KaiZen

[• يمنى♡• @yumnah_elkhabir]

thissssss

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

"The greatest sin you can commit against your own life, is to know what you want...and not to act." - Stafford

Do not betray yourself.
Take the Chance.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“The strongest version of you is buried under the habits you're afraid to break.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

There is an African Proverb that I love:

“A cat that dreams of becoming a lion must lose its appetite for rats.”

Meaning: To achieve greatness, you must let go of old habits that could hold back your progress.

[Smart👨‍💻 | Software Engineer @smartnakamoura]

Nigeria just replaced a 19-year-old identity law.

The NIMC Act 2026 was signed yesterday and almost nobody is talking about what it actually does to the infrastructure underneath your fintech product.

Let me break it down.

[Rufybaba @Rufyb]

The composition of banking deposits maturity also confirms this. The bulk of it is short-term, which means banks are often always very careful about their maturity mismatch.

“Short-term” funding is what we have in Nigeria.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This sentence by Jensen Huang hits hard:

“Greatness does not come out of intelligence, it comes from character. Character is not formed out of smart people, it is formed out of people who have suffered.”

[Lukas Not Podolski @OtitoNosike]

The world does not reward potential. It rewards proof. Nobody cares how intelligent, talented, or visionary you believe yourself to be if your life produces no visible evidence of it.

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Pattern Recognition is also the form of intelligence that causes the most stress.
You will see things that others do not.

You'll feel crazy.

Things will be *so obvious* to you, and others will just deny it.

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

"Be calm enough to avoid war, and prepared enough to finish it." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

"Your lack of urgency is wasting your potential."

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

You can't live a big life in a small environment. If you stay in the wrong place too long, you start to shrink. You talk like the people around you. You think like them. You want what they want. If no one around you is building something big, taking risks, or pushing for more, neither will you. Not because you aren't capable, but because you won't even realize you can.

[Nike Adeyemi @NikeAdeyemi]

You teach people to
dishonor you by lowering
your boundaries.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

I've never met someone massively successful who hasn't gone through something that nearly destroyed them.

[Tunde Onakoya @Tunde_OD]

Day 1.

“When you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too”

[Melz @flyboiidotcom]

Them life decisions starting to catch up lol after a certain age, a lot of shit stops being impressive lol and a lot of the effort/discipline-based qualities start to reign supreme. Which creates resentment within those who haven’t been tending to themselves/their lives accordingly

[Ibironke Khadeejah Quadri @ronkecarew]

Excessive accessibility brings disrespect and contempt eventually. Boundaries, boundaries and yet more boundaries

[Manly Mentor @manly_mentor]

Every Man needs to hear this 💯

[Gagan Biyani 🏛 @gaganbiyani]

People have asked me how I feel about Udemy’s sale to Coursera. Honestly, I’m kinda pissed about it.

I want to be clear - I’m grateful for the opportunity to start and benefit from Udemy’s success. It changed my life.

But there’s another side to Udemy. A story of what could have been.

After our Series B, founders owned less than 30% of the company. Our investors took over and installed their own CEO to run it. We all liked this new CEO and honestly, for years it looked like a brilliant move. The company kept growing and growing. They launched B2B and built a $500M ARR business. Eventually, the company IPO’ed for $3B.

Yet all along there were clear cracks under the surface. Over Udemy’s history, there have been 7 CEO’s. The board replaced the second CEO with dud after dud. I’d often try to meet with the board or the new CEO, and was completely ignored. Eren had influence as Chairman of the Board but Oktay and I were so ignored they didn’t even invite us to the IPO. LOL WTF. There are like 50+ people invited to these things and nobody thought: “oh maybe we should invite the people who fucking invented the thing we’re all celebrating.” It shows how little respect they had for founders and for product innovation as a discipline.

I think they wanted a CEO they could control, a buttoned-up suit instead of a brash founder/CEO that is risk-taking, visionary, but a bit of a pain. For awhile, it looked like it didn’t even matter who was CEO - the company was run by the incredibly talented team that reported to them anyways.

Well, it worked until it didn’t.

The company made no major product innovations for 15 years. Instead, they took the original idea (video-based courses) and sold it in every place imaginable. It got us to $800M run-rate. That’s no joke; that takes serious execution and a great team that hustled hard to win the market.

But eventually the consumer business stopped growing. The B2B business has now flattened out as well. Meanwhile, Coursera was catching up.

Original Coursera was a far worse product than Udemy, but it got a ton of press. Learning ivory tower bullshit from academics doesn’t get you a real education, but it does create prestige. They raised from better investors on better terms, and had better leadership.

Udemy to this day has more revenue than Coursera, but Coursera won the court of investor opinion. They got higher multiples from both private and public markets.

Coursera innovated heavily. They added corporate courses to their university catalog, built fully-online degree programs, and offered a B2B competitor that kept Udemy on its toes. Still, the Udemy B2B business (and team) out-performed and so the two companies were deadlocked. Coursera was better at B2C, Udemy at B2B.

A merger was inevitable.

But WHY IN GODS NAME did we sell to Coursera instead of the other way around? Why are the combined companies under $3B in market cap?

Three reasons:
First, edtech didn’t live up to its promise. While these two companies had solid revenue and cash positions, their growth slowed, and public markets balked. This meant compressed multiples and significantly lower valuations.
Second, the companies stopped innovating. They are selling a product to businesses that their customers don’t love. They were category leaders, but they lead the category into mediocrity. They captured a significant share of learning and development (L&D) spending, but L&D as a whole actually lost budget within their organizations. That’s Udemy’s fault, and it doesn’t even realize it.

That brings me to my final point: I personally believe Udemy traded upside opportunity for downside risk. Us founders were unproven and young. We made lots of mistakes, including fighting amongst ourselves. A good investor would have supported us through it because they believe founders drive the highest long-term returns. Instead, they brought in outside CEOs to replace us. I sometimes wonder if they recognize this error; everyone makes mistakes and maybe they learned from it.

Either way - the consequences are real. By ignoring the founders, Udemy failed to innovate, which led to slowing growth which led to mediocre public market results. Furthermore, they don’t have a good evangelist and public markets don’t like a headless horse.

I sold my Udemy stock awhile ago. I think the merger was critical for both companies’ survival. Now, though, the new combined entity needs to innovate again.

On B2B, Coursera needs to help L&D become the heroes of the AI era so the entire market starts growing again. On B2C, they need to build the most educational AI product on the planet. (I’d focus on the former, since the latter is a lot harder and riskier).

Coursera can still achieve our original vision and likely build a $10B+ company in the meantime. Even though I’ve got no stake in its future, I’m mission-driven and I REALLY hope they figure it out.

The current education system sucks and the world deserves something better.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Genuinely a better question than most people realize.

Apollo 11 left a 2-foot wide panel of mirrors on the lunar surface in 1969. No power source, no wiring, no maintenance. Scientists have been shooting lasers at it from New Mexico ever since. The beam travels 239,000 miles, bounces off the mirrors, and returns in 2.5 seconds. That round trip is how we know the moon is drifting away from Earth at 3.8 centimeters per year. So yes, in a literal sense, they were checking if it would still be there.

The seismometers are the part that gets wild. Apollo 12 deliberately crashed its lunar module into the surface at 6,048 km/h. Scientists expected a brief shudder. The moon vibrated for over 55 minutes. On Earth, seismic waves from an equivalent impact die in seconds. Nobody had predicted this. So NASA did it again. Apollo 13 dropped its S-IVB rocket stage from orbit. Hit with the force of 11.5 tons of TNT. The vibrations lasted nearly three and a half hours.

The reason is water, or the lack of it. Earth's interior is damp. Moisture in rock acts like a sponge, absorbing seismic energy. The moon is bone dry, cool, and rigid. Shockwaves have nothing to absorb them. They just bounce back and forth through solid stone until the rock itself stops vibrating. Scientists described it as the moon ringing like a bell.

The seismometers ran for almost 8 years and detected over 13,000 seismic events. Turns out the moon has four types of quakes: deep ones caused by Earth's gravitational pull, shallow ones from the crust shrinking as the interior cools, thermal ones when sunrise thaws the frozen surface, and impacts from meteorites. In 2023, Caltech reanalyzed old Apollo 17 data and found a fifth type: the lunar lander itself creaking and popping every morning as the sun heated it. Every five to six minutes, for five to seven hours straight.

They went up to prove the moon was once part of Earth, measure how fast it's leaving, and figure out what's happening inside a world with no atmosphere, no water, and no tectonic plates. "Checking if it was still there" is honestly closer to the truth than most people's actual answer.