What's happening?

Now.

My Now page offers a more stable way to share updates compared to a Twitter feed, yet it's less permanent than an About page. I use it to periodically share life updates, rather than on a daily or hourly basis. Think of it as a sporadically updated log, where I share what I'm currently reading, exploring, and pondering, keeping you connected to my latest interests and ideas.

Life updates

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.

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.

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 loose 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[linkedin]). 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.