2025 roundup

The last time I felt compelled to publish a reflection on my year was in 2015 here. It was a story of misplaced trust, financial ruin, a career that had bottomed out, and the work of learning to trust myself again. It also signaled the beginning of a new chapter and heralded the birth of Paystack. Today, I’m writing a somewhat similar story.

While the 2015 piece spent multiple paragraphs exploring the aforementioned themes, I will not be expatiating on those in this one. I’m however glad I’m not 40 yet because, you know what they say about fools in their 40s.

Regardless of how turbulent the last few weeks of 2025 were, it was a year of building things I’m proud of.

Wrote Published more #

I spent 2023 and 2024 wailing about how little I was publishing. It wasn’t for lack of things to write about. Quite the opposite in fact. I document my life and thoughts religiously. For example, a 30-minute phone conversation easily becomes an entry of 500 to 1,000 words in Craft. I would share opinionated takes about diverse subjects on Twitter, recognize that some deserved a deeper treatment, and then spend the next few days mentally authoring paragraphs in the shower, collecting material in Craft, but never actually doing the work of finishing. At some point, the awareness of who might be reading had begun to quietly override the instinct to just write.

By late 2024, I decided to reclaim the attitude that defined my earlier blog posts. I treated the process as an exercise in articulation with the payoff being one new post in the archive. I wrote about my thought process here, partly as documentation but mostly to hold myself accountable.

The plan worked. I published more in 2025 than in any previous year and generated a rich backlog of drafts. I experimented more too, including this analysis of Elon Musk’s trajectory through the lens of audience capture.

Curiosity Salon was born #

One of the highlights of my Sunday brunches is the conversations. There is no telling what subjects will come up or how insightful or intense some will get. I sometimes found myself tempted to play scribe but I consistently failed at it, as I already had my hands full taking photographs and engaging. Besides, why burden a whimsical gathering of friends bonding over mimosas with added expectations? So in the spirit of separating concerns, I decided to institute a separate gathering specifically for the conversations.

I got into 2025 thinking about how I wanted this to play out. A friend told me about a monthly lecture series they frequently attend in Toronto where the speakers cannot be professionals on their topics and I had my lightbulb moment. A monthly living-room gathering where friends discuss their fascinations in the form of lightning talks, hands-on workshops, or group exercises. Each edition would run for two hours. To keep things exciting and approachable, the idea was to teach the room something you learned, not something you are paid to know. I called it the Curiosity Salon, and the first edition held on the 7th of June, 2025.

To kick things off, I hosted a workshop titled “How to understand people you strongly disagree with”. I had attended a workshop on this subject at an unconference in 2018 and felt it would make a nice opener for the salon. Everyone got a worksheet with a list of absolute statements (e.g. “your voting weight should drop if you can’t pass a basic civics test” or “centralized biometrics are worth the privacy trade-off for security and economic inclusion”). They were to indicate their agreement or disagreement and pair up with someone else in the room to discuss a topic where their stances were at odds. The idea was to understand your partner’s stance to the point that you can explain it back to them and, in the process, make their argument stronger. It was a helpful exercise in showing that most disagreements are really about the unstated assumptions underneath the thing being debated. Surfacing those assumptions is often enough to turn an argument into a conversation. It helped set the tone and establish the mindset I wanted for the rest of the session and subsequent ones.

Derek Muller of Veritasium recently said, “the universe is an extraordinary place and most people go through life oblivious to how it actually works”. The Curiosity Salon was conceived on the premise that curiosity shouldn’t be a solitary act, and it provides a format for friends who are already curious about the world to share what they’ve learned.

Built a rack-mount PC #

Okay, this is functionally a server but I find myself occasionally referring to it as a PC, perhaps because I built it purely using consumer-grade hardware, save for the enterprise NVMe SSD I added to use as SLOG/L2ARC for an internal ZFS volume.

After getting my feet wet with Proxmox on a small form factor build I completed in 2024, I decided to go all in on homelabbing with a befitting build. As is typical of my PC builds, I had impulse-purchased a Ryzen 9950x a year prior and had no immediate plans for it, so I decided to build one around it.

I started with purchasing a case and went with Sliger. I bought a 17-inch deep case at first and quickly realized I needed a 20-inch one instead as the GPU (a 5090) wouldn’t fit. For my motherboard, I got the MSI MEG X870E Godlike and maxed it out with 192GB of RAM. I mean, this beast is supposed to house multiple virtual machines and containers. It was only right to afford them room to breathe.

I’ll be giving this build and what I have done with it so far a fuller treatment in a future piece, so I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty for now. One more for the backlog.

Fell in love with Nairobi #

Before 2025, my first and only visit to Nairobi was in 2016. I had spent a few months in the Bay Area earlier that year and, whenever I told people I was working on a payment product, the first question was always about M-Pesa. The trip was largely motivated by a desire to experience Kenya’s mobile money culture first-hand, and to hang out with a Ugandan friend I had recently met on Radar.

This time, it was a work trip, but I extended my stay by a few days to spend time with friends. The weather was perfect, and I had a newfound appreciation for the abundance of greenery. As part of the work trip, we visited a tea farm, learned about its history, and were taken through the full cultivation process. I also took a walk with a (now former) colleague in a literal forest in the middle of the city.

I already have two trips to Nairobi planned this year, and I will definitely be visiting more frequently in the future. Compared to Lagos, it’s less chaotic, more internationally varied in its everyday offerings, and (at the risk of repeating myself) very green.

Celebrated milestones with friends #

Two friends got married in March and August and I was a groomsman for both. A friend turned 40 in April and threw a party that was a celebration of her whimsy, calling herself a “professional agbaya”.

My yearly Seychelles vacation was with the cofounders of two companies I had invested in. I plan who joins these trips many months (sometimes years) in advance, so it was a happy coincidence that this one doubled as a celebration. One of them had announced its acquisition of the other just two months earlier.

Another friend turned 40 in December and hosted a multi-day getaway in an English town. She went with The Phantom of the Opera as the theme for her birthday night, and everyone came correct. The getaway, which spanned the 23rd till the 26th, was a much-needed break from the chaos of the preceding weeks, and yet another opportunity to get into holiday PJs with friends.

I’ve been off social media for 3 months now and this is my first piece of personal writing since I went dark. I figured I would use this opportunity to share some of the interesting things I read and watched during my self-imposed exile, things I would have otherwise posted online.

• You are being misled about renewable energy technology. A video by Alec Watson that methodically makes the case that solar energy alone could meet the electricity needs of the world’s second most energy-hungry country, while dismantling every counterpoint you’ve likely encountered about its supposed downsides. When the video showed up on my feed three hours after it was uploaded, I saw that it was 90 minutes long and immediately knew my boy had cooked. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to inform you that indeed he cooked. This will probably be my favorite YouTube video of 2026.
• Killing in the name of… nothing. A year-end essay from The Verge that uses the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to trace how political violence and politics itself has become illegible. It tracks how political killers are leaving behind less and less writing over time, from Breivik’s 1,518 page manifesto down to memes scratched onto bullet casings. What happens when an entire society stops expecting words to mean things?
• Free speech’s great leap backwards. Another essay from The Verge that examines how the Trump administration has turned content moderation, a system originally built to protect the vulnerable, into a tool for suppressing speech that threatens the state. The most unsettling thread is how willingly platforms have folded, sometimes in rather strange ways. The piece posits that we ended 2025 with every major social media platform controlled by Trump-friendly billionaires, and an administration that now knows exactly how little pressure it takes to get them to comply. This is particularly ironic given that the campaign against content moderation that led us here anchored itself on “free speech” and convinced the undiscerning to applaud the machinery of their own suppression.
• Slop is contempt. Tom White on why AI-generated slop betrays an implicit absence of care. It reframes the discourse away from the usual technophobia and toward something more fundamental: writing as an act of respect. The best part for me was the Joan Westenberg interview excerpt, where she advocated for putting one’s energy into creating rather than hating and trying to fight against AI. It speaks to something close to my own thinking, and offers perspective for a piece I have in my backlog that I was hoping to finish last year before I got interrupted by life.
• Text is king. An optimistic piece about reading and writing. A tad too optimistic, I must say. As is the case when someone downplays what others experience as existential, the comment section is rife with opposing viewpoints. Let’s just say that, contrary to the 1965 song and the many similarly titled pieces of media since then, the kids are in fact not alright.
• In Silicon Valley, A Priest and the Thinking Machines. A profile of a Catholic priest with an electrical engineering background who has become an unlikely ethics counselor to executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Where we diverge (and I indicated as such in the comments) is on the discussion of training self-forgiveness into an LLM. Forgiveness presupposes continuity; a self that remembers the transgression and chooses to release it. An LLM has no such continuity beyond its current context. We should stop treating frozen responders as thinking machines with persistent inner lives and, instead, focus on wielding them responsibly.
• How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo. You can tell I’ve been reading a lot of The Verge. In this piece, Elizabeth Lopatto, who is fast becoming a favorite writer, traces a direct line from Epstein’s influence network through Thiel and Musk to the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on accountability. The piece argues that the campaign against #MeToo was about ensuring that money and power remain beyond consequence. Other pieces from Liz that match the same fearlessness include Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards and Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it.

I’m looking forward to the continued evolution of my writing and person this year. While the much younger version of me may not have had the tools or judgement to adequately interrogate his expression, the version of me today does, because I have spent years deliberately examining who I am, what I value, and how I want to move through the world.

As my housekeeper and I packed my things for a trip in December, I asked her what she would say if she found out I’ve made up with [insert former friend of note] and they were coming over to visit.

“Sorry to say sir but I go think say you no get sense”, she replied.

Happy new year Friday the 13th.