around age 11, i discovered that touching myself in certain ways produced really pleasurable sensations. being the curious kid with internet access, i did what came naturally - research. i went online, read articles, found studies, and discovered this thing i was doing had a name: masturbation. even better, the data showed it was incredibly common, especially among young american males.

my findings made perfect sense to me; it felt good, it was natural, and apparently everyone was doing it. so one day at school, my friends and i were having one of those random knowledge-sharing conversations and i casually dropped it. something along the lines of: “hey, did you know a really high percentage of young men masturbate frequently? i do it daily too.”

the moment that followed was fascinating. everyone just… turned and stared at me like i’d said something completely outrageous. it was in...

After following Elon Musk almost religiously over the last 13 years, observing his gradual but stark personality shift from my initial perception of him has been fascinating. Since 2020, I started developing a theory to help contextualize my observations and now feel compelled to write about what I think is easily the most consequential case of audience capture in history. This will be a long one so, strap in.

At its core, audience capture describes the process by which social media users gradually modify their behavior to appeal to their most engaged audience members. While this phenomenon has been widely documented among influencers and content creators, its manifestation in someone of Elon’s stature and resources presents a unique view into how this dynamic can shape even the most seemingly independent actors.

Pre-2016: Elon Musk, the visionary engineer

In the years before 2016...

We were discussing product delivery in a meeting earlier today where Shola, my cofounder, touched on something interesting about speed versus quality - that classic argument about tradeoffs in project execution. His take was fundamentally different, and it got me thinking. This is it, paraphrased.

Quality is inherent. Speed is a reflection of priorities.

The core insight is this: quality isn’t actually a variable - it’s a constant. You’re either committed to building quality products or you’re not. That’s an absolute fact, not something that flexes based on other factors. Speed, however, is ultimately just a reflection of how you prioritize. This distinction becomes clear when we look at how it plays out in practice.

In an ideal scenario where you’ve got all your ducks in a row - you’re focused on the right work, you’re not getting derailed by random distractions - your speed of...

my first program was written in a notebook. i had just finished reading a thick-ass textbook on qbasic and had an idea for a game. when i was “done”, the code spanned multiple pages. i did not have a computer at home but thankfully, we had a computer lab in school. i went to the computer teacher’s office to request access to the lab to run the code. he took one look at what i had written and shook his head, saying it will not run - he gave me access anyway. needless to say, after painstakingly typing everything out, it was errors galore.

the teacher admired the interest though, and ultimately setup recurring classes for me and about 5 other students. he had noticed our participation in class and took it on himself to set us up for success. he was proficient in c/c++ so once he was done taking us through the basics, we started learning c. our classes were between 7am and 8am (just before...

zuck did what?

the growing trend of reduced moderation on mainstream social media services will end up being a net negative to society. “free speech” advocates were never silenced in the literal sense. they had their “safe spaces” and weird subreddits to themselves.

today, impressionable young people are getting exposed to fringe and dumb content by default, and education is still underfunded for a significant portion of the world’s population.

we have already seen where this leads.

we are not going to forget myanmar so soon, are we?

what i’m about to write reminds me of this piece i wrote in 2016.

it’s year end, and amidst the flurry of activities and moments of reflection, some bibliophiles took to their socials to share how much they’ve read over the course of the year. unsurprisingly, the non-readers jumped in to dispute certain claims without basis while high-fiving themselves with uninformed takes on reading.

i condensed my read of what was going on into this tweet. it was an observation about how unprovoked reactions often reveal insecurities. if anything, a more accurate articulation of it could have said, “your real problem might be with yourself…”. i followed it up by acknowledging my own limitations.

someone replied. their argument is a time management concern. it’s a pseudo-anonymous handle i have come across a few times. previous context indicates someone who is online more often than not. precious...

growing up, i only paid attention to proper casing when creating documents or writing an email. for instant messaging, i used all lowercase. then smartphones took off and autocapitalization made it something to not worry about… until i realized i probably didn’t want to give away what device i’m on when chatting with people. why should they rightfully guess i’m on my laptop when i text in lowercase when i can make things ambiguous by always texting in lowercase?

so i turned off autocapitalization.

over time, a framework emerged to tell my lowercase writing apart from appropriately cased ones. the former signified a stream-of-consciousness articulation, while the latter implied formal comms.

i plan to publish more in the new year, and one way i intend on making it less of an aspiration is to occasionally share slightly longer form versions of the kind of thoughts that inform my...

on june 9 2020, i cut my locs. it was peak lockdown season and people worldwide were forced to introspect and make big life decisions. for a lot of people, this meant cutting their hair, for others, it was learning to make banana bread, but i digress.

my loc journey started in 2010 - about two years before i officially went to the salon to get it done properly. i had stopped using my comb and wore caps most of the time. over time, i had locs free-forming at the back of my head, and after rocking the look for a bit, i had it done right. i started out with interlocking, but i quickly switched to palm rolling.

when paystack got accepted into ycombinator in 2015, my cofounder and i moved to the bay area for a few months. i no longer had access to my usual loctitian and finding one in white people country wasn’t exactly the most straightforward thing to do. since my locs were borne out of...

Every Sunday, you’ll likely find my friend Tolu at brunch somewhere. She might be at Eric Kayser alone, catching up with a former colleague at Pitstop, or hosting close-knit friends at her apartment in Victoria Island. It was no surprise that when she came to spend the weekend at mine sometime in February 2021, she was itching for us to go out to brunch on Sunday. Another friend of mine was around at the time, and we collectively agreed to spend our Sunday morning at Orchid Bistro, Ikeja GRA.

We spent the time talking about anything and everything, catching up on our individual travails, and running commentary on the food. A colleague of mine was scheduled to visit me that day, so she joined us at Orchid Bistro instead. I appreciated how chill and relaxing the outing went and commented on how I’d love to experience it more often. The only problem was that regularly leaving my house...

My first memorable experience with a well-designed and functional network was in 2009 at the African University of Science and Technology (Abuja). My friend, @bigbrovar, designed and built the network, and was its sole administrator.

Speaking of the network being very functional, I am referring to the breadth of services running within the network that needed to be kept alive. The university assigned laptops to students. These laptops ran a custom Linux distro (also put together by my friend) and, at some point, loaded the user’s home directory off the network, making it possible for students to login to their desktop profile on any school-issued computer they can find. There was also some caching setup in place such that any HTTP download is done once over the internet and subsequently on the network, dramatically cutting down bandwidth requirements for system updates, etc. I used to...