Omoniyi

Squash, skiing, steel, good ideas, good books, investing.

Discord -
MBA, UChicago BA (Economics).

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.”

— Aristotle

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get home.”

[Omoniyi @ofomojol]

@tolutee @ModernAwo Can you suggest sources? There is clearly a lot behind what you have to say. Thank you

[Graham Stephan @GrahamStephan]

Sat down with a liquid billionaire yesterday.

His best advice for every business owner: Hire a “send and delete” person.

You fire off the request → immediately delete the task from your brain. They handle it. No follow-ups. No mental overhead. Once you hit send, you consider it done.

If you ever have to remind them? They’re not an asset; they’re slowing you down and stealing your bandwidth. Fire and move on as quickly as possible.

This one hire changed how he scales everything. Hope this helps anyone who needs it!

[Alex Onyia @winexviv]

This Saturday, we will be having another edition of the Sterling Bank Nationwide Online Maths Quiz.

The platform for the quiz is https://t.co/dnjSLGbm07 . Just register and wait for the countdown.

It’s open and free for every Nigerian student, and the winners get ₦500k, ₦300k, and ₦200k respectively.

All you need to participate is a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.

We are making education rewarding, fun and entertaining again, because that’s the only way we can save the nation.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Possible scenarios (ranked in order):

1/ Your country makes the best cheapest products. You export, and your citizens also buy the best.
2/ Your country doesn’t make the best/cheapest; but your consumers enjoy them (Brazil below).
3/ Your country doesn’t make the cheapest/best AND your country blocks access to your market. So you pay more for worst products, and you don’t export. Plus your local companies become less globally competitive as they are protected.

#3 is the worst. It’s what Europe did when America thrived. And it’s what many in Washington recommend today.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

This is what’s causing Anthropic to aggressively beg for govt protection (see below). Customers are finding cheaper alternatives. Keeping employees requires continuing ultra-rich secondaries ($$$) that are dependent on revenue growth. When you can’t win on the field go to DC.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

The most complex phenomena arise from scalable recombination of very simple rules. Whether it's galaxies, chips, or neural networks, if you find the right primitive building blocks, the complexity takes care of itself.

[Omoniyi @ofomojol]

@JFfutbol @jonathanstoop Please share a link if you can to the paper

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[Alex Onyia @winexviv]

There’s a silent disaster happening in Nigeria that nobody wants to confront honestly.

We keep shouting about unemployment, bad leadership, low productivity, corruption, poor healthcare, failed institutions and why our country is not working. But many people are avoiding the root cause.

Our education system has been deeply compromised.

A student enters secondary school or university full of dreams, intelligence and potential. Then the system teaches them something dangerous:

“You do not need competence to succeed.”

WAEC malpractice. NECO malpractice. GCE runs. Sorting. Sex for grades. Extortion. Intimidation. Victimization. Handout rackets. “See me after class.” “Talk to your lecturer.” “Settle this course.”

And after 4 or 5 years of surviving that environment, we expect excellence to magically appear.

It won’t.

A country cannot repeatedly reward dishonesty in classrooms and expect integrity in government offices, hospitals, engineering sites, courtrooms and businesses.

This is where many of our unemployable graduates are coming from.

Not because Nigerians are not intelligent.
Not because our youths are lazy.
But because too many people were trained inside a system where merit was murdered.

The painful part is this:

UNN, UNILAG, FUTO, ABU, UI, IMSU, ABSU and many others are using largely the same NUC-regulated curriculum.

The difference is standards.

The universities that still command respect are usually the ones with stronger resistance against sorting, extortion and academic fraud.

The ones collapsing in reputation are often the ones where corruption became normalized.

Once a student realizes they can buy an “A” with ₦20,000, or sleep their way through a course, or manipulate results through connections, the motivation to truly learn starts dying slowly.

And when millions of such graduates enter the labor market, the entire country pays the price.

That weak engineer may eventually supervise a bridge.

That poorly trained nurse may handle a patient.

That compromised accountant may manage public funds.

That fake first-class graduate may become a lecturer and reproduce the same cycle again.

This is no longer just an education problem.

It is a national security problem.

Countries become great because they protect competence fiercely.

Singapore did it.
China did it.
Germany did it.
South Korea did it.

You cannot build a first-world country with a third-world attitude towards education integrity.

Nigeria does not have a shortage of talent.
Nigeria has a shortage of systems that protect excellence.

And until we become ruthless about fighting academic corruption, exam malpractice, sorting, sex-for-grades and institutional intimidation, we will continue producing certificates instead of competence.

This fight is bigger than schools.

It is about the future survival of Nigeria itself.

[Luke Burgis @lukeburgis]

Augustine had a word for the vice of the internet age: curiositas. It doesn't mean "curiosity", but rather a disordered desire for knowing stuff regardless of its real value. It is the intellectual twin of bodily lust—the following of ephemeral passions without regard for consequences or what they're leading to. It's the act of knowing stuff as a form of possession; as if knowing everything that the latest Dwarkesh podcast guest had to say has any real value in itself.

[ Q-Cap  @qcapital2020]

Most underappreciated thing about equity bubbles is how much money you can make during the manic phase. The problem is most people start believing they have some inherent edge picking stocks when in reality they’re just riding liquidity and momentum. That’s when greed usually takes over and people turn into absolute pigs. The bubble doesn’t end when valuations get insane. It ends when people forget risk exists. To be perfectly clear I don't think there's a market bubble, there's a very specific targeted bubble but when Larry Fink starts talking publicly about creating a Futures Market on Computing Power, the easy money is probably done lol

[John_Hempton @John_Hempton]

The problem with stock markets is that there are three functions.

a. to allow businesses to raise capital well in excess of what individual owners can provide.

b. to allow mass diversification of investments for risk management purposes

c. to separate marks from their money.

All three of these exist - but at diffeerent times of the cycle c is dominant.

There is a lot of C at the moment.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

What I have been able to use Claude for, which amazes me all the time, is to take a random idea and really brainstorm it until we can arrive at a solution that makes sense to prototype.

The amazing thing about Claude is the objectivity. I sometimes counter a suggestion with historical reasons, and it comes back with an even stronger counter to my counter on why something should not be done.

There was one case where it changed the entire logic based on new information I brought in. Made my initial case much stronger, and it discarded its own assumptions without apology. We doubled down on my path and came up with something great.

This is like playing chess, but with an AI that has a historical knowledge of moves guiding you. Maybe I should try to use Clade to play actual chess against my iPad chess app.

I now spend more time using Claude than on social media, and I am learning all the time.

[Robin Wigglesworth @RobinWigg]

After months of work, the FT's new podcast on the history of finance is now finally live! 🥳

The first two episodes — hosted by @gilliantett and yours truly — are on Mesopotamian debt and genius investors of yore. Pods on railway bonds, the Nixon Shock and the amazing stones of Yap coming. https://t.co/M9Qbn3OYJW

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

There’s an old Chinese saying that I love:

“The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”

[Dmitry Sky @Sky_Hustle]

Instead of building a forecast from scratch, which is an exercise in compounding guesses, you take the price the market is giving you and gradually work backward: what growth rate, margin, duration of competitive advantage does this price require to be justified?

Then the only question is: is that plausible or insane?

That's a dramatically easier cognitive task. You're not predicting the future. You're evaluating whether someone else's implied prediction is reasonable. Falsification rather than construction, Karl Popper would approve.

And it naturally surfaces the best opportunities: cases where the market's implied assumptions are obviously wrong in one direction. You don't need to know what a company is worth to know that the market is pricing in something that can't possibly be true.

@mjmauboussin has formalized this as "expectations investing" and it's probably the most intellectually honest valuation approach available. It admits what you can't do (forecast) and focuses on what you actually can (judge plausibility).

[BONESAW 🕊️ @BonesawMD]

If you're someone that tends to speak on things but be way too early for others to receive them, then you have no choice but to write. Clearly. Often.

If you don't, that pompous entitlement from the people that chastised you for your ideas they now love will drive you insane.

[Omoniyi @ofomojol]

@0xSero Dm please lets talk