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.

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.

Many people glamorize tech jobs, but they are one of the highest-risk spaces with very limited professional longevity and upside. A doctor can still treat patients at 90, and lawyers or accountants hired at 80, but very few people will employ a 40-year-old coder. Apart from being much more expensive, they can't put in the number of hours the younger and less expensive coder without a life will put into the job. This is why you see so many people becoming successful founders in their 40s working for themselves—another very risky move.

After the UBA takeover in the '90s, I asked my uncle how they planned to respond to GTBank, which was growing very rapidly and dominating the middle market at the time. He said they would create many regional GTBanks inside UBA instead of going head-to-head. They did just that. The regional directors were the MDs of their region, and they adapted to the needs of each region's market. This allowed them to grow tremendously until internal crises changed everything. I was thinking of that strategy when looking at GTbank and others that have now become old.

No "publicly known" habit of the billionaire that you copy will ever make you a billionaire. If it worked, we would have had far more billionaires.

The things that make most people rich are the things you should fear the most about them. They rarely share those things. This tweet came about because of a recent interaction that sparked a memory. Many rich people use other people and throw them under the bus. At a certain level of wealth, this becomes an unconscious habit, yet it still attracts sycophants who rationalize actions of the wealthy.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” - Henry David Thoreau

I remembered this quote while I was in Lagos. It was evident all around. Both the rich and the poor in Lagos are desperate, and I finally discovered why. Limited options and constraints lead to desperation. Nigeria is full of constraints. Many people make excuses for and rationalize those constraints, but they are still constraints. Imagine going to a bank and not being sure that you will get the money that you want. Imagine not being sure if you will be arrested for nothing.

In my software testing days, I met a company that wanted me to recruit educated Africans as testers and they wanted to pay $200 a month. The Naira and Cedi weren’t so devalued at the time and it was ridiculous. I told the guys that nobody would accept that. They argued that Indians took even less and I should find people who would accept the amount. It was stupid because I was expected to make some profit on the $200 as well. It came to roughly $10 a day. I passed on the contract and decided to find testing deals by myself.

When I see pitches from people who don't know me and are just trying their luck, I feel a pang of sadness, but I do what I have to do and tell them the truth. Try to make good friends, and those friends will be the people who help you to move forward. Strangers rarely help. Don't make friends with people when you need help. Don't reach out to people only when you need help. Some of the people I do business with today have been my friends for decades. I met them at school or through other friends. That is how trust is strengthened.

20 years after university, I found a classmate working as a security guard in a bank. I took his number, and we discussed what happened to him. He had traveled to Germany for work, and all the money he was sending home was squandered by a relative until he got deported. I also met a classmate from primary school who was my barber in Ikeja at Class Night Club those days. He was in tears as he was cutting my hair. We discussed the past and the future.

Both guys found their feet and are now doing much better than they were at the lowest point.

Finance is about ecosystems.

I learned so much from my uncle by just watching how he used leverage to build wealth. The first and most important thing is a personal balance sheet. Know the value of your assets before you take on liabilities. That valuation came from insurance. All his assets were insured and had value placed on them. It made it easy for him to use them as collateral to get leverage for other assets, which were again insured. His father-in-law was one of the biggest insurance brokers in Nigeria at the time, so he used them a lot.

There is old money, new money, and wannabe rich money.

I was traveling on Emirates to Uganda once, and they upgraded me to First from Economy. As I was going from Economy to Business and First, I was looking at the differences in how people dressed and carried themselves. A lot of the guys in Economy Class were traders. Some had money but didn't spend it lavishly on a short flight between Dubai and Entebbe. They were mostly dressed informally and were respectful. Business Class was full of people dressed up and uppity. Most likely company people.

Jay's (not his real name) father was a well known religious figure. The family is wealthy and he married into another wealthy family. His wife was gorgeous and accomplished but he had one weakness. He slept with maids and househelps in our estate. I was shocked when I found out. It was a perversion and he was a sex predator but he didn't see it that way. He genuinely felt that it was some form of benevolence. He would argue with the bible and show how Abraham and others were truly polygamous and I later discovered that his father had secret families.