On Creating Content With Derrick Ikenga and Uche Kene

This week, I met with two friends, Uche Kene(@uche__kene) and Derrick Ikenga(@software_artist). Two smart individuals. The meeting for me was a business meeting and a coffee date.

Our conversations were around Euphoria Labs, an Augmented Reality experience startup we’re trying to build. We also talked about work, other smart people, girls and enjoying life.

Our meeting, led to different things that I believe are amazing but what stood out was the two things i learnt after our discussions.

I learnt;

Always surround yourself with smart and amazing people. People that would ginger you.

I’m good at what I do, which is creating content but I haven’t been able to grow as much as I want to because I live in an environment where tech and the general internet lifestyle isn’t a thing.

Where I live, young people here do retail business, transportation, internet scams or are artisans. The creative energy here is close to non-existent.

Creative in this context, I mean, being on Twitter, building things for the internet, tech bros(sis), people who listen to altè music and people I can have conversations with about things I’m interested in.

You could argue that where I live don’t matter as long as I converse with creatives on the internet but nothing beats the sense of belonging when you meet them in person or find yourself around people like you.

The second thing they both made me realize is building and sharing constantly over a period of time leads to huge opportunities.

In Derrick’s case building a particular product was what lead Jumoke Dada, founder and CEO of Taeillo, asking him to join her startup as CTO. He said every project he has ever worked of till date is as a result of things he has previously built no matter how ugly they might have been.

Uche Kene had two job offers, one at Taeillo and at Cregital, before his graduation. This was possible because Uche was constantly making noise about brands and marketing. It came naturally to him and he ran with it.

For the unaware, I was among the few people who suggested Uche joins Taeillo.

Although we’re friends what really got me on the table Uche and Derrick are standing on was the work I did at 4kreport. In derricks words “you were creating and I saw it as a big deal.”

4kreport was a blog I created to covers news and updates in Nigeria’s eastern region tech ecosystem.

Constantly creating and sharing something of value yields great opportunities. The universe finds ways to reward you. The need to constantly create and build things led to this article and I hope it inspires you to create.

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