Yesterday’s session was called Finish Lines. Every few minutes, he would start a sentence, a line, or a statement and ask you to finish it. As usual, all of them were good and witty, but this one was the most thought‑provoking, and it came quite early in the run: “Recently, I found out I was totally wrong about…”. I thought about it so much and had no answers.

Not because I’ve not been wrong recently. I really can’t help it. I’m wrong a lot. I have a girlfriend and an ex‑wife, so you can imagine there’s no way I’m not wrong at least once a day. My job also requires me to be. It’s the only way I’m able to learn. Being wrong keeps me from relying too much on pattern matching and heuristics. Being a parent also means I’m wrong all the time. You learn new ways to handle issues and correct mistakes. You realise, a lot, that you project your adult feelings onto kids who are just being kids. So yes, plenty wrong.

So how come I couldn’t come up with an answer when Coach Bennett asked? It turns out many of us experience being wrong as a threat to our ego, especially if we grew up being shamed or punished for mistakes. To protect our self‑image, we often minimise, deny, or quickly move past our wrongness instead of fully facing it. Of course, there’s a lot of nuance to keep in mind. Not all of us are the same. But if you grew up in cultures where a high premium is placed on being right, then you probably have a bit of this tucked away somewhere.

It is important, though, to remember when we have been wrong and to face our mistakes, so we can deal with them better when they come up again. Imagine having to write the same test every time simply because you will not admit you made a mistake and reread the material to correct yourself. It makes no sense.

Many years ago, I was wrong about something that is so relevant to my work now that I am grateful I never forgot that lesson.

Back in secondary school, around 2003, my friend Tim was the information officer – basically an information prefect whose job was to get news and important information to students. When we finally got internet connectivity and a cybercafe where different classes got 45‑minute slots each weekend, Tim took on teaching people how to use the internet. This was the first time most of us had seen Yahoo or created email addresses.

One day, Tim decided to write a comprehensive guide to using the internet – how to search on Yahoo, set up Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and basic internet concepts. He planned to make it a long article – it ended up being two A4 pages – and wanted to post it on noticeboards and read it at evening assembly. I told him people wouldn’t want to read something that long, that they’d figure it out themselves during their weekend sessions, that it was unnecessary since he’d walked me through everything in just a few minutes. Imagine that: I was the one he had to walk through the thing, and I still told him people wouldn’t need it.

Tim ignored my advice and wrote it anyway. The reception was incredible. People crowded around the noticeboards to read it, took notes, and tried to memorise parts of it. It was exactly the kind of key information people needed and wanted. I remember thinking, “I was so wrong about this,” and realising how easy it is to dismiss ideas just because they don’t make sense to you personally.

This story stays with me, especially in my current role. I interact with founders every day, knowing I can only fund maybe 1 per cent of the people I speak with. That doesn’t mean 99 per cent of the ideas are wrong. It is more about me: maybe I don’t understand the market, don’t have the money available, or simply have limited capacity for new investments.

The main thing is not to beat yourself up for being wrong, and not to hold on to rejection too tightly just because someone was wrong about you. Figure it out, but don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Tip of the day: Just do that thing. Don't wait till all the conditions are perfect. The structure will come after you thrown a bunch of random stuff out.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that I tend to see time very differently now. Time is a real compounder. I don't know why it took me so long to get it. I think it's because we don't pay for it beforehand. You kind of just get in on credit, and then it can take a while for your statement to come through. What's even more ridiculous is that we undervalue it and overvalue what it buys us. Time buys us what we need to buy everything else: money.

Let's put scammers and grifters aside: everyone you know who's rich paid for it with time. No matter how lucky you think they are, they put time into something, and it paid off.

Money aside, I've really been thinking about it in terms of skills. It's crazy how much better you get at stuff when you put time into it. I've seen lots of people go from terrible to amazing at something just because they put time into it. We tend to ascribe luck and natural aptitude to people who just spent time grinding when we weren't looking.

But time has a preference for how it's spent, and that's with consistency. I took a course a few years back on learning how to learn, and it's mind-blowing how much consistency compounds over time. I see this a lot with cooking. People think cooking is hard and you have to have "the hand." That's probably true for Michelin-starred chefs, but definitely not for you. Consistently practise cooking, and over time you start to understand flavours and timing. Then one day your friends can't believe you made such a great plate. But you had to endure a lot of bad stuff to get there, and even just toss some out.

Okay, let me get to my point. Don't underestimate how much time matters. Spend a little consistently on something and you'll be surprised at how much progress you've made. I know it's a struggle because we've been conditioned to focus on short-term results and quick gain — and for many of us, long-term thinking is really a luxury. But if you keep looking too close, you'll never see far enough to plan for the obstacles ahead.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Tip of the day: Close all those tabs — in your mind and on your browser. They're slowing you down. You don't need all of them. 😌😌😌

For the first time in a long time, we are facing the reality that we simply can't leapfrog our infrastructure gaps. In an age where AI is redefining everything in ways more remarkable than the invention of the internet, we've suddenly found ourselves way behind: no water, no power, no data. And the road networks needed to build all of this are poor. We seem to be at a very big disadvantage.

But if you flip it, now is suddenly the best time to build all of those things. If we start from the fundamental belief that demand for compute is infinite, then investments in infrastructure start looking like they can deliver real commercial returns. Technocrats and bureaucrats can now see that there's never been a better time to drive incentives for public-private partnerships. What they did for telcos (arguably stretching it here), they can do for every key sector now. This is a great moment for investors close to governments to start making that case.

For founders, this means we can now attempt to build the hard things. Thanks to improving technology, it's getting cheaper to plan, predict, generate, and iterate productively. Don't confuse any of that for things automatically becoming easier. Building anything that generates real value is always hard.

So yeah, I'm excited about the future. I just hope it won't be a waste of excitement.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how to talk about the things people like to talk about in the way they like to talk about them. If I grew up in my son’s generation, I’m fairly sure someone would have slapped a learning-disorder label on me. I just want to get to the point, which means I often don’t bring a lot of colorful language or elaborate framing to the table.

On top of that, I seem to process things slowly. I’ve heard you, I understand you, I just need to mentally review what you’ve said. But because you want me to respond as fast as you did, I start talking anyway and fill the silence with fluff while my brain catches up. My system 2 runs faster than my system 1, which is unfortunate because system 2 is supposed to be the slow one. People close to me have learned to be patient. If you’re my sister and you’re stuck talking to me, I genuinely feel sorry for you.

“Okay Joey, those are all excuses. You could just write like everyone else.” Thanks for that. The problem is, I’m painfully shy, even when it’s just me and my computer. If I don’t know you and we’re in conversation, know that it’s taking everything in me to engage, and I’ll need at least a day to recover afterward. And there’s this Maurice Switzer quote I read in secondary school that has lived rent-free in my head and quietly sabotaged my adult life: “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”

So yes: odds are you’ll get bored, annoyed, or exhausted.

But I want my next performance review to be fantastic. So prepare yourself: you’re about to be hit with a lot of sparse, incomplete, foolish thinking. You’re welcome.

On today’s episode, I finally built software successfully with a coding agent.

I’ve been trying to do this since I first touched ChatGPT in 2022. I’ve watched these tools go from truly terrible at writing simple code snippets to genuinely useful, at least if you’re not a code purist. And honestly, most of us who need these tools have no business being purists about anything.

In 2021, a lawyer came to me with a product idea. I told him to go read a product management book if he didn’t want to waste his money, and more importantly his life, building an MVP. Today, I’d just tell him to pay $20 for Claude and he’d have an MVP in a few days.

I’ve also spoken with founders who want to test ideas quickly without adding engineering costs or distracting their teams. Now they actually can do that without blowing up the budget or the team’s cadence.

These are the people who really need this. I don’t buy the narrative that engineers are going to lose their jobs. They’ll actually become more valuable and better at what they do.

If you’re worried about losing your job to AI agents, don’t be, unless you’re unwilling to become a better manager or architect. Then you should be worried, because that’s what the role will demand over the next few years.

Anyway, here’s what I built along with Claude. If you work in VC and you’re curious, fork it, improve it, and use it for your portfolio. If you are a DFS Lab portfolio founder or want to just send me updates for fun because you know I like them, come help me test.

See you soon.

Took out this bit from an article I wrote a few years back. Sharing this because I'm thinking about the topic of AI a lot more these days (duh) and my views here show just how difficult it is to predict the future.

A member of the audience recently had an experience with a web service that automatically generated a logo for his business along with different applications of the logo within a couple of seconds. He was largely satisfied with the result and was pretty impressed by the fact that it got done at a fraction of the time and price he’d have spent if he had engaged a human designer.

My reply to this in the context of which the question was asked is pretty simple. AI won’t take the job of visual designers.

Constance made it quite clear in his response that the designer’s duty is to solve problems, no matter what those are. But we differ in that while he believes visual designers will become obsolete in a couple of decades as intelligent systems will be able to do most of what they currently do, I’m more of the opinion that it’s the tools visual designers use that will evolve and AI will play a huge part in optimizing their decision making process.

AI in its current state is best suited to replace tasks that are patterned and/or predictable. Though some processes in a designer’s workflow are predictable and can be automated, the work of designing in itself is not predictable. We tend to forget that as much as designers love to follow patterns to make their jobs easier or faster, a large part of the choices they make are based on intuition. It might not be perfect, but it has a key component — the human touch.

So how will AI come into a designer’s workflow? To go with yesterday’s theme of colour picking, instead of spending hours agonizing over what shade of blue to pick, which is probably as a result of not knowing enough about what my a large number of my audience will be comfortable with, an intelligent system will help me analyse research data it’s collected from my potential audience and show me the best shade of blue that will work. Another scenario could be presenting me with a range of page layouts my audience will most likely be comfortable viewing my content on and saving me a huge amount of time designing mockups and coding prototypes that end up wasted.

I’m no AI expert and could be very well wrong. Please make room for that. My thoughts on AI taking over our jobs are largely informed by a couple of articles I’ve read over the last few years, one of which is this McKinsey report from last year.

If I want you to take anything from what I’ve written, it’ll be this: roles will evolve, tools will change and titles will become irrelevant, but the core duty of a designer won’t change — solving problems. And the only way to avoid getting left behind is to never stop learning. Constance and I will definitely agree on this.

But that’s not true. If you have an investor who only wants to hear from you when things are going well, that’s a red flag. You should avoid those kinds of investors at all costs.

I always encourage founders to view updates as something they do for themselves and their team. It’s a useful exercise for regularly reflecting on how the company is doing—what’s working, what isn’t, and where help is needed. The earlier you are in building your company, the more frequently you should send updates. That’s because early on, your strategy will likely evolve faster, and it’s a good way to track and manage these changes.

When you’re caught up in the daily grind, it can be hard to see the bigger picture. Investor updates bring in trusted perspectives that can help you identify blind spots. And importantly, they provide an opportunity to ask for help. As a founder, it’s easy to feel isolated or overwhelmed, but there are people out there who can help you. Even if you don’t think your investors can directly solve a problem, they likely know someone in their network who can—and many investors are happy to make introductions or provide support.

If you’re unsure what to include in your updates, don’t overcomplicate it. Here’s a simple format I recommend:

1. Reminder of what your company does.

2. Progress so far: You can break this down into highlights and lowlights.

3. Summary of key metrics.

4. Plans for the next month.

5. Team news.

6. Ask for help.

7. Appreciate past help.

That’s it! Not so complicated, right?

The key takeaway: Investor updates are for your benefit just as much as they are for your investors. Keep them regular, be honest, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’ll go a long way in building a strong, supportive relationship with your investors.

To give you an example, here’s an update I wrote to investors back in 2018. Of course, I polished it up before sending it out, but it almost followed this basic structure.

##Product##

We began work on changing our frontend stack to web based frameworks and are making great progress on that. At our current pace, we’ll be able to meet our target of having our apps live by the end of March.

In the last month, we made major improvements to our web app and backend infrastructure, breaking up our monolith application into small services that can be called independently. This has made releasing feature updates on our web app a lot easier, the first of which will be going out by the end of the week. With over 17,000 unique visitors monthly, we consider our web app a key product channel and will be releasing/testing new features on it pending the release of our new mobile apps.

We made upgrades to our back-office software with a major focus on fraud detection. There’s still a lot to do, but we are happy with the results so far.

A major hurdle our customers have always faced is having to fund their wallets using existing payment instruments. This has also affected our active usage over time. To solve this, we began talking to Providus Bank to allow us create Wallet linked NUBAN accounts for our customers. This means every Wallet customer get a Providus account number that money gets deposited into and their wallets get funded instantly. We’re in the later stages of this integration and hope to roll it out with our app update in March. We’re positive this will increase active usage of Wallet accounts and we immediately expect to see a jump in transaction value and volume.

A key part of our growth strategy is opening up Wallet to customers outside Nigeria - especially travellers and emigrants. We’ve begun talks with partnership talks with Visa (cards) and Stripe (foreign bank account funding) to provide solutions that help us target this group. If talks continue as smoothly as they’ve gone so far, we’re positive that by the end of the first half of the year, we’ll be generating a lot more revenue.

Still on the subject of growth and new ways to generate revenue, we’ve been in talks with Luno to explore how we can integrate cryptocurrencies into our product offering. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be running a promotion in partnership with Luno that will help us gauge customer interest in crypto. Results from this promotion will determine our next move in this direction.

##Operations##

As we process more volumes, our card funding and bank transaction costs continue rise. This means we’ve seen our unit economics makes less and less sense based on our current model. To fix this, we’ve started renegotiating our existing deals with partners and begun working on new partnerships that help bring down our operating costs and open up new revenue streams.

##Team##

We let go of a couple of people last month, bringing our number down to 9. John and I are learning hiring lessons fast and are particular about ruthlessly editing our team as we grow.

##Key Metrics##

Signups: 2,074 -19.61% MoM

Transaction Value: N1,130,967,343.36 +25.28% MoM

Transaction Volume: 73,413 +26.72% MoM

Revenue: N4,269,153.54 +15.39% MoM

We continue to see a slow down in signups and consider this a correction as the hype over the government’s Trader Moni scheme dies down.

We’re pleasantly surprised by the growth in transaction volume and value as we had feared December was going to be an anomaly due to the expected spike in transactions around the festive season.

##Burn##

N4,478,882

##What do we do?##

Short Term: Wallet is building the digital bank of the future. You can download the Wallet app and open a banking account in seconds. The Wallet app can be used to send money to any bank in Nigeria, pay bills and make payments anywhere on the internet via a virtual dollar card.

Long Term: Wallet aims to be Africa’s foremost borderless digital bank, allowing people transact seamlessly across the continent using any currency of their choice. This means we want people to be able to perform localised financial transactions in any African city Wallet operates in; just like Uber does with the taxi experience.

For a long time, I struggled to feel content with my own journey. I spent so much energy worrying about being left behind that it often left me unmotivated and stuck. It took a lot of time and mental conditioning, but eventually, it clicked—I woke up one day and realized that the only race I was running was against myself, not anyone else.

I’ve seen this struggle even in some of the smartest people I know—they compare themselves to those around them, overthink, overanalyze, and ironically end up becoming exactly what they feared: stuck in mediocrity.

I wish I could offer a straightforward guide on how to avoid falling into this trap, but it’s a journey each of us has to navigate on our own. It takes a great deal of self-awareness, and that’s the key: your only competition is who you were yesterday. Some of the most successful people I’ve met are driven by an internal desire to succeed, independent of what others around them are doing.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be inspired by others; just don’t measure yourself against them. I’ll leave you with the iconic line from Kanu’s old Peak Milk campaign: “You need to believe in yourself! It’s in you!”

For me, the answer is clearly electricity. Growing up on the outskirts of Lagos, electricity was a high priority. Generators were rare, and solar panels were virtually nonexistent. We relied solely on NEPA for power. In contrast, we built our own roads and could buy water just a couple of streets away. I'd have to think hard to consider any other answer.

But, as it turns out, electricity is the wrong answer. When you think about it more deeply, roads were the foundation of civilization long before electricity existed. Roads enabled trade, war, the expansion of empires, and even escape from threats like Genghis Khan. They’ve been both a blessing and a curse, but undeniably essential to our survival and dominance as a species.

So, why am I writing about roads? I love pondering how things used to be and how the past can inform the future—looking back to move forward. It might sound counterintuitive, but I enjoy it. I spend a lot of time on Google Maps' Street View, which is a great way to see how much development has occurred in an area over time.

Lagos is a paradox when viewed this way. There’s as much development as there is decay. And what better way to illustrate this than by looking at roads? We keep piling commercial development onto poor infrastructure. More people use poorly constructed roads and inadequately designed road networks that haven't kept pace with the growing population. This leads to broken roads, chaotic traffic, and pedestrians risking their lives just to get lunch.

So, what can be done? I wish I could offer a solution that makes commercial sense for private investment, but there isn't one. We’ll need to keep cycling through politicians until we find one who takes infrastructure development seriously. Maybe a group of dedicated urban planners could create an open-source framework for local governments to adapt. Mark Essien also suggested something a while back.

Anyway, now I’ve shared my concerns with you, and I feel a lot better. Thanks for reading. Bye.

As you can guess, I paid for it. I spent five years in senior secondary school instead of three because Mayflower would rather have you repeat than ruin their stellar WAEC exam records. Luckily, I started school super young, so I had time to spare. I didn’t even bother with JAMB exams, and Leke and I ended up spending the money on food, which he felt guilty about for ages 😂😂😂, sorry Leke.

Despite my lack of interest, I made friends who loved school. Tim, Leke, Chinedu, Yomi, Lola, Daniel, Ayo, and others made it look easy. Then there were the JETS club members, treated like royalty at Mayflower. They got to represent the school at competitions and received hero’s welcomes when they returned. They took advanced classes, got extra attention from teachers, and seemed to enjoy it. They all aced their exams and most if not all got into university on their first try. Looking back, their schedules were brutal—studying more than 10 hours a day, including weekends. I admired them and wished I could be like them.

It wasn’t until I got to university and studied on my own terms that I realized I didn’t hate school—I just didn’t know how to learn the way my teachers wanted me to. I still ended up dropping out, but I discovered that I love learning, just in my own way. This realization gave me a new appreciation for education and got me thinking about how to make learning more accessible for people like me.

This brings me to Michael. We weren’t super close in secondary school, but I admired him and his friends. They were the math geniuses, tackling problems that seemed impossible to me (it took me years to realize I actually love math—I was just lazy!). Michael went on to graduate with great grades, got into university, became a top salesman, went to Stanford, and co-founded a YC-backed startup which I happily invested in. You can read more about his inspiring journey here and check out his book—you’ll love it.

So why mention Michael? In a time when education is often deprioritized and everyone wants to be an entertainment star, Michael is making education cool again. For the past three years, he’s been running The Adewale Students' Conference. I support it every chance I get because it shows kids that you can be an academic star too. I desperately hope it grows beyond Ogun State, reaching secondary schools nationwide and universities, sparking the interest needed for STEM research that truly advances society.

If you're inspired to donate or help in any way, buzz Micheal, he's too passionate about this to not respond.

I've reviewed a few fintech financials, and it's frankly astonishing that in 2024, some practises appear reminiscent of those from 2012. Seun and I spend a lot of our time together trying to understand why many fintechs still make these mistakes with the wealth of knowledge out there.

Before I continue, keep in mind that this is an overly simplistic view of things to consider when building a fintech. But for many of you, it's a very important base. Plus I'm not trying to write an academic paper here.

Let me explain this as I used to at Wallets to my colleagues. Imagine a customer deposits 100 naira into their account, and you claim the deposit is free. In reality, we know there's a cost to you, let's say 10 naira. So the actual value you have is 90 naira, but the customer sees 100 naira in their wallet. If you were a bank, you might invest 40 naira of that 90 to earn some interest, potentially increasing the total to 110 naira, covering the deposit cost. But as a non-bank, you're left with a deficit. Now, scale this scenario up to thousands of customers, and the picture gets grim.

The immediate question to most people is: why absorb this cost? It's a strategy to attract customers in a price-sensitive market, hoping to upsell later. However, the crux of the matter is recognizing this as a cost, a debt to your ledger. Unfortunately, many don't even maintain a proper ledger, leaving them unprepared when a surge of withdrawals happens, not to mention potential fraud attacks. All you wanted was to offer a better banking experience, but now you're in debt over money you didn't actually spend.

Here's my advice:

1. Don't start a fintech unless you understand finance and how to maintain a core-banking service.

2. Always cover your costs (set-up a general ledger for transaction costs you assume on behalf of your user).

3. Have separate bank accounts and isolate transactional funds from your operational funds.

4. Prioritise hiring a finance expert even before bringing on your first engineer (if you cannot hire, get people with solid experience in this area to advise you).

5. Be honest with yourself and your team to avoid misleading your customers.

6. Religiously run your EOD, EOM, EOQ and make sure it all adds up!

Sometimes the ideas make sense but one can't see how big the market potential is. Many times as a result of being knowledgeable about the subject matter, we don't account for outliers or surprises. Experts are many times overconfident in their thinking.

Sure, one doesn't want to be dumb and clueless especially when there's a fudiciary duty to profitably return capital to investors. But there's a reason incumbents keep getting disrupted. Whether that's because of what Ben Thompson addresses here or because research shows that innovation at startups outperform the R&D departments of big companies, you want to make sure you're not so smart that you miss what in retrospect should have been a no brainer opportunity.

Bessemer Ventures' anti portfolio is a such a great place to get humbled.

Ultimately one has to figure out a way to remain eternally curious and excited. It's one of the best ways to enjoy the gruelling journey of being a passenger in the hot air balloon that startups tend to be, whether you're a founder, operator or investor.

In the journey of starting something new, whether it's a business, a project, or any venture, overcoming inertia and analysis paralysis are among the most significant hurdles. We often fall into the trap of over-planning, creating exhaustive lists and strategies that, while impressive on paper, lead us nowhere because we never actually begin. Alternatively, we might embark on our journey only to be stopped in our tracks by anxieties and doubts about what the future might hold. Sometimes, the issue is that we set our sights too high too soon, establishing monumental goals that, while aspirational, are simply unrealistic in the early stages.

So, how about adopting a different strategy this time? Consider the virtue of starting small. Take pleasure in the completion of each small task. Recognize that it's the aggregation of these little things that, over time, weave together to form the tapestry of your grand vision. Each minor accomplishment is a brick in the foundation of your larger goal.

Moreover, understand that starting small doesn't mean thinking small. It means setting realistic, achievable goals that, step by step, lead to larger achievements. It's about iterative development, learning, and adapting as you go. With each iteration, you gather feedback, learn from real-world interactions, and refine your approach. This cycle of build, measure, and learn turns your initial idea into a continually evolving and improving entity.

Starting small also means being nimble and flexible. It allows you to pivot and make changes without the heavy burden of sunk costs or the daunting prospect of steering a large, unwieldy ship. You're more agile, able to respond quickly to changes in the market, customer preferences, or your own learning and insights.

Remember, the most towering trees begin as the smallest seeds. They don't burst forth from the ground in their final form; they grow gradually, weathering storms and droughts, adapting and strengthening over time. Similarly, by starting small with your project or venture, you allow room for organic growth, resilience, and adaptation.

Embrace the small beginnings, cherish the journey, and understand that each step forward, no matter how small, is a step towards achieving your larger goal. This is the power and promise of starting with an MVP. It's not just a product or a project; it's a philosophy of growth, learning, and adaptation. So, take that first small step today, and begin the journey towards something truly great.

Happy new year!

PS:

Always happy to talk about stuff.

You see, critical thinking is typically something you should learn in school, particularly at university. However, due to the passive nature of our educational system, it's often not taught effectively, if at all.

Some people are fortunate to be exposed to critical thinking early in life, perhaps through parents, a well-educated aunt, or a teacher who encouraged active thinking and interaction. Unfortunately, the majority of us don't have this opportunity. Many of us were born after the 70s, a time perceived as the golden era of education, or we had our intellectual curiosity stifled by society. Yes, let’s blame society for this.

This lack of critical thinking has resulted in a generation that believes itself to be knowledgeable but is, in truth, merely consuming information presented by respected individuals. This explains why we often repeat actions, expecting different results, why we replicate ideas without understanding the nuances of our specific situations, and why we cling to the same beliefs without challenging them.

Interestingly, we are all born with an innate desire to understand everything around us. This is evident in the endless "whys" of toddlers. But as we grow, influenced by adults, we often adopt a preference for order and structure, sometimes forcibly. Forward-thinking societies recognize this issue. They understand that while structure and order are important, innovation rarely arises from strict adherence to them. Thus, they have developed educational systems that encourage questioning and fundamental exploration, fostering critical thinking.

These advanced societies are not perfect and still stifle original thinking in many ways, but they at least teach critical thinking. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case everywhere. In some places, critical thinking is neither taught nor encouraged, leading to a generally mediocre society.

Reflecting on my personal journey, I worried about my lack of critical thinking skills for a long time and tried to remedy it through reading. This approach was unsuccessful; I merely absorbed information without processing it. Then, about 12 years ago, Seyi advised me to start writing. Writing forces you to think, to form and refine your thoughts on a subject. This process doesn’t require public sharing or publishing, just personal reflection and refinement.

However, writing alone isn’t enough; you also need to engage in debate, as I learned from Emeka. Engaging with those who are likely to disagree with you can be challenging, often making you feel foolish. But through this process, you identify flaws in your logic, improve your reasoning, and ultimately enhance your critical thinking.

Forcing yourself to form your own opinions on topics you find interesting or are involved in is a powerful way to practice. It’s challenging, especially as an adult accustomed to mental shortcuts, but it’s essential. There’s a tendency to lean toward answer fluency, which is the speed at which one comes up with an initial, intuitive answer to a problem. While useful for creative thinking, this can be a barrier to critical thinking.

All that being said, it’s important to remember that you don't always need to reinvent the wheel. Relying on established mental models and heuristics is often acceptable. You need a solid understanding of these concepts to apply them effectively, but they don’t always require in-depth critical thinking. They can serve as a map filled with shortcut routes for your thought process.

I’ll leave you with a part of a message from Jake, who rightly criticized me for saying I didn’t need an opinion on something he shared for review: "…if you don't have anything to say, it means you didn't put enough thought into it."

“What we love about music is not that it sounds good. What we love about music is that it sounds inevitable. It’s playing the thing that we all know is unfolding. Whether we want to accept it or not…”

Hearing those words, I couldn't help but think of all the stories about companies shutting down or laying off people.

Every time one of those stories make the news, my friends are quick to seek my opinion and hear what went wrong. It’s tough to give an answer if you’re not in the room, so more often than not, I find myself telling them “it could have been anything and this is actually the norm.” So why do we keep starting and funding companies if it’s so hard to do? Well, to paraphrase Jon, it’s inevitable, and this is how we learn and evolve.

There are a lot of reasons a company can fail. From running out of money, choosing the wrong strategy, not being what the market needs, to cofounders falling out. A lot of reasons. As long as you have people willing to take the risk to start something new, you’ll have stories of these companies dying. Think about it, we all know at least one person who’s entrepreneurial in our close circles, many who seem to have a new business idea every other month. Not only do they have these ideas, the execute on them, and many fail. Sounds like your mum? Yeah? Same story here, only this time it’s more public. And I can tell you one reason why. We romanticize the idea of creating companies.

I remember very clearly in the early days of the current startup scene in Lagos, it wasn’t sexy to build a company. At all. If you were spending time building a startup at CcHUB, you were just a nerd with an affinity for ‘suffer head’. No one was throwing money at you left right and center, and if by some stroke of luck, you raised money it was always so small or came with a lot of conditions, people congratulated you with caution. To make ends meet, you most likely had a job. Somewhere along the line, things changed. I don’t have the energy to go into when exactly. But they changed sha. Founders became celebs, raises were congratulated, companies with no hopes of even ‘bad revenues’ were paying top dollar salaries and had fancy offices. In all of these, the hard work that goes into building companies became abstracted.

Building a business is hard and the probability of failure is much higher than many of us admit. We’ve masked all that hard work behind the fancy articles, tweets, sponsorships and events, but it’s always there waiting for us. For the founders and their teams, consider this a coping mechanism for the myriad of problems they wake up to everyday. But we can’t pretend that it’s not hard and failure is always a more likely outcome than success. So what we are witnessing is normal. Companies will die, people will lose their jobs, sectors will consolidate and bad actors will leave. But that’s okay, because that’s what always happens as systems evolve.

Last year, I sent a note out to our founders telling them to prepare for the long road ahead. If you’re currently building a company, my advice remains the same. Corrupting Jon’s beautiful words slightly: what we love about building companies is not that it feels good. What we love about building companies is that it is inevitable. It’s creating the future that we all know is unfolding. Whether we want to accept it or not.

If I had a dollar for every time a would-be founder told me they haven't launched because they lack funds, or for every email pitch I've received from founders claiming they only need $250k to kickstart their venture, I'd be quite wealthy by now. They have no waitlists, no Letters of Intent (LOIs), no prototypes—nothing, yet they’re asking for how much? Loool.

Alright, let’s get to it.

Do you really need all that money?

When considering starting a company or stepping into the founder role, you need to think about money at different stages: the start-up phase, scaling beyond your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and the growth stage. Each stage demands distinct funding types, which is why there are various funding rounds. Let’s focus on the initial stage for now.

Money is undoubtedly vital, but attracting investors can be tough when you’re just starting out. If you’ve amassed a wealth of experience in a related field or played a key role in a prominent startup, you might have a shot at raising funds based on your background. But often, that’s not the case, leaving many founders starting from scratch with no prospects for outside funding. I encourage aspiring founders to really ponder what they need the money for. Many seem to lack clarity in this area, so let's look at it together.

In my view, in the beginning, you typically don’t need a large sum of money. Your financial needs usually fall into categories like personal expenses, company setup, essential tools, and customer acquisition. You'll have to be disciplined and precise in managing these costs.

For personal expenses, I suggest saving enough to sustain yourself for at least a year, ideally two. Be prepared to dramatically alter your lifestyle. It’s a sacrifice worth making if things pan out. Too many people cling to their comfortable, well-paying job habits—please stop. That won’t cut it as a founder. If you're well-off, that’s great. But if not, adjust your expectations.

Be ready to live modestly for a couple of years. This is serious; expect to be financially strained as a founder. It’s okay to keep your day job while validating your idea, but don’t expect investors to fund you during this phase. If you can’t afford basic costs like company registration and domain purchase, maybe starting a business isn't for you. Family and friends might help with these small initial expenses.

Remember, if maintaining your current lifestyle is non-negotiable, then perhaps entrepreneurship isn't your path. Many founders need to cut back, unless they’ve saved substantially or have a side business generating passive income.

How to ‘build’ with no money

Now that we have gotten some things out of the way, let's talk about the most important bit of your new life; building with no money.

Product development is where I see many stumbling. You should be able to craft an MVP, a prototype, or a landing page and build a waitlist without hefty funding.

Numerous no-code tools are available to help create a basic version of your product for sale to potential clients or customers. Use free resources like Google Forms, Zoho Mail, Airtable, Notion, Coda, Webflow, etc. Learn as many skills as you can, or ask friends for free help. Engage with communities and connect with people who might want to gain experience by working on your project or idea. Early on, hiring shouldn’t be where your funds go.

Starting lean helps instill discipline for when you do have more funds to manage.

Sell like your life depends on it, it does.

Lastly, focus on selling. It’s the lifeline of your business. Once you have a rudimentary solution to your customers’ problems, start selling, no matter how basic your offering may seem. If a group of people are willing to pay for your crappy product, you’ve passed a major test. Never outsource this bit. If you can’t sell your idea or product yourself, no one can. It’ll surprise you how much useful feedback you can get from directly reaching out to your customers yourself.

If potential customers are interested but require a more developed product (common in the B2B space), secure a Letter of Intent (LOI) from them. This can be a powerful tool when approaching investors, showing you already have committed potential buyers.

So, now you see why I initially bypassed the topic of money? Having ample funds doesn’t guarantee business success. Generally, you need less money than you think to start that business. Discipline is key.

Thanks to Victor for the very very small editing help 😏.

If you're still here, then you like problems, and I'm here for you. Welcome. Many people have been on this journey you're about to embark on, so you're not alone. Unfortunately, many of those people don't share how hard things can get and what tools you'd need to survive. So over the next few posts, I'm going to tell you to the best of my abilities. Let's start with the top of my list.

Grit:

You'll need this in spades! I put this before passion because there'll be many days when your passion will disappear. The only thing that'll keep you going will be your ability to just keep grinding. This is one reason I love backing engineers and salespeople. If you could go through 5 years of university studying a shit load of boring concepts without giving up, or learned to sell something people thought they'd never want/need, then you're already on the path.

Passion:

If you don't have this for the problem you want to solve, maybe don't bother. This is the thing that gets you started in the early days. This is why you're excited to go to that meeting, spin up that Canva page, or write those first lines of code.

Patience:

I was going to say time initially, but you can't control time. What you can control is how you handle the wait. That's where patience is necessary. There'll be days when things are just not moving, and it appears everything has ground to a halt. You'll have to be patient. You'll have to learn how to look for opportunities while you wait. A lack of patience is going to blind you and put everyone around you on edge.

Paranoia:

You'll need a healthy dose of this. This is going to be your cocaine, and you'll have to be a high-performing addict. This means no one around you has to know about this. You'll run to the bathroom to sniff it once in a while and make sure you clean your nose before you come out. Why? Everyone freaks out once they know you're paranoid. Same way they freak out the day they see that white streak on your nose. But paranoia is every founder's secret weapon. It's how you stay ahead of the competition. It's how you obsess over your customer service. It's how you make sure your best people don't leave. Again, a healthy dose—whatever that means to you.

Empathy:

Always remember to be kind to yourself and the people you've brought on the journey with you. Don't act as if they are you. They are not. You'll have to learn to be emotionally intelligent while being objective at the same time. Don't just listen to people; hear them.

Skills:

This one is a no-brainer, but I think it's important to state. You need key skills that are going to be critical for your survival in the early stages. I put sales and product development—engineering especially—at the top of my list. I'm going to assume that you already have operational expertise in your problem space. These skills will save you a lot of time and money. Plus, you get to be in control of your momentum early on. So between you and your co-founder(s)/founding team, make sure you have a handle on these skills.

People:

The journey will be tough and hard and lonely; you'll need people. Either co-founders, a solid founding team, or deeply committed advisors, these people are going to be your support when all else is going to shit. I've seen cases where the only reason the company is alive today is the people. This only works if you surround yourself with the best people. Don't be mediocre. You can't afford that. In fact, that's a quick way to guarantee failure. Constantly vet the people around you and never be in a hurry to commit to new relationships.

Okay, you've gotten here. Good for you. It's totally okay if you've decided not to go ahead and start something. In fact, that's my preference for you. Keep that cushy job, mull over that idea for a little longer, enjoy those business class flights, keep expensing those bills, don't rush. What people don't tell you is that being employed is a quicker path to being a millionaire than owning a business.

Did you see that I didn't mention money? Lol. That's because it's never a reason to not become a founder. In my next post, we'll talk more about money.

I regret having to leave Wallets. I don't talk about it much unless you're Seun or, in some cases, Victor, but damn! That hurt like hell. Building that company was something I'd been trying to do for more than 8 years before I finally got to, and then having the opportunity to do so and losing it so quickly was a huge bummer. I basically drifted through 2020 in a very numb state, unable to accept what was my new reality.

In 2010, Iroiso, Obaro, and I thought it would be a great idea to make it easier for us to pay our school fees. Back then, you had to pay cash in the bank, then take a copy of the payment slip to an office at the university and hope that it had been posted and then confirmed. There were many cases where you had to go between the bank and the school bursary multiple times. That process took nothing less than five days if you were lucky. Well, we thought, "Why not make the process simpler?" Purchase airtime to the tune of that amount, get a code from the airtime vendor, input the code on the school website and that's it, school fees paid! I know how ridiculous this sounds now, but back then, NIP didn't exist. We aptly named it Air. But we had no idea what we were doing, and we ultimately got nowhere.

Fast-forward a few years, I'm working in the payments space and even though we have made progress as an industry, things were still complex, especially for end users in the banking space. No one seemed to care that customers deserved ease of use. I spent some years working to make the experience easier at different firms, but I somehow felt that to properly define the experience, I had to own and direct the vision in some way. So when my co-founder showed me what was at the time an MVP he was building, you can imagine how interested I was. It took me almost two years to join fully, but I committed myself to making sure we built a company customers loved and people wanted to work at. And boy, were we making it happen. People loved us, my colleagues were amazing, and even though I was broke as hell, I finally had that opportunity to build the bank of my dreams. Then it ended for me. Just when we were reaching escape velocity, it ended. YC Demo Day was on the 19th of March that year, and by December of that same year, I was out.

I regret not being able to finish what I started. I regret having to leave the most amazing people I ever got the opportunity to work with. I regret not having the chance to execute all the amazing ideas we had as a team.

Okay, that sums up regret number one. Number two: I regret not immediately starting again. This one didn't hit me until Seun brought it up about two years ago. We were perfectly positioned to start again and do it successfully. We blame it on the PTSD we were dealing with at the time, but it doesn't remove the regret. I definitely should have taken another go at it.

All that being said, I'm happy I got to experience all that. I wouldn't give it up for anything. Wait, I'd definitely give it up for a few million dollars. But you get the point. It's hard to put a price tag on all the lessons learned. Now, when I work with founders, I'm actually more useful to them.

I'm grateful my regrets don't weigh me down.

I didn't grow up wealthy; in fact, looking back, saying I grew up in a lower-middle-class household is a stretch. I grew up on the outskirts of Lagos, knowing what it meant to be poor and deprived of basic amenities and not being able to provide them for myself. The military was in power for the most part of my childhood, and there was the sense that if only they could leave, the country would get better. The '93 elections were a big deal where I grew up, and I remember the jingles, posters, and hope like it was yesterday. I also remember my eyes burning from tear gas used to disperse protests after the elections were canceled. The five years between '93 and '98 felt numb. Outside of the '94 World Cup and the '96 Olympics, there was almost nothing to be excited about. But somehow, everyone hoped. Even when Abacha started his propaganda pushing his eventual transition to democracy, my dad collected the materials and read them. I did too. Even as he killed and detained all his perceived enemies, we all just hoped. We went from kerosene stoves to cooking with coal stoves and firewood, yet we still hoped.

Then the man died. I clearly remember the joy on the streets that day and the weeks following. Finally, all that waiting was over. We were now going to be accepted back into the fold of developing nations on an upward trajectory. People didn't have to leave the country anymore. In fact, they could all now come back. We were going to become a rich nation where everyone would have access to the good life!

You know all of that didn't happen. In fact, along with many other countries on the continent, we've descended into levels of poverty so extreme, economists can't wrap their heads around it. We've expanded the tentacles and branches of corruption, privatized it even. Education is nowhere near the levels of the '90s, let alone the '70s. We are currently experiencing a massive brain drain, and in a few years, many of our institutions will barely have people worthy to be called leaders in any sense of the word. In fact, now one reads Chinua Achebe's "No Longer At Ease" and longs for the 'gentle' decay of those days.

I've heard people say, "But we have mobile phones and, most importantly, the internet. Now we have access to opportunities on a global scale!" That's BS! We've never been more unequal than our peers in the West! Now we just have a front-row seat at the gallery of disappointments. Of course, there'll always be outliers. The people who get those remote jobs at that huge tech company, the entrepreneur who sells his business for a respectable amount of money, the young girl who gets a scholarship abroad applying from her mobile phone. That's the problem right there. The fact that these are outliers. These stories are so far from the norm, we've struggled to get your folks to ignore fraud and pursue a career in tech or some other respectable field.

Okay, let me stop ranting. My point here is that until we figure out a way to drag ourselves out of our current mess as a country and continent, there's going to be no bright future for us as a people and all that hope will be worthless. I love backing founders building in these hard conditions. They're mad optimistic and it's very infectious. But it gets harder every day telling them to just keep building and things will work out in the future. For someone like me who sucks at selling, now picture me trying to convince investors that putting money into the continent is the way to go. Of course, I'm hopeful and optimistic; that's why I make these bets. But I'm also painfully realistic about how things are.

I do a lot of reading on national development and nations pulling out of poverty, and to be honest, we are many, many decades away from national prosperity. And the further we decline, the longer it will take to pull us back.

Most of my thinking on this topic revolves around how we can stop the decline even in the face of passive and corrupt governments. It's hard work, and it doesn't involve setting up a utopian crypto settlement for you and your friends. In his book, Gambling on Development, Stefan Dercon puts it aptly, "There is no one, cost-free path to development." Hopefully, I'll have some clear thoughts to share in due time.

The principle of "Strong opinions, loosely held" from Farnam Street resonates with me as it advocates for a balance between conviction and openness. It encourages continual evaluation of one’s opinions, ensuring they are refined and fact-based. This principle helps keep my composure when confronted with opposing views.

The essence of this reflection is to underscore the importance of having strong, well-considered opinions for success in any endeavor. These opinions, while firm, should be open to challenge. They shape our human identity, and individuals with strong opinions often leave a lasting impression on us.

However, possessing strong opinions and voicing them are distinct matters. Unlike many, I believe it's not necessary to share all opinions, especially those likely to ignite heated debates devoid of rational discourse. Topics like religion and politics, closely tied to personal beliefs, often evoke emotional responses rather than rational discussions. Sharing such opinions online almost certainly invites a barrage of emotional reactions.

At this juncture, you might ponder the difference between an opinion and a belief. While I could easily look up definitions, I prefer to formulate a well-thought-out opinion on this matter.

This text was edited using ChatGPT (Prompt: Edit the following text for grammar, clarity and brevity while keeping the tone the same.). You can read the original writing here and get a sense for why I will pay anything for this tool.