If you’re ambitious I’d highly recommend working in an organization or a team where people have your similar sense of urgency or you will slowly go insane
1. Customer funds (Money customers save with you)
2. Operations funds (Money you raised, made, or borrowed)
Thou shalt not touch 1.
The day you ever get to a point where you are running low on 2, and you need to touch 1 (hoping you will put it back).
That's the day you wrap it up, go home, and pay your customers their money.
Sam Altman says Slack has many positives, but it creates endless fake work
We need an AI-native productivity suite to replace docs, slides, email, and Slack
Not add-on features, but trusted agents that handle work and only escalate when needed
This finally feels within reach
Some of the messages that have touched me most today are from people who were actually in church yesterday, who had a better service experience with @pewbeam_ai, and noticed it.
Thank you all for your excitement and support.
my mom decided that her final act in life is to be a pastor 😂
She graduated today from MFM’s school of ministry.
Super proud of her and all the countless exams she had to prepare for and take.
Some years ago, in my previous workplace, we conducted a study on about 103 Nigerians who spent over 7 years abroad before returning.
We wanted to use Hofstede's cultural dimensions to understand why people return from a national culture perspective. What behavior or reason could be associated with Nigeria's national culture on Hofstede's Dimensions. The top three reasons they gave were:
1. Unfulfilled Dreams, and Community — Most reported feeling stuck abroad. They said they were working just to survive, not thrive. Many became depressed, mostly because they couldn't live the life and get the goals they really wanted to do with their lives. The beautiful thing is we really are different people. Hofstede says we're quite collectivist and a lot of people agree, on his scale, were 100% collectivist. Personally, I don't think it's entirely true because that study revealed that some tribes are not interested in community, while others are. But that's another conversation.
2. Business & Roots — Surprisingly, under-35s formed the second-largest group. They said they returned to manage houses/businesses they built while living abroad, citing Nigeria's familiar environment and low trust in others handling their affairs. Some earned more in naira (adjusted for purchasing power) than foreign currencies abroad - like one entrepreneur making ₦250k daily from branded goods. This aligned with Hofstede about Nigeria. We are low on Long Term Orientation (maybe trust), our score is 8%. Maybe this is truly a case of lack of trust, or it is because some tribes are quite individualistic (the data actually showed respondents from certain tribes chose they'd rather do business on their own rather than collaboration). It also showed that we aligned with Hofstede saying that we are quite 'Uncertainty Avoidant'.
3. System Flexibility
Older returnees (29+) valued Nigeria's informal networks that helped bypass bureaucracy. They believed it was easier to manipulate your way around Nigeria, and get what you want to make your business grow. They contrasted this with rigid systems abroad where even friends wouldn't bend rules for them. This aligned again with uncertainty Avoidant and Nigerians being highly indulgent people as Hofstede's research said.
About two years later, I visited the Prof who led the study and he casually told me that 45 respondents had returned abroad. The main reason? Trust issues - unreliable partners and business fraud made Nigeria's "flexible" system work against them. Some also said their business wasn't going to last a long time (these conversations were informal dialogues the Prof made).
In the end, let's understand ourselves, Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions help as a start, but I still know there are cultural nuances. For us to begin a new journey, we need to fix TRUST while understanding our collective goals.