Victor KOLABO

venture builder @Trykolabo

[Victor KOLABO @victorknowsyou]

This is exactly the problem we’re building against at @trykolabo

Portfolio fraud → we verify work history against actual delivered campaigns, not submitted samples

Delivery failure → locked deliverables spec both parties sign before any money moves

[Toyosi @toyosi_akinya]

Massive respect to hiring teams fr. Idk how you guys do it.

Hired 2 brand/motion designers and a video editor in the space of 5 months for a project and none could deliver reasonable work for said project.

[Ewgi @Ssaasquatch]

Again theres $1m+ in your phone and you just gotta press a few buttons to bring it out. Good thing this is coming from Ansem himself. I think the bigger point here is simple: stay opportunity-agnostic. A million dollars is a million dollars whether you make it in stocks, crypto or somewhere else in the financial markets. Your job is to keep learning, spot the opportunities and extract as much as you possibly can. I’ll do my bit to make this a lot easier for a lot of Africans on @Nectar_finance

[The Ark @The_Arkinc]

Get perspective onchain.

Coming soon ⛓️👀

[Nathan Nwachuku @_KingNath]

@terraindustries is excited to lead a $1M strategic investment in Aeon, with participation from @TechProd_Arch (Flutterwave CEO)

Aeon is a Nigerian startup building sovereign cyber defense for Africa

Cyber is a critical frontier of defense, with growing cyber attacks from..(1/2

[Ajim Capital @AjimCapital]

Ajim Capital is proud to participate in @terraindustries latest $1 million funding round for Aeon.

Aeon is building cybersecurity infrastructure to help organisations across Africa better protect their networks, cloud systems and devices.

The new funding will help the team grow its engineering team, improve its products and turn existing pilots into commercial deployments.

The round also follows a successful pilot between Terra Industries and Aeon, which has now led to a commercial partnership to bring Aeon’s cybersecurity solutions to more organizations across the Global South.

We’re excited to back the team as they build for a safer digital future in Africa.

[Babájídé @Babajiide]

Sit with the money for at least 6-12 months it’s most important you do nothing and mentally get use to it

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Although you pay for AI by the token, that's not the unit of inference, because you get more problem solving per token as models improve. Someone needs to define the unit, perhaps using a chain of increasingly hard problems, each pair of which can be solved by a single model.

[Matthew Chang @MatthewChang]

Allow me to interpret what’s happening.

Anthropic is being audited.

Anthropic desires to file an S-1, as they would like to go public. Therefore they need an audit. And by “they”, I mean the VC’s who invested in them. So “they” can exit their position and pass the bag to firemen, nurses, teachers and policemen.

How does this go from the VC’s to the working man and woman? Because the size of the IPO will automatically qualify Anthropic for the Fortune 500 and the Dow Jones 100. Therefore, every working person with a 401k or pension will end up owning a little bit of Anthropic in their mutual funds. Teachers hold the bag, VC’s take the cash. Thank you, come again.

Now back to the audit. The audit required is a PCAOB audit, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. This audit is what all public companies must comply with be on the stock market. Revenue recognition, expense classification, depreciation, related party transactions, etc. It’s there for consumer protection.

This audit is TOUGH. It is INVASIVE. There is no way to lie your way through it. Any company that passes a PCAOB audit automatically earns my trust on finances.

How do I know? Because I’ve been through it before. @ChangRobotics is 2 year PCAOB audited and currently underway for a 3 year audit. It’s brutal. The same as showing up as the valedictorian to your high school graduation, except you’re naked, and you have to walk on stage and deliver the speech. It’s rough. And I know many incredible founders that can’t pass one.

Now, why would Anthropic be leaking all kind of weird statements lately about “self pacing” a slow down on AI (e.g. they are WAY behind on revenue), and profitable if they didn’t have expenses (e.g. we just learned for the first time what our expenses are, because we’re being audited).

Because they were claiming NVIDIA discounts and Microsoft cloud credits as revenue. Because they had no clue what their expenses were, or why it even mattered. Because they had unlimited investor capital and their job was to burn it to make an LLM. Well, they did a great job with that!

That’s the same as my wife coming home with Bed Bath and Beyond coupons and telling me it’s her paycheck. Ummm, not the same, sweetheart.

So by now hopefully you can see that Anthropic is in a PCAOB audit right now, in order to file an S-1 and go public, and pass the bag to teachers so the VC’s get profits. And hopefully that explains their “crazy” behavior.

In reality you can be grateful to KPMG, PWC, or whoever is auditing Anthropic, because it’s the first time Dario learned that:

1) we are not profitable
2) expenses matter
3) coupons are not revenue
4) we have no clue how to be “profitable”
5) growth is hard when revenue numbers are in an audit and not a power point

-your neighborhood engineer

[signüll @signulll]

ideally you should never ever apply for a job, a job should apply for you.

[Itana (formerly Talent City) @ItanaAfrica]

For too long, building a globally competitive company from Africa meant leaving it, incorporating in Delaware, raising abroad, letting the value you create settle somewhere else. Itana was built to change that.Seeing it named at this level is a marker of how far the work has come

[Deji ° Perpect Radar @dejiperpect]

How do people protest commission fees and delivery fees, then canvass for higher pay for delivery riders?

How exactly do you expect an extremely low-margin business like Chowdeck to make money?

Most people have no idea how reality works. It's a shame, but that’s expected.

[Oui Capital @OuiCapital]

In 2019, we invested $150K in a company called TeamApt.

Five years later, that investment became $8M.

Here's the story. 🧵

[obásolá @obasolaaa]

oh, the places you’ll go.

[Suzanna Prophecy Daniel @suzannaprophecy]

I want the shuttlers team to win so bad. They are solving a core problem for the everyday Nigerian. One of the things I’m realizing following Uber's exit and how it happened is that some of the best solutions for Nigeria will be built by Nigerians living in Nigeria.

Hot take, maybe, but it’s a pattern I keep seeing.
You understand the problem differently when you’re actually living with it. You know what people do when the “normal” process doesn’t work. You understand the workarounds, the frustrations, the little things that don’t show up in a research report, and there’s also more at stake.

A Nigerian building for Nigerians, from Nigeria, has a different relationship with the outcome. If it works, they’re building something in the economy they actually live in. If it fails, they feel the consequences too. An international company can come into Nigeria, see an opportunity, build for a while, and decide to leave when the economics no longer make sense.

The Nigerian founder doesn’t have that luxury in quite the same way, and this is why we need more Nigerian-owned startups, products, and brands to succeed. We have a very interesting economy with very specific problems that are begging to be solved by people who understand the context deeply. And we need more support for the people willing to build them at all levels.

[k. @korie_tweets]

legally, an illiterate is someone who can’t read or write in the language used in the contract. your take would hold water if the contracts were written in french or some other language.

an ignorant player is not an illiterate player. let everybody lie in the beds they made.

[Mr. Czar @Mrczar_]

This is how to predict your future:

I made this tweet yesterday:

“The closest prediction of your future is the result of the top guy in your industry. If you beat them, then you are an anomaly.”

A few people asked me to explain, so here goes -

If you are a doctor, the top guy in your industry is the CONSULTANT.

His life is the best possible outcome of your future - because it is the end game of your career path.

Which means, if he earns ₦800k a month, your future top earning will be around ₦800k, plus everything & the life that income gives him.

You will not escape this end game - NO MATTER how hard you work. Because the game is capped.

Which means, the best way to make more than ₦800k and have a life significantly better than the Consultant is NOT to work harder; it is to EXIT the game he is playing.

Working harder will simply accelerate you towards the unfavorable end game. So why play it?

Which means you need to find a player that has the life you want.

In the case of the hospital, it can be the doctor that owns a hospital chain.

So if your end game is to be rich, then the hospital chain doctor's game is the best play. Not that of the Consultant.

End games are scattered all around us.

If you are a teacher, you can look at the principal or highest-paid school administrator.

If you are a banker, look at the branch manager, regional manager or executive director.

If you are a lawyer, look at the senior partner of the law firm.

If you are a civil servant, look at the director or permanent secretary.

If you are a footballer, look at the highest level you can realistically reach in that career and ask yourself if that life is what you want.

If you are a taxi driver, look at the guy who has spent 20 years driving and ask yourself if you want his end game.

If you are playing the JAMB => university=>NYSC =>9-5 game, look at where the person 20 years ahead of you ended up.

If you are an entrepreneur selling products online, look at the biggest person playing the same game. Trace what game they are REALLY playing, instead of just working hard.

You must ask: “Do I even want his end game? or do i need to play a different game”

Because if you don't like the destination, working harder is actually a bad strategy.

[Kayode Makinde @Mkm_world]

We spent months tracking 5,467 bets from Nigeria's biggest sports betting influencers.

The bets were worth ~$4.8 million.

We wanted to answer a simple question:
If you followed their bets exactly, would you make money?

The answer is no.🧵👇
With: @thimmie_onas @temiladeoluwaaa

[Techpoint Africa @TechpointAfrica]

🧵 This week in African tech:

From fintech profits and crypto taxes to digital IDs, telecom licences, and creator monetisation, here are some of the biggest developments that shaped the continent's tech ecosystem this week.

[Chinonso @Nonso_Obiefule]

Interesting.

A few months ago, as ecosystems exited the Nigerian market, there was a narrative suggesting that Nigeria was not viable for blockchain ecosystems to thrive.

We have our challenges, but Nigeria remains Africa’s largest crypto market and one of the fastest-growing globally.

Circle's Arc, Stellar, Solana's SuperteamNG and a handful of others are still doing the work of growing global onchain ecosystems locally. And there is still room for others looking to penetrate Africa’s most important crypto market.

[Geekay @gkbalogs]

SMEs, here is a non-exhaustive list of legal 25 possible taxes, levies, permits, licenses, and regulatory fees that a business in Nigeria may be required to pay.

And this is just the beginning…

1. Company Income Tax (CIT)
2. Development Levy
3. Capital Gains Tax
4. Education Tax
5. Police Tax
6. Sales Consumption Tax
7. Withholding Tax (WHT)
8. Pension contributions — employer
9. National Health Insurance-related contributions
10. Industrial Training Fund (ITF) contributions
11. NSITF contributions
12. Business Premises Registration
13. Parking Levy
14. Environmental/ecological charges
15. Waste collection charges
16. Business sign permit
17. Signage registration
18. Food premises registration
19. Food hygiene certification
20. Environmental health inspection fees
21. Food-handler certification
22. Medical examination of food handlers
23. Fire Safety Levy
24. Local government business registration
25. Trade permit

[Babatunde Akin-Moses @AkinMoses1]

Anytime there's not so pleasant news about a company, the debate breaks into two camps: some people analyse what went wrong, and entrepreneurs push back with "you're just talkers, not doers".

So after GoLemon shut down, my @ConfusedSith wrote an interesting piece for @readnotadeepdve titled "Everyone is in the Arena", on the grounds that everyone directly or indirectly participates in the success or failure of most businesses.

I see it differently, for at least 3 reasons:

1. There is a difference between the stadium and the arena. Not everyone is in the arena.

2. Everyone has a voice, but not everyone has a stake. When things go wrong, the losses are not the same.

3. Those outside the arena usually get the benefit of hindsight. I propose a simple timestamp test for this one: when did you first form the opinion you are now sharing?

Enjoy the full piece: "Everyone is in the Stadium, Not the Arena". See link in the comments.