Stanley Joseph Ouma

He cleaned toilets as a child. Worked as a waiter as a teen. Built the world’s most valuable AI company. 🤯 Meet Jensen Huang (founder of Nvidia) > Born in 1963 in Tainan > Moved to Thailand as a child > At 9, his parents sent him and his brother alone to America > Attended Oneida Baptist Institute, where he cleaned toilets daily > Studied engineering at Oregon State University and earned a Master’s from Stanford University > Worked as a waiter and dishwasher at Denny's > In 1993, founded NVIDIA at a Denny’s with $40,000 > Nvidia nearly went bankrupt in the 90s but survived > In 1999, Nvidia invented the modern GPU, transforming computing forever > Cut his salary to $1 during the 2008 recession > CEO for 30+ years > In 2025, Nvidia became the first company to hit a $5 trillion market cap > Today, AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude run on Nvidia infrastructure The most improbable arc in the history of American capitalism.

Eric Schmidt: Google co-founder Sergey Brin's formula for running a company

Software engineer. Born 1962. 1990s ~ Databases were expensive, heavy, locked behind giant companies. Small startups couldn’t afford serious infrastructure. Building internet products was painful. Michael changed that with code. He created MySQL — an open-source database that was fast, lightweight, and easy to deploy. Free for developers. Powerful enough for the growing web. Suddenly startups could scale without spending millions. Forums, blogs, e-commerce stores, early social media — huge parts of the internet were built on MySQL. It became one of the foundations of the LAMP stack that powered the modern web explosion. Even companies that later moved to massive distributed systems often started with MySQL. Most users never heard his name. Yet an entire generation of internet companies exists because his software made building affordable. 🐐🐐🐐

Netflix, Wikipedia, Airbnb, Dropbox ~ all run on the same web server. One quiet Russian engineer wrote it alone. For free. 🤯 Meet Igor Sysoev 🇷🇺 > Russian software engineer. Born 1970 in Soviet Kazakhstan. > Failed his first university entrance exam. > Joined Rambler in 2000 as a system administrator. > 2002 ~ started writing a new web server in his free time. Alone. > Goal: handle 10,000 simultaneous users on one machine ~ a problem Apache (the dominant web server at the time) couldn't solve. > 2004 ~ released nginx publicly. Free. Open source. > Zero marketing. Zero PR. Just the code. > 2008 ~ nginx was serving 500 million requests per day at Rambler. > 2011 ~ founded Nginx Inc. with co-founder Maxim Konovalov. > 2013 ~ Netflix scaled its streaming CDN to 40 Gbps per server using nginx. > 2019 ~ F5 acquired the company for $670 million. > December 2019 ~ Russian police raided his Moscow office over a fake copyright claim. > The Russian tech community publicly defended him. Charges were dropped.🚀 > 2021 ~ nginx overtook Apache as the #1 web server on Earth. > 2022 ~ left F5 quietly. No farewell tour. No book deal. > Today nginx powers Netflix, Wikipedia, Airbnb, Dropbox, Cloudflare, WordPress. > 33% of every website on Earth runs on his code. Apache trails at 26%. Microsoft's IIS isn't even close. > Still 100% open-source. Still free. One man wrote it alone, in his free time, for free. He never sought publicity. He never asked for credit. A third of every website on Earth still runs on his work. Webserver GOAT. 🐐

The messaging system behind Netflix, Uber, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Pinterest, Spotify, and thousands of real-time systems worldwide. It started inside LinkedIn to solve one impossible scaling problem. ⚡ Meet Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao 🚀 > 2008 ~ LinkedIn was drowning in data pipelines. > Logs, metrics, user activity, analytics — everything moved differently. >Existing message queues couldn’t handle the scale. So three engineers built a distributed commit log inspired by database internals and transaction logs. They named it Kafka ~ after the writer Franz Kafka. >📚2011 ~ LinkedIn open sourced Apache Kafka. > Most companies ignored it at first. > Then the world moved to real-time systems. > Kafka became the event streaming backbone powering Netflix recommendations, Uber ride dispatching, LinkedIn activity feeds, Airbnb bookings, Pinterest analytics, fraud detection, observability pipelines, and financial systems. Instead of request-response thinking, Kafka introduced event-driven architecture at internet scale. Millions of messages per second. Billions of events per day. Near real-time everywhere.Kafka changed how modern backend systems are designed. The ecosystem exploded: → Kafka Streams → Connect → Schema Registry → ksqlDB → Event sourcing → Stream processing Entire engineering cultures formed around “streams instead of tables.” Apache Software Foundation adopted the project. Later, the creators founded Confluent to build the commercial ecosystem around it. Today Kafka is everywhere: → Banking → AI pipelines → IoT → Observability → Microservices → Autonomous systems → Real-time analyticsMost users never see Kafka. But the internet runs through it every second. From one internal LinkedIn infrastructure problem to the nervous system of modern distributed systems. 🌍Open-source engineering changed the architecture of the internet again. 🐐

The database behind Twitter, GitHub, Snapchat, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram. In 2009 one Italian wrote it alone, on a MacBook Air. 🤯 Meet Salvatore Sanfilippo 🇮🇹 > Italian programmer. Born 1977 in southern Italy. Goes by "antirez" online. > Left university at 17. Self-taught coder. > 1998 ~ invented "idle scan" ~ a stealth network scanning technique now built into nmap. > 2009 ~ started building Redis alone, on a MacBook Air 11, to fix his own startup's database problem. > Redis became the in-memory database powering Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Snapchat, Airbnb, Instagram. > One of the most-used databases on Earth ~ built by one self-taught coder. > Maintained it alone as Benevolent Dictator for Life for 11 years. > Also built Kilo (a full text editor in under 1000 lines of C), Linenoise, Dump1090, Disque, Jim Tcl ~ all open source. > June 2020 ~ walked away at the peak. "My hands will be free," he wrote. > Spent two years writing a science fiction novel about artificial intelligence. > The novel described prompt engineering ~ before ChatGPT existed. 🚀 > December 2024 ~ the internet called him back. He returned to Redis. > Built the new Vector Sets data structure for AI similarity search. > 27k+ followers on GitHub. Active on BlueSky. Avoids Twitter. > Lives in Catania, Italy. Codes from home. Calls himself "the Robin Hood of open source." He built it alone. Walked away at the peak. Came back when AI needed a new way to think. No fame. No equity. Just code, novels, and home. Open source GOAT. 🐐

Mark Zuckerberg revealed how he built Facebook early on using an $85 server, and refused to spend money he didn't have: "The server was $85. We didn't want to be like those projects that raised a ton of money, then lost a ton of money, and finally hoped to somehow pull through." "Whenever we had more money, we'd rent another $85-per-month server, and that's how we grew step by step. In the early days, you absolutely cannot spend money you don't have." Watch and repost. Tap the quoted tweet below to see how Zuckerberg views risk↓

Spotify wanted one Swedish coder so badly, they bought his 300KB masterpiece just to get him. You’ve used his code your whole life. You’ve never heard his name. 🤯 Meet Ludvig Strigeus 🇸🇪 > Swedish software engineer. Born January 1981. Goes by "Ludde" online. > Studied Computer Science at Chalmers University in Gothenburg. > 2001 ~ at age 20, fell in love with old LucasArts adventure games. > Problem: those games only ran on ancient PCs. > So he reverse-engineered them ~ took apart their code, line by line. > Built ScummVM ~ a free tool that runs Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, and 100+ retro games on any modern device. > 2004 ~ did the same with Transport Tycoon Deluxe. > Built OpenTTD ~ a free clone, still played by millions today. > 2005 ~ at age 24, hated how bloated existing BitTorrent apps were. > Built µTorrent. Alone. In under 300 KB ~ smaller than a single high-res photo. > Rapidly became the most popular file-sharing client on Earth ~ over 150 million users at peak. > 2006 ~ Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were starting a music app called Spotify. > They wanted one programmer to build their streaming engine ~ him. > They didn't just recruit him. They bought µTorrent in late 2006 just to get him on the team. > Two months later, they sold µTorrent to BitTorrent Inc. and kept Ludde. > "Spotify bought µTorrent, but what we really wanted was Ludvig Strigeus," former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn later said. > He led the development of Spotify's core streaming engine ~ the technology that lets songs play instantly with zero buffer. > Lives with a rare muscular disease. Uses a wheelchair. Has done so for years. > Codes from his apartment in Gothenburg. > Won 5 prestigious Swedish honors between 2006 and 2023 ~ including the Polhem Prize, Sweden's highest technology award, and an honorary doctorate from Chalmers. 🚀 > Elected fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2023. > 2026 ~ left Spotify after nearly 2 decades. Joined Nordan AI ~ a Stockholm AI lab building Europe's answer to Palantir. > Never founded a company. Never gave a TED talk. Never sought equity. > No Twitter. No interviews. He built the era of file-sharing. Then built the era of streaming. Now quietly building the era of AI. No fame. No equity. Nothing in his name. Software GOAT. 🐐

Netflix, Wikipedia, Airbnb, Dropbox ~ all run on the same web server. One quiet Russian engineer wrote it alone. For free. 🤯 Meet Igor Sysoev 🇷🇺 > Russian software engineer. Born 1970 in Soviet Kazakhstan. > Failed his first university entrance exam. > Joined Rambler in 2000 as a system administrator. > 2002 ~ started writing a new web server in his free time. Alone. > Goal: handle 10,000 simultaneous users on one machine ~ a problem Apache (the dominant web server at the time) couldn't solve. > 2004 ~ released nginx publicly. Free. Open source. > Zero marketing. Zero PR. Just the code. > 2008 ~ nginx was serving 500 million requests per day at Rambler. > 2011 ~ founded Nginx Inc. with co-founder Maxim Konovalov. > 2013 ~ Netflix scaled its streaming CDN to 40 Gbps per server using nginx. > 2019 ~ F5 acquired the company for $670 million. > December 2019 ~ Russian police raided his Moscow office over a fake copyright claim. > The Russian tech community publicly defended him. Charges were dropped.🚀 > 2021 ~ nginx overtook Apache as the #1 web server on Earth. > 2022 ~ left F5 quietly. No farewell tour. No book deal. > Today nginx powers Netflix, Wikipedia, Airbnb, Dropbox, Cloudflare, WordPress. > 33% of every website on Earth runs on his code. Apache trails at 26%. Microsoft's IIS isn't even close. > Still 100% open-source. Still free. One man wrote it alone, in his free time, for free. He never sought publicity. He never asked for credit. A third of every website on Earth still runs on his work. Webserver GOAT. 🐐

The man who killed the $10,000 GPU myth. He did it alone, from Bulgaria, with one C file. 🤯 Meet Georgi Gerganov. >Bulgarian developer. Nobody had heard of him. >In March 2023, Meta’s LLaMA model leaked online >Within days he wrote a single C file >Called it llama.cpp >It ran a full AI model on a MacBook. No GPU. No cloud. >The entire AI industry said you needed $10,000 GPUs to run LLMs 🔥 >He proved you didn’t. On a laptop. Alone. >Also built whisper.cpp ~ same thing for voice AI > His code is the foundation of Ollama, LM Studio, and GPT4All >107,000+ GitHub stars. Fastest open-source AI project to hit 100K ever. 🚀 >In 2026 Hugging Face hired his entire team >Still ships code. Still open source. Still free. Every time you run AI locally, you’re running his work. Absolute Legend 🐐

- He killed his neighbor who killed his dog. - Started McAfee software - Forbes top 100 - Presidential candidate - Wanted in 3 countries - Survived 50+ assassination attempts - Married a prostitute who was hired to kill him - Behind Edward Snowden - Bitcoin billionaire - Worked on the Apollo missions -Hacked Hillary Clinton's office by sending her staff free computers - Killed a few people in Belize - Lived on a boat in the Caribbean sea with armed guards - Never paid income tax because he blackmails the US government - Escaped captivity in Guatemala by faking a heart attack - committed suicide in a Spanish prison - May still be alive

Meet Andrew Ng (Every developer who learned AI for free, he made that possible) > Born in London, 1976, grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore > Started coding at age 6 > PhD from UC Berkeley, 2002 > Joined Stanford as a professor. > Became Director of the Stanford AI Lab. > In 2008 was one of the first researchers to use GPUs for deep learning > Everyone thought it was pointless. He did it anyway. > In 2011 put his Stanford machine learning course online for free > 100,000 students enrolled in the first edition alone > Nobody had seen anything like it > In 2012 co-founded Google Brain with Jeff Dean > Built neural networks at a scale nobody had attempted before > One network learned to recognise cats from YouTube videos with zero human labelling > The entire world of AI stopped and paid attention > Co-founded Coursera the same year. > Now 150 million registered learners worldwide. > Founded DeepLearning[.]AI, Landing AI and AI Fund after that > Over 200 research papers. Over 8 million students taught directly. > Named to the TIME100 AI list of most influential people in 2023 A man who could have kept world-class AI education behind university walls chose to put it on the internet for free. "AI is the new electricity. It will transform every industry." He did not just predict that. He spent his life making sure everyone had access to the switch.

M-PESA processed 46.4 billion transactions, valued at KSh 41.7 trillion, contributing 59.2% of Safaricom’s total service revenue growth, growing 13.4% year on year and expanding its share of the revenue mix to 45.6%. Of the 46.4 billion transactions processed, 57.8% were free. Paybill revenue fell from 38% to 20% of M-PESA revenue over five years. Financial services grew 19.1%, the fastest rate in three years. The number of distinct credit customers more than doubled to 18 million.

@alexnjenga @ICEALION I almost joined them. I dodged the bullet wallahi

Good afternoon @ICEALION kindly process my claim (KDV 187J) of Ksh 7,800,000. I’m tired of the everyday lies from Magdalene Nekesa of the claims department.

Mark Zuckerberg might be the only person in history to get accepted into Harvard and react like someone told him the laundry was done. Video captured by his father in 2002.

When Harvard saw a hacker, the world saw a billionaire.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, on how he bought 20% of NVIDIA for just $200.

> be claude shannon > invent information theory in 1948 > literally define how data moves through machines > build the foundation for the internet, computers, and AI > die in 2001 never knowing any of this happens > anthropic names their AI after him in 2023 > that AI is now talking to a billion people > using the exact math he wrote on a chalkboard 75 years ago most people using claude daily have never heard of claude shannon which is kind of exactly what he would have wanted tbh, dude was famously unbothered

Elon Musk made $180M selling PayPal: > He invested $70M in Tesla. > He invested $100M in SpaceX. > He invested $10M in SolarCity. Today, his stake in Tesla is worth $350B, his stake in SpaceX is worth an estimated $800B, and SolarCity was acquired by Tesla in 2016. So he turned $180M into $1.15T. A casual 6,388x return in less than 25 years.