Recent content on Mark Essien
When coding with AI, the primary speed constraint is your own rate of review. AI can produce code at a huge rate, but the result can differ from what you wanted. That means that, at the very least, you have to inspect what the output is (even if you don’t care about the code). 
 This review involves you opening the app, going to the relevant pages, clicking around to see if it looks like…
A couple of million years ago, it stopped raining in the Sahara. 
 At that time, the Sahara desert was green and luscious, it was the perfect environment. Apes where everywhere. As it dried up, most of the apes retreated southwards to the forest areas. But a small group of them did not make it on time, and were stuck at one of the lakes in the area. 
 They survived by fishing, eating from…
All human invention is done by cities. Not by individuals. Every time something significant comes out, it is never out of some random village in the middle of nowhere by someone who nobody ever heard about - it’s usually from a city (or cluster) of people who were all working on that thing. Vienna invented some of the best music that ever existed. San Francisco some of the best software.…
Exponential startup growth is something extraordinary. But the inputs for startups are always linear - you can only produce product linearly, create blog posts linearly and so on. 
 Even if you create excellent blog posts that end up being shared hundreds of times, or rank well, the output function is still linear. 
 Linear inputs do not directly result in exponential outputs . 
…
In Nigeria, the treasury bill rate has hovered around 20% for a long time. There is no incentive for anyone to lend anyone money for less than 20% p.a, so all mortgage rates have to be higher than this price. This creates a situation where mortgages are too expensive for anyone to afford. 
 Can we fix this? In this note, I’ll introduce a few financial instruments that can be used to…
Recently, listening to a podcast between two prominent Silicon Valley business leaders, one of them told an anecdote. 
 A candidate had been recruited for a role, and when he entered the interview, the candidate said something to the effect of “I can’t wait for the weekend to come.” The interviewer, who was the founder of the company, immediately knew that this was not a…
An organisation is primarily made up of feedback loops. A feedback loop improves itself, and any part of an organisation without a feedback loop stagnates. The design of an organisation is then primarily a game of building self-reinforcing feedback loops. 
 The quality of the people in the loop is not even as important as the pain that the feedback loop causes in the people when it is…
As a schoolboy, I remember looking at my friends and seeing a fierce brightness in their eyes. It felt like they could see the world and all that lay before them. That brightness would almost always be accompanied by a radiant spirit and a wild imagination. With those friends, I would go on journeys of fancy, exploring the distant world in every corner of the playground. 
 As we grew, the…
In this philosophical exploration, I offer a theory of gravity based on basic principles. Like building a proof in geometry, but about reality itself, I’ll show that the usual things we see in the universe—space with three dimensions, time moving forward, objects with mass, and gravity—can all come from a very simple starting point. I only need two basic rules. From just these two, and…
Let’s imagine a fictional crypto trading platform called Bincoin. 
 There are two types of crypto trading possible on a platform like Bincoin - one is called P2P and the other is called Spot Trading. 
 In P2P trading, a buyer posts an offer on the website that they want to sell an asset for a certain price - e.g N1000 for 1USDT. A seller accepts this offer, then the buyer transfers…
Globally, there is an alarming trend - human birth rates are dropping rapidly. They are not dropping by a small amount, they are collapsing in some countries. For example, South Korea had 500,000 babies in 2007, last year it had 249,000 babies. Half the babies that could have been born were never born. If this continues, soon there will be no more south koreans. 
 But what is causing this?…
I’m the founder and CEO of Hotels.ng Hotels.ng - one of the biggest online hotel booking agencies in sub-saharan africa. I also founded HNG Internship , which is a free coder bootcamp - we’ve put more than 10,000 africans in coder jobs. 
 I’m also a coder - mostly C++, but a few other languages too. 
 I enjoy bike riding and tinkering with hardware. 
 I’m from…
There are two different people living on the same piece of land - with two different languages and two different religions. They both have significant religious interest in this piece of land. No side wants to give in. 
 Additionally, there are millions of people who were expelled from the land, and live in the surrounding countries. And those countries are not granting them citizenship - so…
Nigeria has a weird system of sharing money among federal states. The more people you have in a state, the more money you get. Since that system got introduced, Nigeria’s population has grown very rapidly. Much faster than its direct neighbour Ghana. Each state has been claiming more and more people. 
 How do we know the population has grown? Estimates! A census was done in 1991, and…
The 2023 Nigeria Election was an incredible event where a minor candidate with a tiny party rode on social media support to getting almost the same number of votes as the ruling party and the former ruling party. 
 The election just ended, and the vote is very close between all parties: 
 
 Peter Obi Labour Party: 6.1 million votes 
 Atiku Abubakar PDP Party: 6.9 million votes…
My phone pinged: “Tell Mark Essien they are coming for him.” 
 I had no idea what that even meant. It was a forwarded WhatsApp message that someone had sent to a friend of mine. 
 All I was doing was trying to convert PDFs from the 2023 Nigeria Presidential elections into spreadsheets. 
 But let’s rewind a bit and give some context. 
 In 2020 a small group of about 5 young people…
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings lived in exactly the same way. There was a small community or village with a number of human beings living there, maybe around 200 people. This community was far enough from the next community that there was no struggle for resources - there was water, animals to hunt and land to plant food on. The vast majority of the existence of humanity has been…
Yes, deep neural networks are alive. As alive as a tardigrade, which only has 200 neurons. And we all describe a tardigrade as a living creature, even though it certainly cannot paint realistic pictures the way a deep learning network can. 
 Life is a difficult thing to describe. We view life strongly from our human perspective - which revolves mostly around a creature seeming to be searching…
Micro-services may be good for scaling, but they introduce a lot of complexity to software. The vast majority of software produced will never need to scale, so all the effort invested in building it as a set of micro-services will be wasted. 
 The complexity of micro-services comes from having different repositories, with separate deployment (that need to be separated using something like…
Many of us write tens of thousands of words yearly. All those words are written on some corporate social media website, and they can wake up any day and ban your handle. When that happens, your entire collected works, which could represent a lifetime of thoughts are gone. 
 We put so much effort into writing - we should not just make sure this writing is preserved - we should also ensure that…
The problem 
 There are many Governments who struggle to run companies. It’s difficult - a Government is a huge organisation dealing with tens of thousands of problems. It’s difficult for it to build the attention and skill required to run multiple companies in different fields. And when Govt officials are appointed to run the companies, they are often not incentivized to make the…
Techniques 
 A technique is a specific type of knowledge that a person can gain that is applicable in a wide array of circumstances. 
 For example, I could learn the art of persuasion. This will likely take me a long time to learn, but once I have it, I can use it in many different situations. 
 There are situations where knowing that technique puts me at a very big advantage (for…
At Hotels.ng, we use 6 servers - all are fully dedicated, baremetal servers. That means we get the pleasant task of managing everything on the servers. It saves us a lot of money, but for that, we really need to go deep into the infrastructure. 
 Sometime in November last year, one of our servers died. It had been running along for 4 years without a problem. Then one of the SSDs died - of…
One of the best things crypto could achieve is this: 
 I go on a website in Nigeria, and I specify that I want to send 100€ to Germany. The price is displayed - ₦450,000. I pay, specify the bank target account, and within 30 minutes, the money has arrived in a German bank account. The entire process is mostly decentralised, and uses crypto. 
 This does not work right now for all country…
The most expensive thing any company can do is to start a project, and not complete it. Every single man-hour, every single cent spent on that project gets destroyed, as soon as the project is cancelled or abandoned. 
 One of the most expensive uses of anybodys time is also starting something that never gets completed. Every single hour spent in that project is destroyed when the project is…
Introduction 
 In Nigeria, it’s very difficult for small businesses to raise small capital: funding of the range N3m to N100m is scarce. The Nigerian Stock Exchange is supposed to be a market that allows the raising of capital from the public, however, because of the large number of rules and processes involved, companies cannot easily get themselves listed. 
 I am proposing a new,…
Click here to view the bigger version. 
 I’ve been doing a lot of DevOps work recently, and terminals are horridly broken. There is so much copy and paste going on (well, unless you have a super memory). Why can’t we fix that? 
 I have designed an improved terminal for people who deal with a lot of different servers, and need to do a bunch of different things. 
 Easy access…
We’ve all heard the advice about focusing, but it never quite seems to sink in. Or it gets mixed up with all the other advice we hear all the time. 
 But I’ve come to find that one of the most powerful productivity methods you can try is that of radical focus. Taking a bit of time to find what to focus on, and then absolutely and only focusing on that one thing till it’s…
Close to my home, there is this park that used to be a graveyard. Once all the graves were full, the city council planted grass everywhere, put a number of benches about, and declared it to be a park. 
 I enjoyed visiting it to work on my book. I liked that very few people ever visited the park. I also liked the earthy smell of the park, the way the light splashed bright patterns on the floor,…
I recently watched the TV show Atypical on Netflix. It’s a show about a boy with autism and how he navigates the world. Because of the condition, he likes routine - things should stay the same so that he understands how to interact with them. He does not like new situations and changes. 
 To achieve this, he has organized the world into a set of rules as to how things work (and should…
In this post, I would like to suggest an alternative to Proof of Work and Proof of Stake in Crypto. I will call it Proof of Improvement. 
 The idea behind proof of improvement is that crypto tokens represent a real world improvement in state of something. This way, as that thing improves over time, the value of the token and the entire network improves. 
 A little background to the other…
A field of sunflowers sat beside another field covered with grass. Perhaps long ago that grass field was a pasture for animals, but now there was nothing there except an old tractor in the corner. 
 An unusual gust of wind, going against the direction the wind usually went in that area, lifted a few sunflower seeds from a particularly full sunflower, and dropped them in the grassy field. 
…

 I can hear the rain coming in the distance and my plans for today have been washed away. — @imogiemubarak June 6, 2017 
 Mubarak is never going to age. As we gray and become old men and women, Mubarak will always be young, walking with the smile he always had, making the jokes he always made. 
 In our memories. 
 We all live and leave a footprint on the world. Mubarak was a…
Some companies are too early in a market. A common scenario where it would happen is where an idea that is working in an advanced market is transplanted to an emerging market. 
 In my opinion, the biggest threat for such a company is raising too much money very early. My logic is as follows: 
 Companies will adapt themselves to the amount of money they have. They will base their hiring,…
A few months ago, I came up with an idea - let’s (Hotels.ng) do an internship program for software developers. We put out a tweet and within 2 days, more than 100 people had applied. People wanted to learn software development. 
 Obviously, so many people could not fit into our office space. So we pivoted - it would now be a completely remote internship program. And not just that, but we would…
There is this disconnect between a non-technical CEO and the technical team. Often, there is frustration on both sides - the CEO wonders why the team is not delivering, and the team feels the CEO is asking for things to be done in an impossible time frame. 
 And many times, because of how little the CEO knows, this communication gap cannot be effectively breached - and the company ends up…

 
 Focus on making users use your product before you over-invest time in building the product. If people don’t want to use a simple version of the product, they won’t want to use a complex version. Building the first version of the product should take at most 3 months 
 
 
 Give your technical co-founders equal stake, or have enough money to pay for the good guys.…
A few things I have noticed that one should take note of as one manages people: 
 See the future 
 You must see the future. This means that you often sit and think of all the bad things that could possibly happen and you start fixing them now before they happen. If you are good enough, it will look like you are being unneccessary cautious about things that never happen - but it’s because…
(This post needs to be edited, the images are missing) 
 I conceived of the idea for Hotels.ng in early 2012. I started working on it then (it was called hotels.com.ng), made a beta, and then went out trying to raise money. I knew next to nothing about raising money. 
 One of the first investors I approached was Rocket Internet. I sent them a plan with the opportunity - they never replied…
It’s quite easy to be good enough at something that everyone around you praises you. For example, you can read a few books, do a couple of courses and everyone will see you as a 3D printing guru. But that’s mostly because nobody else knows anything about 3D. 
 In a place without a large density of engineers, it’s very easy to do this. It’s easy to claim you are good at…
The HNG Internship is one of the largest software developer training programs in Africa. It does two batches a year, and each batch has about 13,000 people joining. We focus on finding the best out of the 13,000 and placing them in jobs. In the last batch, we had about 200 finalists out of the number who started. We work with many companies - in the U.S, U.K, and Nigeria to staff them up with the…
I posted this picture on twitter, and got some DMs and questions as to how we use that setup to power the Hotels.ng call-center. Here is a short description. 
 Hotels.ng used to use a bunch of mobile phones to power our call-center. As we reached 200+ calls/day, it became unfeasible to continue like that. There are many expensive call-center solutions, but we always have to watch our expenses…
Hotels.ng is looking to hire very smart people. People that like internet, that like startups, that want to be challenged to create order out of chaos. 
 So I put out this tweet: 
 Looking to employ full-time genius. Job description: Be smarter than 95% of people in world. Send me email mark@hotels.ng. 10 words only.
— Mark Essien (@markessien) 
 
 I had about 40…
Hotels.ng is about two years old now. In the first year, it was just a website — no business built around it. It started off by me purchasing lists of hotels. The entirety of hotels that were available in any known dataset that was available in public or in any government archive was about 1500 in Nigeria. I listed them all on the site and put the site up. Only 100 of those hotels had pictures.…
Recently, I have been introduced to the concept of “100 years from now”. Basically — will your business exist 100 years from now? 
 Let’s look at an example of a business model that will not exist in 100 years— Airline Ticket selling. There are a limited number of airlines. There are a huge number of people selling airline tickets. The people selling those airline tickets are competing on…
The only true currency we humans have is time. Everybody is given a pot of time when they are born, and every day they take out a little from it. One dreaded day, the pot is empty. 
 People will pay money to have a little more of that precious time. So many modern fortunes have been made with products that save people time, like the automobile or the telephone. 
 The best way to evaluate…
I founded Hotels.ng in 2013, at a time when it was impossible to book any hotels online in Nigeria. Since then till now, we’ve made 13,000 hotels bookable online, with particular focus on those small hotels that are extremely hard to reach. The company currently has 80 staff, and we are either the largest or one of the largest online hotel booking services in Nigeria.
The big man at the door glared at me for an uncomfortably long time. I stood there, the bright light shining in my face. He then moved to the side and motioned me in. The club was dark and huge. Loud minimal house music boomed all around. People jumped up and down everywhere. At the windows, several people sat, looking dazed and drugged. 
 Somewhere in this berlin club was an American and I…
You often hear people say that you should make your product inherently viral. An fully viral product is a product like Skype. If only one person uses Skype, then Skype has no utility at all. A non-viral product is something like a Tax Calculating software. You basically use this all alone and by yourself. 
 Fully viral products are dangerous because they have the chicken and egg problem. If…
I’ve noticed something that is not immediately obvious - rejections without explanations can also be very helpful. 
 Imagine you are applying for a job, or for funding for a project of yours. You are confident going in – everything seems to be in place, and you are sure you will get accepted. But then you get rejected. The first question you will ask is: why? You want to know from the person…