Precious kings

Co-host @StartupAs Customer @homeease_ng | Strategies | Building people and companies ❤️

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

Awesome move!

[Shuttlers™ @Shuttlersng]

Have you heard? Shuttlers is now live on Google Maps! 🎉💃🏾

Find out what it means for you👇🏾

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

AI is brutal 🥲

[Bennett @b_nnett]

23.5 hours later... there's an app and it's open source.

It tracks activities & sleep. It has full sensor support: HR, SpO2, HRV, Temperature, Motion, etc.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

I don’t believe so sha

AI is largely built on this btw

[sy @seezyou]

Pattern recognition is the highest form of intelligence.

[y @ysuckme]

stay around ambitious people. they'll never mock you for trying.

[Viktor Petrenko @viktor_vrp]

Peak hardware engineering workspace efficiency.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

What?? 🤣

[Interlinked @Interlinked444]

Being a highly intelligent outlier doesn't negate your ability to be retarded, paradoxically it actually enables far more creative ways of being retarded.

[Russell Brunson @russellbrunson]

I believe that entrepreneurship is the greatest form of personal development.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

Wow.

But I want to work in Google 🫠

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

Sounds trivial but there's a lot of capital looking for deployment

Accessing the capital na where wahala dey

And I hardly blame the investors, the risk in this market is too much and sometimes but worth it

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

My cousin told me two things when I got to the UK as a student. First was. Never do odd jobs; they are a trap. Second, sort out everything related to credit on time, as you are looking for something better to do.

That guy I met at Enfield 22 years ago, who was washing cars, did not have a credit card or a mortgage. He kept sending money home, but it kept losing value, thanks to inflation. Meanwhile, I know someone who has bought over 40 properties using the UK banking system (before the rules changed), and their properties have appreciated.

I have relatives who have lived abroad for decades and are still struggling with the mortgage for one property, and others who have a portfolio of assets, including businesses. The difference was how they started. Those who started with "struggle jobs" somehow maintain that siege mentality and think small.

Survival usually limits people's options, but I learned early that doing software testing gigs from the school library was a more sustainable option than carrying boxes at Tesco. If you have a university degree, you have to think bigger and better than those who do not.

[Sung Drip Woo @YaBoyRoshi]

IM CRYING! 😂😂

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

I don’t know how you guys survive without vertical tabs

Been using Edge + vertical tabs for over 4 years now>>>

[Machiavelli Bot @UnmodernmanBot]

The man who tells everyone his pain often becomes attached to the sympathy it brings. Suffering can become a social identity if it gets attention, excuses, and softer expectations. A serious man does not turn wounds into a public performance. He turns them into private intelligence and changes the structure that produced them.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

Amazing realization in second paragraph

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

I've been praying the past few weeks. Unsure why.

There's good evidence behind prayer. It mimics breathwork, calming the nervous system, dropping cortisol, and quieting the brain. Daily prayers show lower depression, anxiety, and pain.

I'd like to develop a prayer practice. Growing up, the protocol was written for me. Explaining whom to pray to, the structure of the prayer, and the boundary conditions.

I don't really know how to pray now.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

Japanese reliability>>

[Olóyè. @Ol0ye]

I don't think people understand or appreciate the ingenuity of Toyota or a Honda.

A lot of companies make great cars.

Super cars.

Not a lot of companies make affordable cars that'll go 400k miles without needing an engine overhaul.

It's an incredible feat of engineering.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

This! 🤣

[Brigham's Burner @FiredUpCoug]

Kids these days probably don’t even know how to make micro-adjustments to their font sizes and page margins.

Back in my day, half the fun was figuring out whether you could turn a 9-pager into a 10-pager without the teacher realizing you set Times New Roman to 12.3 pt.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

22 years ago, in Enfield, London, I met this Nigerian guy whose job was to wash celebrities' cars at a very high-end car wash. Everything he made, he sent back to Nigeria to invest in property. He was not well educated and didn't know of any other assets to preserve wealth.

At the time I met him, he was saving a lot and regularly sending home millions of Naira. His clients and patrons were very generous, and he was very hardworking.

The first thing I asked him was why he didn't take all the knowledge he had gained to set up a similar business back home. His answer was - "They will rob me blind if I am not there."

He wasn't ready to leave his cash cow in England, and he also knew that setting up a business at home was a risky endeavor. I see this pattern repeated with many successful Nigerians outside Nigeria. Trust is rare, and many have been burned.

The surprising thing is that when Nigerians do the reverse and try to set up businesses abroad from Nigeria, they would most likely choose other Nigerians to run them. I have seen this with banks and churches. Some are successful, and others are not, but they keep doing it anyway.

What happens to Nigerian trust locally, and why is it different when things are abroad? The simple answer is systems. A Nigerian doing business with another Nigerian abroad is protected by the rule of law and the systems in place there. There is also something deeper that I stumbled upon.

Nigerians typically choose other Nigerians to run things, even though their products are originally Nigerian products or products largely meant for Nigerians in the Diaspora. When it is a universal product, they would choose others, but would still likely choose Nigerians first. It is a paradox.

There are many times when choosing a Nigerian to run a Nigerian business outside Nigeria is a very bad idea, especially in those places with xenophobia, and where Nigerians are despised, but the reason Nigerians choose other Nigerians is that Nigerians abroad work hard. They know what they are running away from and put everything into it so they don't go back.

I always joke that I have more relatives in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, than in Benin City, and it is likely true, as a family reunion there once had 200 people. One thing I noticed was that the family members almost always employed other family members in their businesses, and those businesses thrived.

One of them even ran a car wash, employing his brothers, who later set up their own car washes. These were informal arrangements without any contracts, but everyone behaved and played their part. The interesting thing was that they never tried to do the same thing back home in Benin City. The answer seemed simple: maybe desperation and greed led to bad choices by those at home, but why?

I have always wondered why the same family bonds abroad that bring people together and help them do well disintegrate when they get back home. The only people I have seen who have kept these family bonds in business, tight at home and away, were the Igbo people. The interesting thing was that the car guy in London was also an Igbo man, but he couldn't leave a business with his people back home to run.

I later asked why, and he told me it was a high-end, personalized service that took years of apprenticeship to perfect. He was cleaning and detailing Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other high-end cars for footballers and bankers. If he tried to train people to do that, they may end up taking the business away from him. I finally got my answer.

Trust is multifaceted. You have to first trust yourself before you can trust others. I have a barber in Lagos called Chika who has absolutely no fear that I would choose others over him, as we have had a relationship for decades. I have the same relationship with Chika as I had with my late co-founder, because we were always truthful with each other. It was something that grew over time.

I have followed Chika from Ikoyi Hotel to Victoria Island, to a shed when his shop was demolished, and finally to his current place, where he has operated for the last decade. I have even begged him to come to Accra, as I still don't have a regular barber here after 17 years. Many others in Lagos have the same relationship with him, and there are more of them there than in Accra. Chika is that good.

He has also been unable to transfer that skill to others, making his business less scalable. It will always remain a niche luxury service. The type of business we try to do matters. High-trust businesses with a personal touch require the founder to micromanage everything.

In Ghana, I once lost a $ 330k-a-year deal because someone (a Ghanaian) was too laid-back to respond to an email on time. Another Nigerian took the deal. Nigerians are more aggressive in doing business than others. So, I understand why people hire Nigerians abroad, especially in other African countries. They have more hunger. Nigerians choose Nigerians because they are easier to micromanage.

Hunger at home can easily turn into greed. A Nigerian guy I recruited in Lagos for a project at MTN Group in the early days had tried to circumvent me with my South African partner. I was lucky to have seen the email he wrote to that effect when he left his screen open in the office. I became more cautious about who I worked with. It repeated itself much later, when I saw that our internal company emails were being read in the Ericsson office before they poached a lot of our people.

Could these things have happened outside Africa? Maybe the probability would have been much less. The hunger is the same, but the greed is less, as many of the needs are usually already met. This is the same for Nigerians working in other parts of Africa. You don't need to worry about diesel for your generator, fuel scarcity, or security. When those basic needs are met, Nigerians become very different people.

This is why I keep telling people recruiting from the diaspora not to bring them to Nigeria, but to allow them to settle in other African countries for now. Trust is enhanced when people worry less about basic things.

This is a simple and pedestrian explanation, but trust me, it works all the time. There are people I know who would love to work for Nigerian companies but would never want to live in Nigeria. Hire them, but don't let them come back home unless you are ready to treat them as expats.

Nigeria is the problem with a lot of people; it is not because they are Nigerians but because they are in Nigeria.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

Run a startup

AI B2B SaaS to be exact

[Erin Price-Wright @espricewright]

If you're a naturally anxious person, I recommend pursuing a high stress career path where at least you'll be compensated for anxiety you're going to have anyways.

[Precious kings @preciouscopy]

@Mr_Accoladed @UgochukwuCFR Exactly!