In the arena.

Abuja, Nigeria
Joined September 2014
Nelson retweeted
Deutsche Bank AG is going long on Nigeria’s naira against the dollar and has also added the west African nation to its frontier index monitor which now features several African currencies including Angola’s kwanza and Ghana’s cedi bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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So many interesting conversations this week, I think I’ll write a piece on agentic payments just for kicks 😂
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Building Brimble is the hardest thing i've done in my life and to be honest I am kind of suprised to see it's still standing, it's so crazy because we don't support local builders enough and if it's in S.F it's the other way round 1) You get constantly compared to vercel/railway and it's sad because if you want to get people in this space to use it to you need to ship features to the quality they have already set (either same quality or you go higher) 2) After shipping almost the same quality, local users here still force you to make decisions by cutting cost of your product, just because you want them to use it and at the end of the day, you still get compared and you even have no choice. 3) I and abraham have been constantly bootstrapping the product for the last 4 years, so we only scale on demand. We don't have the luxury to throw money into compute unncessarily. 4) There were different iterations of the product just to get PMF, the directions changed about 2-3 times between the years. 5) oh fine, "enterprise" has the money. But at the same time, you need a good amount of money to get the licenses to support enterprise and at the same time, some enterprise will look down on you especially when it's just 2 engineers managing the product, ever since we got the idea in 2022. You do performance and security audits yourself, you need to be extremely stable (just with a team of 2 and after all that, you still get compared. It's very much fine, but nobody gives a damn) 6) Brimble literally has everything (databases, sandboxes, fullstack deployments, autoscaling, static outbound ips e.t.c). Strived to succeed 7) You are also trying to pitch to investors, in a case where some of them don't have a clue or the nuances involved in what you are building. The best everyone has to do is support local products, supporting local products even gives you as a user a ton of advantage. You control the type of features you want, the prices is very affordable for you, you'd get the maximum support you need without having to send emails or wait for 3 business days to get feedbacks. A few angels really believes in the vision and fingers crossed, really love it. But at the end of the day, it still seems you aren't good enough for people to use you. I'm extremely grateful for people that took all of these out of their mind to actually support us in terms of using the product end to end. Sharing reasonable feedbacks and also sticking around even when it had issues. If i have the opportunity to do this again, i would peacefully decline.
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Counter argument: Not only is taste subjective, it's a moving target. As soon as [tasteful thing] becomes easily replicable, it stops being tasteful. Taste is a status game with a strong defensibility mechanism. That's why the term is so fuzzy and ill-defined. Vagueness is the whole point. It's meant to be hard to copy.
I no longer see any compelling reason to believe that taste is some permanent boundary LLMs won’t cross. It’s already happening.
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this design everyone's talking about chow deck did, where e dey pls?
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Nelson retweeted
We just completed training Nerve-1, our first AI model built entirely from scratch. Nerve-1 is a lightweight, ~34M-parameter model trained on over 23 billion tokens. It’s designed for intelligent routing, deciding how much reasoning effort a task requires and directing it to the most suitable AI model. It runs entirely on regular CPUs, making routing decisions in milliseconds. We estimate it could reduce our inference costs by at least 30%. Rolling out soon to all businesses and users on @trydecideAI
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Nelson retweeted
Until death, all defeat is psychological
This model is very very good. I was struggling to find anything to throw at it that it couldn’t do, even when other top models failed. Meta is back.
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the only moat left is the love of the game
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Nelson retweeted
We carved a niche for ourselves by offering one of the best payroll engines Africa has seen. The plan has always been to give it to other people so that they could offer it to their own clients. Frankly, we can’t acquire all the customers in Africa, but all Africans deserve great payroll tech. Today, we are finally there. We present Vuzo. The embedded payroll platform for African businesses. If you want to embed payroll in your platform, or just want to know more about how it works, please dm me. vuzo.africa/
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Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are: • Proprietary data • Network effects • A physical component
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I'd actually pay for this if it was on my xbox and allowed cross platform multiplayer.
🚨3 new playgrounds just landed!!! 🟤 Mud: the field after rain 🟠 Sand: tyre goals and golden-hour dust 🟢 The Cage: 5-a-side under the floodlights Pick your playground before kick-off. Free, no download. monkeypost.xyz
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Dear START UPS, those present at Day 5, don’t take the prayer we prayed over you lightly ! Very soon, we shall be announcing your names on HC as one of our partners in Jesus’ name !
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Thank you @Shalom_HeyEliy for giving me an example of AI-native development in Nigeria so undeniable that I can use it to shell shock my peers in the US.
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First, this is some incredible work. The pace of update is such a great example of what modern software production can look like. Second, I have a really unique base of SF + Nigeria followers and they're each ships passing through the night: I see multiple posts on Naija Twitter saying this would have been a sensation if it was build out of the Valley. About 2 months ago, we had a digital twin project go viral, made by @cdngdev. (on 5.6-sol) xitter.cf/cdngdev/status/2091909… It went viral for a few days and it subsided. Here's the chart of that spike: xitter.cf/cdngdev/status/2102602… LagosLife is obviously much deeper (building out a full Sims-like experience vs. the GTA-like nature of the SF digital twin) and its userbase is much more engaged. It's surely built alongside a newer, Astra/Opus5.5 level model. I think the Labs should be *extremely* excited about something like this. It shows how much deeper a concept can go in frontier markets using their tools vs. the "awesome project" nature of what they saw in the US. The empowerment of technically-capable creators is global - market context is what changes it into something potentially commercial. Only time will tell if LagosLife sees a similar spike and fall like the SF project, but the absolute virality is something worth paying attention to. Again, huge congrats to the monumental work (and ship speed) of @Shalom_HeyEliy + her agents.
2 MILLION PLAYERS!!! 😭🇳🇬👑 ABUJA AND PORT HARCOURT ARE NOW LIVE! 🔥 You asked for your cities. I built them. Now go and find your people 😂❤️ 101k+ playing right now. 10 MILLION+ visits today. Lagos 🤝 Abuja 🤝 Port Harcourt REP YOUR CITY BELOW 👇🏾 lagoslife.app/stats lagoslife.app/
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Lmao. If you’re a problem solver, you’re a problem solver. regardless of the sector. The only thing that ever separated individuals like this from solving problems were skill issues. There was no justifiable ROI into putting the level of effort required to solve problems at this scale. Now, AI’s given every true problem solver an infinite arsenal of tools to solve most problems they encounter. Layer that with curiosity fueled by perfectionism ✨ Seeing things like this always excite me so much. Seeing where the world is headed in the next 2-3 years I’m gassed!
Someone on Reddit reverse-engineered their LG TV because the Plex app took 30 seconds to load Built an entire native Plex client from scratch using Claude Code, Opus, and Fable. Started in C, moved to Rust, ended up building his own OpenGL UI framework along the way Same TV. Same hardware. Profile picker now loads in 3 seconds instead of 30. Runs at 60 fps. Supports 4K, Dolby Vision, Atmos. Fully open source One person. One TV he was annoyed with. AI tools doing the work of an entire engineering team firmware reverse engineering, media playback, GPU profiling, shader optimization, UI architecture, all of it
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Nelson retweeted
In my 2025 year investor letter, I wrote to investors on how the future of commerce has changed. Games were a sector we saw growth in. One thing I didn’t see was how AI will enable even more complex games development. This is the best time to be building things. If you have a game idea, here’s your cue to build it.
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Excited to join the Silicon Valley & The World Global Advisory Board, an initiative launched by @semafor alongside Co-Chairs Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Lisa Su of AMD, Divesh Makan of ICONIQ, and Ruth Porat of Alphabet. Looking forward to bringing an African perspective to this global dialogue, championing alignment between the leaders building AI, the policymakers regulating it, and the businesses deploying it on the ground.
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Lagos Life launched on October 1st. Just 9 days later, over 4.7 million people have played the game. Today, I’m excited to announce that Vatar, the parent company behind Lagos Life, has closed a $500K angel round led by AB Hassan (@ijbguy), Nathan Nwachuku (@_KingNath), and GB Agboola (@TechProd_Arch). Lagos is just the beginning. We’re building entire worlds, and there’s so much more to come. 🌍 vatar.com
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Nelson retweeted
Finally tried to activate the Temu promo bundle and everyone in that organization should be arrested for fraud.
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