Epic Win!

That was our team. 🔥

There are many Africans with a free $50k to $100k lying idle somewhere than we think. They keep cash as a contingency for many reasons. Anything can happen. Positively or negatively. Cash is sometimes worse than a dead asset. They keep it anyway. Most likely outside Africa.

I was having a chat with my best man about African investments and I could have tried to teach him ancient Sumerian instead. Dude’s mind is closed to Africa. He would rather invest in Dubai as it made more sense. Problem is there are African investments with much better returns.

I think Africa has a massive PR problem. The problems are real no doubt but the opportunities are also real. The news about the problems overshadows the details about the abundance of opportunities. I still can't forget the lady at @Ashesi who told me about African abundance.

I have seen magic done in 2001 with $285m raised all locally in a month for a deal. Over 20 years later, African startups are still hustling in a demo day abroad for thousands of dollars that other Africans already have to give but don't or can't. It is a complete mindfuck.

There is a reason African people don't believe too much of the good news. They have been brutalized and conditioned so much with bad news that it becomes their frame of reference. Where else can a train track be attacked twice in two days and nothing is said by the government?

What is the calculation of the super-rich Nigerian and why don't they run to the hills whenever there is an economic crisis?

I think because each crisis presents new opportunities with loopholes to gain advantage. I’ve once said that Nigeria is the world’s opportunity capital.

What Nigeria produces in abundance is opportunists. We don't do capitalism or socialism in Nigeria, we do opportunism.

Opportunism doesn't think long term about anything. It takes lemons and makes lemonade, then tries to create a lemonade monopoly to have outsize sales margins.

This is why we import when things are scarce. We trade when we are broke. Importation and trade are very short-term value creation processes without long-term upside. It is why our wealthy people are ”low-quality” according to @DoubleEph 😂

There is generally no production depth

Our banking system is also complicit in supporting this charade. It is why most of the nonperforming loans have been made to these same opportunists masquerading as the ”super-rich”. I missed the opportunity to add quotes in my first tweet. Their so-called wealth is qualified.

Something is fundamentally wrong when an economy is almost completely transactional. Yes, I have made money from fintech but I also see the long term damage of the current fintech hype. Nigeria as a country has been in one long hype cycle. This is why I keep saying it isn't real.

There is this inertia that most people in business who think they are successful have that prevents them from acting on things until it is too late. It is why they are caught unawares by change.

I read ”Only the paranoid survives” and I am seeing it play out in real life again.

Constant paranoia doesn't mean acting like a crazy person or even a mean and greedy person. It means that you are constantly aware that adverse change can make you irrelevant very quickly. The speed of irrelevance is much faster now and it largely depends on team types.

Some teams can be deluded. They believe too much in themselves because of past glory that it clouds their ability to see future danger. When the unexpected finally happens, they turn on each other and blame themselves and abandon the ship. They have always been living a lie.

Some teams can be totally ignorant of what is happening around them and can have tunnel vision. They end up working on products that have become irrelevant before they finish. They still believe somehow that others will adapt to them and csnf understand why failure happens.

Some teams can have extreme keyman risk. One person knows most of what needs to be done and nothing works well when that person is not in the picture. This type is more prevalent than we can imagine. Once one person takes more initiative, others just become passive.

One thing I am grateful about is the ability I have always had to keep living my life on my own terms without being drawn into trends. I am an obsessive extremist. I don't do middle ground obsession. When I love something, I don't do half measures. I can also do dislike that way.

What I have learned is that there are some trends you can't avoid even when you don't like the hype around them. One of those trends is crypto.

My boss @osuide ALWAYS without fail, predicts big things in tech. He introduced me to the Internet with my first infoweb account.

He introduced me to crypto too in spite of my misgivings. I bought $300 bitcoin and promptly lost it. The fact that I could lose something valuable that easily was my pain. I didn't at first see the bigger picture of custody aggregation. This was before coinbase became a thing.

I had actually searched for the domains ”bitbase” and ”coinbase” and maybe I even owned one of both domains at some point, I can't remember. I was, however, a very early adopter who dropped off when it seemed to become a fad. I was even on some ICO advisory board at some point.

I remember I wrote to @iaboyeji and @TechProd_Arch to take it seriously at Flutterwave. I also had a chat with one of the founders of the local exchanges about not using the .ng domain and using .africa to avoid the Nigerian government and their potential issues.

Sometimes I wonder if we should be building certain types of African organizations with obvious gaps in people resourcing?Then I remember what my uncle and his friends did for the financial sector with MAYO and PTC.

Edtech has actually been in Africa longer than we think.

MAYO/PTC was actually the first Ed-Tech company in Nigeria and also the first place I worked and did my NYSC. We took UK accountancy and banking institute materials and used tech to modify and republish local versions of study text for students preparing for professional exams.

We also provided prep classes and corporate training. This was how we also started @SwiftaSystems, it was initially from tech training before we moved to product development and services.

For tech, we were self-taught but we created a new market for ourselves with education.

Education ALWAYS comes first before adoption when it comes to tech. We aren't doing nearly enough at the moment. Everyone wants to build products for the educated market and ignore the uneducated market. Uneducated doesn't mean formal school, it is about industry and paradigms.

Current Ed-Tech initiatives are focusing on basic education but market education is a significant opportunity. No matter how simple you think your product is to use, there will be many who will not use it until they understand the fundamentals and why it exists at all.