I don’t think people realize how easy it is to grow old and have the world change on you, leaving you without safety nets while you seem to have been doing everything right. My two parents, who were civil servants, and their experiences before retirement, profoundly changed me. My mother retired as a school principal, and by the time she retired, the only car she had was one that her brother had bought for her. She had a house she had not completed and was living with me as she battled health issues before she finally relocated to America.

My cousin came home for holiday and went for drinks with her girlfriends at Soul Lounge at the Palms years ago. A guy sent them a bottle of wine and she sent it back to him with thanks. The guy got very upset and said she was arrogant. She told me she was tired of that weak game. Many Nigerian men want to buy their way into a woman’s heart instead of talking their way in. I had a trick in those days of my life in the streets and it was a special phone number. I made sure I got to the number exchange phase quickly, and they never forgot that phone number.

What is one thing you can sell every day by yourself to at least one person that they will purchase for the rest of your life?

This is the answer to the question is the secret that fortunes are built upon. Not big breakthrough deals. Deals and exits come when others see it too. It is very easy to get caught up in the form of entrepreneurship and not the substance. It is not about the CEO title; it is not about raising money from investors. Whenever someone wants me to look at their deck, I check for this simple thing. Will people buy? Can you sell?

I have lived this life to the fullest and seen a lot. The only true wealth I have seen is that which generates profit every minute. That is what I am seeking, not some lump sum windfall.

Make millions today, and without regular profit, you are broke. I've been there many times. You don't need approval to be wealthy, and you also do not need to be liked. Just provide something that people need and will use, and you remain wealthy. I despise Elon Musk, but I pay him for two Starlink Subscriptions monthly.

There are two types of rich Africans.

The first type was created from scarcity, and the second was created from abundance or inheritance. Their attitudes towards others regarding food will tell you which is which. Their parties tell all the stories you need to know. The scarcity millionaire strictly monitors and controls food and drinks because they don't trust that people will steal everything. This is a valid concern as I have seen people who don't know the value of expensive food and drinks waste them.

I once had a British client who believed it would be difficult for a Nigerian to run the company he was running at the time. He made a very logical case for it, too, and it was about corruption due to divided loyalties. At first, I disagreed until I started doing more business. I saw things that defied logic. People would buy profitable businesses and slowly bleed them to death internally while raising a lot of bank leverage. Bankers were sometimes complicit in these schemes, and even banks themselves suffered from similar insider ownership scams.

"The customer is not a moron. She's your wife" - David Ogilvy, 1955, and 1963 in "Confessions of an Advertising Man."

The African customer is not an idiot; he is your brother or a potential seed-stage investor.

I struggle to see how to use some of the products being pitched. I now have a rule that I take people seriously only when I can see how to use their products more than once daily. It's the toothbrush test again, and many of those pitching fail it. Do you use your product more than once a day? If not, then why are you building it?

Nigeria in the 80s was in a weird place. Civilians took over power and subsequently lost it. There was austerity, which led to poverty, in turn leading to crime. A large number of small arms were in circulation, leading to numerous home invasions. Most households had a hidden gun. They did not advertise it, but if you tried to steal from the wrong household, you may regret it. This had some unwanted secondary consequences. Robberies became more brazen and violent as robbers would announce ahead of time that they were coming and rob entire neighborhoods.

Guy: Oga, I want to know what to invest in as I have some cash.

Me: Is it up to $1M?

Guy: Oga, no oh!! Just like $50k.

Me: How did you get it?

Guy: I did one deal with a friend.

Me: Tell your friends to help you get more deals like that. Focus on more income first of all. You all have noticed here that I no longer talk too much about retail investments, it is because I have learned. You cannot invest your way into great wealth without having an income generating entity. I am now working more with people to generate income rather than do investing.

In Nigeria, I am a landlord in Benin and a tenant in Lagos. As a landlord, I don't want any interaction with tenants; someone else does that headache. As a tenant, I hated agents with a passion and used them only once. Our office has been at the same Oniru place since 2010. 🧵

https://twitter.com/Babshub_/status/1907754931907379404

It is a two-sided marketplace where sellers and buyers have different preferences. The only way to solve that is to examine why both have different preferences and then reconcile their differences. Unfortunately, the agent will still remain a necessary evil in this process.

One area of study that fascinates me a lot is behavioral economics. African entrepreneurs don't study it enough and use data to validate frameworks or create new ones. It is never true whenever I hear that lack of disposable income is a reason for people not buying anything.
Motive and motivation are much more important to look out for while selling. This is why we may laugh at Ola of Lagos and his antics, but he can pass a message through and probably will sell shitloads of stuff because he keys into vanity in a way MTV Cribs also did years ago.

In my grandfather and father's time, most people were farmers, and Western education was scarce. They got educated and got jobs that helped them to get property and retire. In my time, entrepreneurship was scarce, and we did it instead of choosing saturated workplaces. Now... ...legal entrepreneurship is no longer scarce, and many people who can't get jobs opt for it. This creates another problem of too much, and because criminality is scarce, it has become more lucrative.

Yahoo boys and criminals are much more common now than 20/30 years ago.

Listening to @ChimamandaReal and @Trevornoah's conversation on his podcast, I remember school in England in 2005 and how I couldn't make a complaint against a lecturer who was racist and sexually harassing me because she was a woman and I was a man. It was a complicated situation that she exploited to her advantage. The conversation was buried because of political correctness. People on either side are doing so many bad things, and perceived "lack of privilege" was weaponized in many ways, leading to frustration.

I have tried many Nigerian apps, got hooked somewhere in the onboarding process, and abandoned the apps. There is no follow-up to try to resolve this. There is no attempt to capture my basic email first in the easiest way possible, like Google or social sign-up. Missed chances. Onboarding seems to be a headache for most apps built by our people. The smoothest onboarding process I have seen was with @MoMo_PSB, an existing MTN customer. Opay and Moniepoint tried. They seem to have the same onboarding template in tiers, which makes sense.

I have been wondering why most communities of Nigerians that have any financial goals or crowdfunding element always end up with someone stealing money?

This started from my departmental association in school as far back as in the 80s. The President embezzled and was sacked. My estate association in Lagos had the same problem and the man ran away. Someone with a house that he owns in the estate escaped to Canada to avoid paying the money he stole. I have observed this in so many forms. Someone has to try to become too smart in the group.

Dear Africans, you don’t have to manufacture everything. Just part of a product is enough to make you wealthy if the finished product is in high demand. We have to build comparative advantage beyond extraction and labor. Low tech is also ok. Let’s learn a lot of low tech. There is a lot to manufacture from waste products. I didn’t realize that the stuffing for a lot of soft furniture products is now shredded plastic. Guess who makes it now here in Africa from our plastic waste? The Chinese. They also export it too. It blew my mind!!

How many African freelancers do we have in tech? Is there any real way to figure out the size of the African freelancer market?Most people I know trying to build products for them seem to be discovering that the market is not as large as we imagine. Plus many get jobs and churn. There is a theory that most freelancers don’t survive doing freelancing long enough as most do not have experience and provide a lot of substandard services or products. This was very true in the early days but now, they are part of properly structured online teams quite early.

People avoid asking me to come to panels in Ghana because I always say what they don't want to hear but they know that it is true. People want me to talk in Nigeria because they know I will say the truth and they will only pretend to listen and do nothing different. There is a cultural difference of denial in both countries that doesn't help either country. We all know that things are fucked up in Ghana but we pretend it is all good as things will somehow be great in the future. Indefinite optimism.

Apathy is contagious. You can easily catch it from friends and relatives, but neighbors and colleagues at work are the biggest spreaders of apathy. This is why the greatest factor determining your success in life is where you live. Sometimes, that is all it takes. Influence. Many people do not have the willpower to be different. Very few have the willpower to lead others to change, even when they are different. This is why people seek tribes and gravitate toward others who share similar standards or are more tolerant of their habits.

Why do we all want to live longer?
It is because as humans we are iteration machines. We always want to do what we have done before even better. Improvement is at the core of our existence. Even when we can’t do it ourselves, we learn to use others to help us achieve progress. All of evolution is about iteration and improvement. One secret that we don’t immediately realize about ourselves is that we innately want to be better for, or do better things for others. Even on his deathbed, Steve Jobs was still churning out ideas to make our lives better.

I read Paul Grahams recent long essay on “Wokeness” halfway and was overloaded. I kept thinking cultural and identity wars come from too much boredom and focus on things that don’t matter until I was held at Millbrae for 4 hours on suspicion of laptop theft at a Starbucks. That experience changed me as I became more empathetic to the cause of those fighting racism and bigotry. There are real life daily effects and some of it deadly. 200 meters from were I was held that day, a friend’s brother was killed by the same police some months later.