Daniel

the problem with today’s #podcast wave is that we’ve stopped using audio as a tool and started using it as a digital oxygen tank, yes. We are suffocating in a sea of "expert" opinions while our actual lives remain stuck in neutral. We’ve entered a state of Synthetic Intimacy, where your brain literally cannot tell the difference between a high-level mentor and a voice in your earbuds. You spend four hours a day "hanging out" with tech titans and fitness moguls, and your nervous system responds by releasing the social satisfaction of belonging to an elite tribe. But when the AirPods come out, you’re still sitting in the same room, with the same bank balance, and the same unstarted projects. You’re effectively "ghosting" your own reality to live in someone else’s conversation. Pathetic Lookig closely one can tell that this has birthed a specific, rotting trait, of Cognitive Hoarding. We have become a generation of intellectual dragons, sitting on a pile of "how-to" gold that we will never actually spend. You know the exact morning routine of a billionaire like Elon Musk, Jeff B, Dangote, Strive M, Ali baba, or Bill G, the specific API architecture of a successful SaaS company, and the psychological triggers for a viral marketing campaign. You feel smart and prepared but that feeling is a hallucination. In the tech world, we see this constantly, the founder who can debate the ethics of AGI and the nuances of payment orchestration for hours but hasn't shipped a single landing page. They are "Information Rich and Outcome Bankrupt." They use the podcast as a sophisticated shield; as long as they are "learning," they don't have to face the terrifying possibility of failing. It’s a socially acceptable way to be a coward. The dark side of this is the Erasure of the Intuitive Self. And I honestly believe that Survival in 2026 isn't about who has the most data, it’s about who can act in the face of uncertainty. Cuz by constantly piping other people’s logic into your skull, you are effectively evicting your own inner voice, and you’ve replaced your gut instinct with a "best practices" manual written by someone who isn't living your life. Think about the person who listens to a "wealth" podcast while they work out. They are literally outsourcing their own struggle. They can’t even feel the burn in their muscles or the boredom of a task without needing a host to tell them why it matters. We are losing the ability to think in silence, which is the only place where original, high-value ideas are actually born. And as it would unfold, the side example that should haunt you is the Pre-Success Consultant. This is the guy who gives everyone advice on "scaling" and "unit economics" because he’s heard 500 hours of interviews, but he’s never actually sold a product to a stranger. He’s a ventriloquist for a millionaire’s ghost. He’s built a massive library of solutions for problems he hasn't earned the right to have yet. Dude true survival isn't about collecting keys to doors you haven't even found; it’s about having the raw, unrefined grit to kick the door down yourself. We’ve traded our agency for a subscription, and until we learn to embrace the silence of execution over the noise of "insight," we aren't moving we’re just vibrating in place. And sadly, the blacks and the white folks are affected by this enigma.

@MicrosoftLearn Perhaps a chat with @Laura and some Claude Code token? 😘

Do NOT doom scroll tonight. Instead, learn a new skill. Comment for a course recommendation.

What utter disrespect! Na @markessien I blame for not really publicising the record of the @hnginternship program. When you factor in costs and scale, the HNG alum (company and the internship program) has by far the strongest "mafia per capita". it is a combination of the legacy of Andela, Jumia & Paystack. Unlike many programs, HNG Internship launched many people into the tech industry a large number also moved to global companies. Dem full Germany and Netherlands Keeping quiet about the sucess of a model is not humility, it blinds people from seeing what works doubling down on the methods. @TechCabal, @TechpointAfrica or @thecondia should do a story on them. You can start with the founder of Lemfi, Ridwan. BTW, all those that benefited from Mark and keep quiet when tweets like these come up (maybe cos you don't like his politics), are not doing the minimum expected.

@mayukh_panja Happy to connect. I’m actually looking into something related to Germany tech ecosystem at the moment and this came up from the search.

I need to connect with more African people in this app. I barely know anything about the continent and all I have heard and seen about Africa are from these stupid ass NGOs, who very clearly have an agenda and thrive only from selling poverty porn. I am sure there are nerds doing nerd shit in Africa, brands selling stuff, marketers making cool ads, a whole thriving ecosystem. I don’t see them much.

The African financial sector remains ill suited for industrial strategy. Many European countries had public banks mandated to invest in agriculture & manufacturing with patient capital, eg Sparkassen (savings) & Raiffesen (coop) banks in Germany. They were key to finance SMEs.

Meanwhile, somewhere the conversation is still largely about digital transformation and basic AI awareness.

Couldn't be more thrilled.

When a customer says the price is too high they are almost never objecting to the number. They are telling you that the story did not land. That the value was not made sufficiently visible. That the distance between what they are being asked to pay and what they understand themselves to be receiving has not been closed. Lowering the number without changing the story simply confirms the customer's suspicion that the product was overpriced to begin with

Books, for me, have always been the most honest conversation available. The people who wrote them had nothing left to prove. They had already built the thing, survived the thing, lost the thing, or rebuilt the thing. They were writing from the other side of the experience. And from that side, people tend to tell the truth. So I read bsessively and systematically with the specific hunger of someone who is building something they cannot fully explain yet and needs to find the language for it.

What a company believes about itself determines what products it builds. What products it builds determines what customers it attracts. What customers it attracts determines what revenue it generates. And what revenue it generates reinforces what the company believes about itself. This is a loop. And like all loops it can be virtuous or vicious depending on the quality of the belief at its centre.

I don't know for our team but my secret - the one I strongly believe we built Paysight on, is that revenue data, when properly structured and interpreted in real time, reveals patterns in buyer behavior that no human team can see and no traditional analytics stack can surface. At @pay_sight we have one customer profile that generates the insight that justifies the entire company's existence.

Competition Is for Losers

I believe that when a business shifts to value extraction instead of value creation, it's the beginning of the end. With Buffer, I’m trying to operate with what I’d call an “under-extraction” philosophy. Create real value for customers and lean into generosity in how we package it. I love how @tobi from Shopify put it: "Your customers notice if you're going into value extraction." The way he describes his job is inspiring: "adding as many levers as possible to the room and then not pulling any of them." In the past few years we've added countless new features and improvements without raising our prices. In recent years we've added the majority of new functionality to our free plan. We've never made people jump through hoops to cancel, and a few months ago we proactively cancelled subscriptions for inactive customers. We emailed them and said: unless you respond or start using the product again, we'll cancel at your next renewal. I want to put minimal energy into value extraction with Buffer. I believe that pouring our energy into how we can create the most value possible will mean that our results take care of themselves. The goal is to build real loyalty with customers and achieve genuinely sustainable long-term growth.

Whenever I open a job or career portal and see that it’s managed by @bamboohr, I just think, “God bless this company for making applicants’ lives easier.” It feels so seamless. My first real encounter with them was when I applied to and worked with eHealth Africa in 2022-2025. Since then, I’ve really come to appreciate them. The questions are simple, just enough to properly vet a candidate. It would be great to have something like this at PaySight soon.

Shola was excited when he saw the title of our proposal: “Making room for a bigger decade”. It was the perfect way to capture the mission he had invited us on. By our next meeting, it was a different story. I'll explain. We had held several conversations with different leaders to absorb context... and we were right at work, excited to the brim about the challenge. We have a thing for high stakes based on our previous work but the nerve never fully disappears, not in a subjective field like branding. We had been introduced to the Orange team, a strategy development agency they had hired to lay the foundation for everything. I knew the co-founder, Tola Alade and he had told me about his business partner, Alessandra. A few months earlier, we had exchanged one of those “we should work together sometime” but we meant it. Now it was here, right on our laps. There was no ice to break. They had started before us but everything was still early, fluid and in motion. We studied their work-in-progress documents, and jumped on calls to hear their thinking, share our thoughts, ask questions and exchange ideas. Ale would sip from her big cup that looked straight out of Italy (I was right), as she talked us through her thought process laid out on slides and complete with “don’t take this too seriously, I just quickly put it together so you can have an idea”. We liked her immediately. Off to a great start, it all appeared. We held our own internal conversations to make sense of everything we had learned so far, from the several conversations and our study of older Paystack materials. We distilled our robust, and apparently brilliant ideas into a set of possible directions. Ready and confident, we asked for a call with the Paystack leadership. At the end of what we thought was a great presentation, they were rather shocked by a presentation that was all theory and no visualization. As a strategy-led design agency, we were used to having those thoughts-only conversations with our clients over several calls before any visuals. But fair to them, they had hired a whole agency for that. Enter Emmanuel Quartey. He unmutes his mic, starting first by giving us some feedback on the ideas, and then going on to close with something along the lines of: “guys I get you, but this is all too abstract for most of us at this point. I’m your guy here, however. I'm happy to sit fully with you at this level of abstraction. Consider me as your client in this phase. Let’s do our meetings as a smaller team and we will come to this wider meetings only at more tangible milestones.” And that’s how the combined task force was born: Emmanuel, Ale, and Wilfred Alfred, Paul Akorede, Dunsin Ayodele, Mercy Abayomi and myself from FourthCanvas. (Teslim Abu would join the project later on and Tola Alade listened in from time to time, from the Orange side). Over the weeks that followed, we met often, sometimes 3 times a week, talking through every word, line, shape, and shade. It felt like one same team. Many times we spent more than 4 hours on one call. Figma is on the Google Meet presentation from Paul’s screen, and everyone else was either right there on the file creating something or leaving comments. Someone is importing something from Adobe Illustrator to Figjam, another is uploading a sketch from paper… so we can all have it one place for all to see and discuss. Everyone is trying something, or asking what if? The sessions flowed from our own internal calls to the extended sessions with Emmanuel and many times, Ale. Working with Emmanuel was intense and exhaustive. It was both a blessing and a challenge. If you listen well to Emmanuel, you will get somewhere great, but from time to time, you'd also have to insist and defend your differing conviction. It would have to be convincing indeed however! He is everything but the surface. Emmanuel could try to nudge you for hours in one direction and when you finally start to agree, he has seen something he didn’t previously see and now he’s arguing for something you had defended and now discarded. We were not surprised by Emmanuel’s obsession, however. At least, not after our very first meeting. After Emmanuel said he was our guy in that first 'unsuccessful' meeting, we had jumped on a first call to properly get to know each other. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he had mentioned in passing, this building project he was currently pouring his soul, heart and mind into. “If you guys want to hear more about it”, we can do another call for it. Of course we want to hear more about it! We set up a call on the calendar. We must have set 60 or 90 minutes to it. We invited other members from the larger FourthCanvas team. 6 hours later, we were still going... Emmanuel had hundreds of pictures, links, and iterations to show. It was a ‘masterclass’ about soil, drainage, walls, doors, nails, bricks, hinges and everything you could see and not see about a building. We were in for a ride. We explored far and wide, but still within the crafted intentions of the would-be parent brand. From ‘rails to ambition’ to ‘exponent’ and ‘environmental modulation’, we sketched hundreds of ideas, and refined tens of them, looking for the mark that most fittingly captures the next, bigger decade of what was simply Paystack. The next time we presented to the larger group, they loved the ideas, but now they thought we had gone too far with the ideas. We had gone deep and wide, seeking the right metaphors for what they were trying to build. We had distilled several pages of strategy and made sense of them with brilliant concepts we could write books about. We had done everything but the obvious — the stack. At the beginning of the conversations, everyone tended towards TSG as the name, even though it meant ‘The Stack Group’. We had chosen to ignore the stacks idea from the elegant Paystack logo. TSG needed to have its own unique identity, we said. We had the Paystack icon on our board, with a red x crossed on it like: "don’t do it". Later in the process, it was clear this would be known more as ‘The Stack Group’ than as TSG. Now the red x on the stacks logo started to become grey. “I love these ideas but I’m also wondering: should we really ignore the obvious?”, Shola asked me one evening on iMessage. With the new spelt out name, it was increasingly necessary to consider a direction inspired by the idea of the ‘stack’, which defined the identity of the successful first child of the incoming adoptive parent. The following morning on our internal call, I was trying to give the team a download of what Shola said when Paul showed me something he came up with the previous evening. It was as if he was listening in on my conversation with Shola. He had come up with a brilliant idea that nodded just enough to the stacks without quite being the stacks. Several iterations later with additional input from Dunsin, Wilfred and I, we had a strong, compact mark that shared the appearance of layers stacked up but most importantly emphasized elevation from one level to another. At the same time, it subtly read T, S and G. (Once you see it, you can’t unsee it). It simultaneously paid homage to the origins of Paystack and illustrated the acceleration that the parent group was to be about, ultimately becoming its own striking, unique mark. In our next presentation, we began by saying it was just a work-in-progress. We were confident about the mark but we were also trying to manage expectations. We also showed other ideas that were completely unrelated to the stacks. Amandine didn’t hold back her excitement. Shola was in love! He said it made the perfect connection. “It feels Paystack without being Paystack. It feels like the more mature, institutional version of Paystack.” He continued: “I can imagine someone putting off a Paystack shirt and putting this on, and it still feels like they come from the same place.” We had created a ‘mastermark!’ It was strong, institutional and potentially timeless. We were, and still are, very excited about how much it feels like an uncle beside his niece, when you put them side by side. And this fits Orange’s family tree classification, where Paystack was that brilliant first child with accomplishments (we heard: layers) and The Stack Group was the wise uncle with global relationships who amplifies the work of the entire family (we heard: levels). The new mark was unlimited in what it could become, while signifying, or better, embodying stability, excellence and growth. “We could wake up one day and decide to make batteries. I want us to be able to go that far and wide, as long as it’s solving a problem for Africans,” Shola had said in our very first call. Now you can, I thought. Put that icon on a battery, data server, skyscraper, digital screen or as one must, a tote bag, and still it would imbue it with the daring Paystack spirit but on an entirely new level — The Stack Group. Explore the full visual system, including typography, colour, texture, devices and overall composition: 👉🏾 fourthcanvas.co/portfolio/tsg

If agents can prospect, qualify, outreach, price, invoice, retain, and expand, what is the human role in revenue?

Today, an AI agent can detect that a prospect visited your pricing page at 2:14 AM, cross-reference their company's recent funding announcement, enrich their profile with 47 data sources, score them against your ideal customer profile, draft a personalised email referencing the exact problem your product solves for their industry, schedule a follow-up, log everything in your CRM, and send the outreach, all before your sales rep's alarm clock goes off. The global agentic AI market was valued at roughly $8.75 billion in 2025. By 2035, it is projected to reach $324 billion, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 44%. To put that in context, no major industry in history has grown at 44% per year for a decade. Not personal computers, mobile, or the internet itself. @Gartner_inc had also reported that fewer than 5% of enterprise applications had embedded AI agents in 2025. By the end of this year, 2026 that number is expected to hit 40%. In twelve months. We are watching.

Over a period of 2 month I research 136 (counting) startups just to understand their revenue model, monetization, pricing strategy, and psychology. Why should someone pay and use your product when there is a strong alternative?

We are entering an agentic economy where revenue is no longer a static outcome but a continuously optimised flow, orchestrated in real time by intelligent systems.

@TheCuriousRuixi @gumroad Your DM not going? Can you enable it?

@gumroad I am doing my podcast and no matter what I will publish it !

Nobody is going to discover your genius if you keep it in your head.