In the arena.

Abuja, Nigeria
Joined September 2014
Excited to share that Evolution has joined Nuvion @ournuvion 🚀 When we started Evolution, we had a simple vision: make moving money across borders easier and more accessible for individuals and businesses, enabling them to go Global from wherever they were. We believed that accessing global financial services shouldn’t be complicated simply because of where you live or where your business operates. What started as a platform for exchanging digital assets grew into something much bigger. We built infrastructure that enabled people and businesses to hold multiple currencies, receive international payments, move money across borders, and access financial tools that were previously out of reach. Along the way, we served thousands of users, processed millions of dollars in transactions, and learned firsthand what it takes to build financial infrastructure in emerging markets. But more importantly, we saw just how much work remains to be done. As we continued building, one thing became increasingly clear: solving cross-border banking challenges at scale requires more than a great product. It requires strong financial infrastructure, regulatory reach, and the ability to serve businesses wherever they operate. That’s what makes this next chapter with Nuvion particularly exciting. Nuvion is building an AI Powered Global banking platform for ambitious businesses, bringing multicurrency accounts, international payments, FX, virtual cards, and stablecoin infrastructure together in one place. Our visions have always been closely aligned, and joining forces gives us the opportunity to pursue what we started at Evolution on a much larger scale. For me, this is an opportunity to take everything we’ve learned building Evolution and apply it to something with the infrastructure, reach, and ambition to serve businesses around the world. I’m especially excited that members of the Evolution team are continuing this journey with me at Nuvion. We’ve spent years building, solving difficult problems, and learning together. Now we get to bring that experience into a much bigger mission. To everyone who believed in Evolution, our early customers, investors, partners, community, and the incredible people who contributed to our journey: thank you. You trusted us when we were still figuring things out, challenged us to build better, and helped turn an idea into a real business. I’m incredibly proud of what we built, and even more excited about what comes next. Evolution was never just about building another fintech company. It was about making global banking accessible for the people and businesses who need it. That mission continues at Nuvion. The Job is just starting
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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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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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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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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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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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Nelson retweeted
my biggest bottleneck is my brain. i need to figure out how to absorb and understand new concepts at 3x my current rate.
My biggest bottleneck isn't code. It's NEPA.
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Nelson retweeted
🚀
Two of my friends used real money to buy money on Lagos life today. That’s how I discovered that Nomba is the merchant bank.
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Nelson retweeted
Anthropic valuation - $2 Trillion OpenAI valuation - $1.5 Trillion Meta valuation - $1.85 Trillion Anthropic 2025 revenue - $4.6 Billion OpenAI 2025 revenue - $13 Billion Meta 2025 revenue - $200 Billion+
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