People ask me why I’d walk away from a CTO title to go build two companies from a laptop in Abuja. The honest answer is boring at first and then it isn’t: I got tired of shipping someone else’s vision and calling it mine.
Nine years in, I’d been the guy who fixes things — the CTO who inherits a mess, calms it down, and makes the roadmap make sense. Good work. I’m proud of it. But somewhere around year seven I noticed the pattern: I was really good at protecting other people’s dreams and terrible at making time for my own.
Hustlrs started as a stubborn idea — a task-auction marketplace built for how Nigerians actually hustle, not how a Silicon Valley deck imagines we do. Nadiron Technologies started as the umbrella I needed so the next ten ideas had somewhere to live that wasn’t “side project on a dying laptop.”
The part nobody puts in the pitch deck
I prayed about this longer than I coded it. That’s not a metaphor — there were real weeks where the technical plan was ready and I wasn’t, and the thing that got me across the line wasn’t a growth hack, it was sitting still long enough to actually believe I was allowed to want something for myself. Scripture has a lot to say about stewardship, and somewhere in there I stopped treating “founder” like a vanity word and started treating it like a responsibility I’d been handed, not one I invented.
What actually changed day to day
Less permission-asking. More 2am decisions that are entirely mine to own, good or bad. I still write code — arguably more of it now — but I also do the unglamorous CEO things: payroll, positioning, telling a client “no” without flinching, learning that “leadership” mostly means being the last person who’s allowed to panic.
Is it scarier than a CTO offer letter? Obviously. Is it the first job I’ve had that actually feels like mine? Also obviously.
We’re still early. But early, on your own foundation, beats comfortable on someone else’s.