On Saturday, July 17,  at Tekedia Live, the live version of Tekedia Mini-MBA,  I will speak on “Planning a Career in a New Country”. My presentation will be divided into three phases: before you leave, the early years in a new country, and maturity. I will share some things which worked for me and some lessons learned!

• Sat, Jul 17 | 7pm-8.30pm WAT |  Planning a Career in a New Country – Ndubuisi Ekekwe |  Zoom link in the Board
• [for Tekedia Capital OPEN session, the time is  Sat, July 17 at 4pm WAT and the link is here]

For example, before I left Nigeria, I moved all my academic transcripts to World Education Services with the mindset that if they are there, I will  never have to deal with any Nigerian university for a transcript. So, WES has all, and if I need a copy, I pay it and within days, they deliver.

Why did I do that? Many in then FUTO Alumni Yahoo group were complaining of delays on transcripts. I felt I could deal with that issue once and all while in Nigeria; I am glad I did!

And more tips: focus on earning more per hour and not pushing to work 24 hours in a day! If you double your hourly rate, you’ve halved the time you need to clock in. So, what is the plan to be at 1.5x minimum wage within 2 years, depending on where you are starting?

America, for example, is easy to figure out. I began at $7.25 per hour (Tuskegee University farm automation work study student) but in grad school in Johns Hopkins University, I moved to $23 per hour! The key is this: you need a plan to unlock opportunities.

Register for the next edition of  Tekedia Mini-MBA.

Tekedia Capital offers a specialty investment vehicle (or investment syndicate) which makes it possible for citizens, groups and organizations to co-invest in innovative startups and young companies in Africa and around the world. Capital from these investing entities are pooled together and then invested in a specific company or companies.

We invest in mainly technology-anchored companies and are sector-agnostic which means those companies could be operating in any industry, including finance, real estate, education, health, logistics, etc. The opportunity is open for individuals in Africa, Africans in diasporas, global citizens in any place in the world, investment groups and organizations around the world.

To learn more about Tekedia Capital Syndicate, go here. 

In the last three months, we have deployed $3.5 million in African startups and Africa-operating startups. This is a new age of value creation, a cambrian moment on entrepreneurial capitalism. We want you to party with us. Share this message and come with your friends, associates, colleagues, families, investment club members, etc.

Founders & Investors, You’re Invited To Tekedia Capital OPEN Session – We Invested $3.5M in Q2 2021

Nigeria has a really big challenge on our huge borrowing culture: we are now spending 97% of our revenue just to service debt. The implication is that most of our recurrent expenditures are now financed through loans and that creates a vicious circle, triggering the need for more loans. In other words, if you have to borrow to pay salaries and handle basic things, you will keep spending more revenue on servicing debts. Simply, Nigeria needs a new playbook to get out of the circle if we hope to save to build the infrastructure of the future.

Debt servicing obligations gulped 97 percent of the Nigerian government’s total revenue in 2020, a report has shown.

According to BudgIT, a civic-tech non-profit organisation, of the N3.42 trillion generated as revenue, Nigeria expended N3.34 trillion on debt servicing.

The report said total expenditure stood at N10.01 trillion.

“This means nearly all FG’s salaries, overhead & CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) were financed with loans & CBN support,” the civic group said.

According to BudgIT’s “2020 Budget Implementation Analysis” report released on Friday, N4.65 trillion was spent on non-debt recurrent expenditure.

“In 2020, FG projected a total revenue of N5.37tn; however, the actual total revenue eventually stood at N3.42tn. This represents a 63.71% revenue performance,” BudgIT said.

“The cost of servicing FG’s debt is drowning Nigeria as the cost continues to grow, gulping a total of N3.34tn (97%) from the total revenue.”

The Nigerian government’s revenue from oil however recorded a significant boost of N1.41 trillion, surpassing the oil revenue projections of N1.01 trillion.

With insecurity scaling across Nigeria, the debt problems will remain. The bad guys have moved to even kidnapping emirs, and there seems to be no solution in the near future: “The police in Kaduna State say the Emir of Kajuru, Alhassan Adamu, and 10 others have been kidnapped by suspected bandits in the early hours of Sunday in Kajuru town, headquarters of Kajuru Local Government area of the state.”

The near future looks extremely challenging for Nigeria with all these paralyses; we need to pray for a good landing in the nation. In America, the biggest problem is that companies cannot find workers to hire; in Nigeria, insecurity has made it largely impossible for farm workers to go to their farms, creating a huge crack on future food security.

He was exiled after he survived boiling oil. It was a banishment, a common punishment during the imperial period, to the Island of Patmos (Greece). John was sent to Patmos under the persecution of Roman emperor Domitian. There, John wrote one of the most important Books of the New Testament – the Revelation. 

Domitian was troubled. When boiling oil could not touch John, every attendee in the Colosseum accepted John’s message. From Rome, they sent him to Patmos, about 33 hours on a modern ferry. The emperor did not want to risk another loss of subjects; he could not predict the next miracle. 

It happens in some companies: the most brilliant staff members have strong visions. Many people are threatened. They could shine and the Boards would prefer them to lead. So, to stop them, the simpletons would conspire to send them to far away branches where they would be forgotten.  

Interestingly, like John, those great workers, right in those branches would see great revelations of the companies. That is it – in the wilderness of those far away branches, we can see a future, unbounded by the noise of the headquarters. Like John who saw a big vision of the future more than anyone, we can do great things for where we work or in our sector. John who later served as Bishop of Edessa (Turkey) triumphed: the banishment promoted him to see a bigger world than Rome, and wrote the Revelation. 

Going to “Patmos” is critical in a globalizing world [we hope you go on strength and peace]. When they send you to China, Brazil and Africa [out of New York], or to Kano, Owerri and Uyo [out of Lagos], they may be plotting your path to a greater mission in your call. 

In “Patmos”, men and women have been picked to lead. Do not be frightened if Patmos comes: a successful career could pass through Patmos.

Y Combinator has announced the launch of a matching platform where founders looking for co-founders can be matched.

The startup school said the platform is designed to ease the challenge founders encounter while looking for cofounders, and they have already made up to 9,000 matches.

“We’re excited to announce Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform is now available for everyone through Startup School, our free online program and community for founders. Anyone actively looking for a co-founder can sign up at startupschool.org/cofounder-matching. The platform has been in beta for the past few months, as we’ve experimented with the process within the Startup School community. To date, we’ve made 9,000 matches across 4,500 founders,” It said in a statement.

Using dating sites templates, the platform invites entrepreneurs to create profiles, which include information about themselves and preferences for a co-founder, such as location and skill sets. It digests that information and offers a number of potential candidates that fit those needs.

“Finding the right co-founder is an incredibly important step in the startup journey. At YC, we have endless anecdotes that show building a company with a co-founder greatly helps with productivity and morale. This is supported by our data: while we do fund solo founders, only four of the top 100 YC companies came to YC without a co-founder,” YC explained.

The accelerator offers the popular Startup School, a free online program with resources and lectures surrounding how to start a company, to anyone who wants to start a company. The school has cultivated a community of 230,000 founders in 190 countries. A matching tool is thus an easy jump to make, one that could help the partners there move even earlier in aggregating and eavesdropping on nascent talent.

The company said the decision to launch the platform was spurred by the growing need to find a compatible co-founder.

“Within the Startup School community, 20% of active founders report that they’re seeking a co-founder, and 25% of aspiring founders cite not having a co-founder as a blocker to starting their company full-time. Many of our users have tried many avenues for a long time, with little success,” it said.

Y Combinator said the co-founder matching platform was built to tackle the above problem. It starts with getting vital information when people sign up. “You tell us a number of things about yourself and your preferences for a co-founder (e.g. interests, location, skills). We then show you profiles of candidates that most closely match your ideal co-founder. When you find a candidate that piques your interest, you can send them a message, and if they accept, we match the two of you,” It said.

The platform is optimized for rapid review to maximize the chances you find the right fit.

But there are concerns. TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas noted that even though the tool may appear as a neat, in-demand and simplistic tool that connects people to each other, it is far harder to execute in a meaningful way than one may think — even if you’re an accelerator as famed and well known as YC.

One of the reasons is diversity and differences that cannot be discovered by merely chatting someone up online.

“Co-founder matching tools are best for founders who don’t have built-in networks and need ways to find collaborators in their earliest days. Startup School is indeed a wide net, but because Y Combinator struggles with diversity and representation of minorities in its batches, it will need to find ways to make sure that doesn’t get compounded when matching founders with each other. Can there be a filter for gender or ethnic background? Should there be? It’s a slippery slope,” she said.

To tackle some of the challenges, Natasha said YC told her that “we don’t ask for demographic information from Startup School participants with the exception of a recent open text box for gender; and a large percentage have yet to fill this out. Right now, we’re using this info within co-founder matching — if you’re a woman, we let you mark that you’re seeking a woman co-founder and we increase the chances the co-founder candidates you see are women.”

Figuring out a way to help co-founders within the matching service learn easy ways to vet compatibility is yet a serious concern. But YC likened it to a romantic relationship.

“Like a romantic partner, a co-founder is someone you’ll depend on and spend a great deal of time with, hopefully for many years. You probably shouldn’t marry someone after just one date, and similarly, it’ll take more than one video call to decide whether to co-found a company with someone. We encourage matched co-founders to meet and, when appropriate, work together on a time-boxed trial project with clear expectations and goals in order to vet co-founder compatibility,” it said.

YC said two companies who met through the platform earlier this year were accepted into the YC Summer 2021 batch, indicating early signs of success.