Süleyman Şah

Maintain the curiosity of a child | Hard-Tech Founder

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

Tech is nothing on its own! It relies on real industries like manufacturing, construction, agriculture, energy, etc. So, a non-industrialised country like Nigeria shouldn’t be prioritising tech over essential infrastructure that forms a solid foundation for us to build upon.

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

The UK is arguably the worst place to have malaria. Just pray to have an African or Indian/Pakistani doctor around.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

😂🤣🤣

[Kada NGBALE @kdngbale]

@asemota "It is difficult to speak adequately, or justly, of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent."
~ Henry James, London, 1882

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

@Jason I’m in

[travis kalanick @travisk]

Atoms.

https://t.co/nbCnIkI3RD

[Mark Essien @markessien]

Pivot now to focus on business with physical assets. AI will decimate anything not on land and in the real world.

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

@mabziz She seems genuinely surprised and probably didn’t mean to be rude. As a northerner who has lived in the UK for nearly two decades, I once wrote an essay exploring why northerners seem so “scarce” here. The reason may surprise you. https://t.co/gTON8rL817

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

@wen_geee @0xDevShah Those that can seamlessly connect the physical world with digital systems. And then build Ai systems that can act on the captured real time physical data.

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

As a tech builder, this tweet resonates deeply with me.

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

The technology may already exist, but that doesn't mean that Nigeria has it. CFM International, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce, GE, etc do not share the patents or blueprints behind their jet engines. They only share generalised information and basic operating principles. So as a recipient of that generalised information, you might "know" how a jet engine works, but they will never share what metal alloys they used to make their engines, their design specifications to make it fuel efficient, wind tunnel testing data, safety testing data etc. In reality, you are not much closer to having that technology than a farmer in the 16th century. All you have is the ability to rent temporary access to it by paying money to the manufacturers and their designated maintenance companies.

This means that every jet engine in Africa is foreign-made, and all significant maintenance involving proprietary knowledge on those engines is usually done abroad, which means vast amounts of USD must be spent regularly just to keep Africa's airspace running, and the US government can ground almost every plane in Africa if it likes by issuing sanctions that prevent engine manufacturers or maintenance firms from doing business with African airlines.

That isn't theoretical BTW. It's exactly what happened to Russia in 2022, when NATO sanctions against Russia made Russian Airlines unable to access spare parts and supplies to keep their Boeing and Airbus fleets operational. And that's why Russia accelerated its indigenous Yakovlev MC-21 program, which has created a fully homegrown alternative to the Boeing 737 with indigenous engines, body, and avionics.

Just because a technology exists and you have access to it does not mean that you have the technology, especially when it is a complex technology like aircraft engines. You're basically just renting space on it from the technology owner, and if you have a geopolitical disagreement with the owner, it can lock you out and return you to the stone age at any time. That's why countries often need to "reinvent the wheel."

If Nigeria ever becomes a wealthy and important country in the future, US trade sanctions are 100% guaranteed. To prepare for those inevitable sanctions, multiple technologies that we are currently renting must be fully localised. Not that they impose sanctions and then we realise that we can't build roads anymore because the technology to drive bridge pillar piles into a river bed was something we were just renting from white people. That's why Ziko's jet engine is important. It won't power a passenger aircraft anytime soon, but it provides the technical foundation to even begin that project.

If your country has no Ziko's, then you don't own your country. All of you are just tenants of richer countries.

[Michael Seibel @mwseibel]

I used to think this was a public forum where people could debate honestly and openly. Now it’s become painfully clear it’s a place where narratives outweigh facts. It’s hard to have an honest debate when lies are more viral than the truth. Be careful about educating yourself on any topic from the posts on your Twitter feed. If you get excited about something here, be skeptical. Do 60 seconds of research before forming an opinion. Seek to break through the narrative.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jeff Bezos: “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy”

Bezos is asked where he gets the confidence to even attempt to build companies of such massive scale, like Amazon and Blue Origin.

He responds:

“I think it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general would be well-advised to try and bias against that. The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive… You say it’s confidence, but maybe I’m just accepting that human bias and trying to compensate against it. The second thing I would point out is that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Video source: @nytimesevents (2024)

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

A new product, a new customer, a new financing!

Introducing Superpower: a 42MW natural gas turbine optimized for AI datacenters, built on our supersonic technology. Superpower launches with a 1.21GW order from @CrusoeAI Backstory 🧵👇

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

Read more here: https://t.co/p1crMtWbZC

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

All Nigerian Languages Are Dying, Except Hausa

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

@akintollgate 1999 elections happened. I was young then, but in hindsight, I can see that the rise in violent gang activity coincided with d return to democracy. Politicians flooded the streets with cash & weapons to steal votes. My novel, Trouble in Valhalla, was inspired by post-1999 PH.

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

@DAMIADENUGA The last one is an accountant. Always running numbers in their heads 😀😀

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

The key identifier of an "elite" class is not merely their bank account balance but their ability and willingness to use their economic and political heft to shape the society around them.

That's why a hereditary landowner and member of the UK House of Lords is considered an elite, while your average Premier League footballer (who may have more money than the HoL member) is not. The difference is in the willingness and ability to wield that power meaningfully.

The reason I keep on saying 'Nigeria has no elites' is that I was born and raised among the subset of Nigerians who erroneously consider themselves to be elite, and I am very familiar with their thought process. It is the exact same thought process that you would get from a sugarcane seller in Mile 12 market if overnight he was given a house in Maitama, a Lexus SUV, a beautiful yarinya and N150m in the bank.

The nouveau-riche sugarcane seller would not be concerned with higher thoughts like how to use his newfound fortune to transform the economic reality of Mile 12 market while positioning to benefit from the transformation. Nope. He would only be concerned with ensuring that he keeps hold of what he has, so that he never has to sleep in a wheelbarrow on a side street off Ikosi Road again.

That's exactly what the privileged Nigerian is upstairs - a sugarcane seller who happens to live in Ikoyi. No matter how many decades they have spent in Ikoyi, their reality is still defined by the desperate quest to escape or avoid poverty. Every Nigerian millionaire or billionaire that you know feels financially insecure. Doesn't matter whether they are worth $1m or $25bn - they are all viscerally terrified of sinking into poverty, and the sum of their decision making is a series of short term deals and compromises to avoid poverty, without any kind of higher, long-term guiding principle.

I know this especially well because I was raised in a house where everybody who is somebody in Lagos stopped by once in a while to work on a real estate deal with my old man, and I would regularly overhear everybody from bank CEOs to retired military generals and air vice marshalls saying things "Our leaders are [insert whiny complaint]." And I would wonder - who are the "leaders" that these extremely privileged people sound so oppressed and intimidated by? Is it not their friends and coursemates from Jaji?

Later on it made sense when I realised that once you are in power in Nigeria, you become God, and even your family changes its rules for you. I've seen families override their olori-ebi because one 50 year-old uncle became somebody in Abuja. Conversely, as soon as you leave power in Nigeria, you sink into total irrelevance and people treat you like your body has a smell. The entire Nigerian sense of value and self-worth is welded to money and power. Once you don't have these 2 things, you might as well be wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak - even your family and contemporaries stop treating you with respect.

The effect this has on elite formation is that unlike in other societies where elites gravitate toward different ideas shared by different camps, and then fight for the right to imprint those ideas on their society (Democrat vs Republican; Maoist vs Dengist; Tory vs Labour etc), privileged Nigerians ONLY gravitate toward one thing - economic power. They have no elite sense of identity outside of money in the bank, a 4-wheeled status signaller on the road, and an overpriced house in a neighbourhood that has a constant bad odour and potholes.

That is also why Nigeria's political actors do this thing called "decamping" where they switch affiliation to whatever political party is in power. Their entire conception of the world is built around access to the levers of economic power so that they can avoid ending up in a wheelbarrow in Mile 12 market.

That's literally all there is to Nigeria.

200 million sugarcane sellers.

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

Does Elon Musk’s quarrel with Donald Trump remind anyone of Crassus and Pompey? The question now is: who will be the Julius Caesar?

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

Does Elon Musk’s quarrel with Donald Trump remind anyone of Crassus and Pompey?
The question now is: who will be the Julius Caesar? https://t.co/lwVhk7lzR4

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

Speaking of Jollof Wars, a Gambian friend, in an attempt to tease me, reminded me that Jollof rice originated from their country. I agreed with him but quickly reminded him also that the version 1 of a software product is nowhere near as good as the upgraded version. 😄😄

[Süleyman Şah @sule365]

“What should I be doing (to get what I truly want) that I’m currently not doing?” is such a scary (and underrated) question. You might not like the feedback.