one that allowed for greater experimentation. I believe that COVID played a significant role in accelerating digital adoption across the African continent, making it ripe for ideas that might have previously seemed too early.
With a renewed focus on emerging technologies like blockchain and AI, our goal was to develop SaaS or productized models that leveraged these innovations. That’s where we are now – still figuring things out and pushing forward on our exciting journey.
2021 — Navigating the Startup world
In 2021, I embarked on a journey of unlearning and relearning everything I thought I knew, questioning my achievements and self-perception. The previous year, I had found love, co-founded KPILens, and raised a $100,000 pre-seed investment from MEST Africa. However, I still felt like I wasn’t good enough, which I later realized was “imposter syndrome.” This feeling doesn’t just affect newcomers – I believe even those we look up to may experience it at times.
Taking into account my earlier reflections on aggressive diversity, I left KPI-Lens in December 2021 – a company I had intertwined with my identity and an idea I had nurtured for two years. We had raised a pre-seed investment and collaborated with reputable organizations to validate our concept. This departure marked a turning point in my career journey.
That year I also read Rules of Management and Rules of Work by Richard Templar – two books that profoundly shaped my thinking about professional growth and leadership. They offered a practical, no-nonsense perspective on navigating the workplace and managing teams, which was exactly what I needed at that point in my journey.
2016–2020 — Finding A Tribe
The journey of my Tribe series started a bit earlier, with my involvement in developer-focused Slack communities and participation in the Moringa School program. However, MEST serves as the hallmark of this series, as it brought together like-minded individuals who faced similar challenges in tech, startups, and entrepreneurship across Africa, just as I had in Nigeria.
This experience felt like being in a room full of mirrors, reflecting individuals who battled the same challenges within different PESTEL narratives. While it was exciting, it also prompted me to explore the dynamics of diverse teams and how to manage them effectively.
This led to the founding of a data analytics company called KPILens, which brought together South African, Ghanaian, Ivorian, and Nigerian team members, including myself. However, reflecting on this experience made me realize the importance of striking a balance in team composition to ensure efficient communication, as aggressive diversity can sometimes pose challenges.
2010–2015 — Self Discovery
Tecmie grew post VPS. I also had to learn GIT by force after that because I never wanted to lose another piece of hard written code because I had no backups anywhere else apart from the server. With my work at the consultancy I got a job. Saturn communications a leading media provider in Nigeria had hired me to lead their I.T team.
They maintained and operated radio stations across the nation and hosted the largest half marathon in Nigeria Aba half marathon. I loved my work with them because they gave me creative freedom, and paid well for a then student.
I setup their whole infra on linux and removed as much dependency on windows firmware as possible, designed and built the marathon management system and implement a run tracker app for the participants also setup the websites and social media to get them running.
After Saturn (Magic FM) I was looking for adventures so I visited Ghana. My first visit to Ghana was in 2015 and the goal was to launch a tech training program (hartsworkshop) still running on Instagram. I loved the country and decided I was gonna visit again.
However hartsworkshop also exposed some of the gaps I had in tech, which made me wanna learn. So I came back to Nigeria and decided I was gonna move to Lagos. You see all my life I’ve lived in the south east away from the center of tech in Naija.
I eventually went through the struggle phase, met amazing people like Ade (Eat pray purpose) who gave me an even larger world view of how much potential tech has, and so I tried to leave my comfort zone again.
I returned back home and moved back to Lagos to work in a startup. Sendbox was my first startup experience and it was sooo much fun, I had the most friendly teammates and I believe I was the second Omo Ibo (Igbo boy) at my time there. The first omo Ibo is Moses (founder of topship as of now). While at Sendbox I got an offer to join MEST on a one year scholarship. So it seemed like once again Ghana was calling my name.
Early Days in Tech
I started a gossip blog with my sister Ruth, Terrylicious. We grew and started receiving 5k daily visits, eventually moving to a low-end VPS provider called Crissic when VPS was still a bleeding-edge thing. However, it cost us when Crissic got acquired by Quadranet. I missed the memo where they asked all clients to move their servers out (source). Sadly, we lost our VPS, and there was no way to recover Terrylicious, so Terry died a painful death.
After Terry, it was hard to recover everything, and given the poor VPS tooling back then, I had mixed up the Tecmie website, Terry website, and a couple of apps that got lost. In the end, we had to rebuild, but only Tecmie survived.