Thank God for the @tan_stack ecosystem

Most "early-stage" African investors are not early enough. You need to go far upstream to create the downstream benefits, rather than waiting opportunistically at the tail end of the journey. This is why I don't believe we really have "Angel investors" and never wanted the title. Education is the ultimate angel investment. Jim Ovia is one of the few unsung angel investors in this category, providing scholarships and early support for potential superstars. Many people are unaware of the significant contributions he made to TeamApt's development into the MoneiPoint it is today, as he doesn't seek the limelight. When I see people discussing minuscule losses in startups today, I laugh. He once paid us 150 million Naira to build an e-commerce product (Z-Mart) that was scrapped after the Nigerian economy shifted into recession in 2016 and didn't budge. It is these kinds of people who can afford it and support the process from the very beginning to the end that we should be encouraging to support the Nigerian/African tech ecosystem, as they are in the twilight of their careers. I once pitched them an ISP connection from Infoweb at Zenith in the 90s, and they listened to me, but decided it was better to own their Internet infrastructure; they started the Cyberspace ISP to serve the bank and others. He has been involved in tech investment before people even realized that it would make sense. I can't forget June 20th, 2015, when I met him in Lagos. A meeting turned into a heated discussion about my relocation to Ghana. He told me he would make sure that I come back to Nigeria. Instead, I discovered later that he was supporting scholarships for gifted students at @Ashesi University privately through his foundation. Some of them have gone forward with great potential. If I have any role model in supporting the ecosystem, it is Jim Ovia. As I said in my Keynote at Big Angels Day in Dakar, we cannot support the poor by making ourselves poor. We should give from abundance by ensuring we create abundance, rather than from scarcity.

You build a real-time chat app. You use WebSockets. It's perfect. The server has a persistent connection to all clients. User A sends a message, the server gets it, and it broadcasts that message to User B, C, and D. It's fast, light, and efficient. You're a hero. Then, the boss asks for video calls. You think, "Easy. I'll just capture the video frames and send them over the same WebSocket connection." It works on your laptop. Kind of. In production, it's a total disaster. The video is laggy, the audio stutters, and your server's CPU and bandwidth costs go to the moon. You've just discovered the hard way what I had to learn: You're trying to make a central operator (your server) manually patch through every single frame of a high-def video call. You're sending a massive stream from User A up to your server, just for the server to send it all the way back down to User B. It's a massive, expensive, unnecessary bottleneck. Your server is dying because it's trying to do a job it was never meant for. This is where you need a different tool. This is where WebRTC comes in. The core difference is simple: - WebSockets are for Client-to-Server communication. - WebRTC is for Client-to-Client communication. Here's the simple breakdown of what to use, and when: WebSocket - This is a persistent, two-way connection between a client and your server. - The server is the single source of truth. All data must pass through it. - Use this for: -Chat apps (where the server needs to log messages and distribute them). -Live notifications (the server tells everyone a new post just dropped). -Stock tickers or live sports scores. -Multiplayer game lobbies (syncing player state from a central server). WebRTC - This is a direct, peer-to-peer connection between two browsers. - The server's only job is to be a "matchmaker" – it helps the two browsers find each other and securely connect. This introduction process is called 'signaling' (and ironically, you often use WebSockets for this part!) - Once connected, the server gets out of the way. The data streams directly between User A and User B. Use this for: -Video calls. -Voice chat. -Screen sharing. -P2P file transfers. Stop routing your video calls through your server. That's not what WebSockets were built for. You don't send video over WebSockets. You use WebSockets to set up the WebRTC call. Let your server be the matchmaker, not the overloaded operator in the middle.

I’m not a Venture Capitalist I’m a Founder who backs founders I bet on high achievers like me

THE ULTIMATE MOBILE APP STACK I’ve tried 200+ software tools this year (not exaggerating). This is everything I’ve landed on for making mobile apps. It’s made building faster and easier. Nearly all of these have generous free plans btw. ⸻ FRONTEND Expo – Simplifies building and deploying React Native apps → expo.dev/ Nativewind – Tailwind for React Native. Make your app look pretty → nativewind.dev/ RN Reanimated – Lightweight animations for mobile → docs.swmansion.com/react-nat… LottieFiles – Lightweight visuals → lottiefiles.com/ ⸻ BACKEND Convex – My favorite backend ever. It's so good. Database, crons, functions → convex.dev/referral/NATHAN31… Clerk – Easy, reliable auth. (May switch to Convex Auth soon though) → clerk.com/ Resend – Handles transactional + marketing emails. Pairs well with Convex → resend.com/ OpenAI – For AI features. Works great with Convex → platform.openai.com/docs/ove… ⸻ MARKETING Vercel + NextJS – For app landing pages. Faster iteration than Framer if you have a good vibe coding workflow → vercel.com/ Apple Search Ads – Low-hanging fruit marketing to acquire customers → ads.apple.com/app-store Sanity – CMS for blog posts. Integrates cleanly with NextJS → sanity.io/ Pallyy – My favorite social scheduling tool after testing many → pallyy.com/?via=nathan Screen Studio – Awesome screen recordings of your computer and your phone → screenstudio.lemonsqueezy.co… Meta Ads – Best paid channel so far. Make sure to use an MMP like Singular (see below). Organic Social – Most of my subscribers have been coming from X, LinkedIn, IG, and TikTok. ⸻ DEVELOPMENT Cursor – I use the $200/mo plan. Totally worth it. I used to use Claude Code too but I've found Cursor alone suffices → cursor.com/ Figma – For branding + visuals (I build app UIs directly with AI, not in Figma btw) → figma.com/ Willow Voice – Mac speech-to-text app to prompt AI faster → willowvoice.com/?ref=NCOVEYA… Ebb – Blocks distracting sites on Mac → ebb.cool/ ⸻ PAYMENTS RevenueCat – Simplifies App Store subscriptions + paywalls → revenuecat.com/ ⸻ ANALYTICS PostHog – Best analytics platform by far. Generous free tier → posthog.com/ Singular – For ad attribution. Preferred over AppsFlyer + Adjust → singular.net/ AppTweak – For App Store Optimization (ASO). Basically SEO for App Store → apptweak.com/ Sentry – Mentioning this reluctantly. Works for now, but switching once PostHog adds error tracking for React Native. ⸻ Well there ya go. I think some underestimate how much the right tools matter. They’re not everything, but they make a difference. Lmk if I missed anything. (p.s. some of these include my referral link. I only share what I truly believe in. Thx for the support!)

Ofeakwu made with goat meat, stock fish, ponmo, oporo, and rice with cold fresh juice will heal me rn 🥲

Kendrick Lamar- 9 nominations SZA- 5 nominations Doechii - 5 nominations They are going to recreate my header🙌🏽

TanStack Start is what web framework neutrality could look like in a world built around the Next.js+Vercel relationship

Can't believe I'm learning all this for free.

While Next.js has a lot of great things and earned its place, TanStack Start feels like a breath of fresh air. With backing from several of Vercel’s competitors, it’s refreshing to see a truly open and simpler alternative taking shape. Exciting things to come.

using Promise.all feels so satisfying for some reason

Maturing is realizing that Next.js isn't it

Every company should create an internal benchmark measuring how hard it is to create a simple regional CRUD service and publish it to production with bare minimal privacy, security, compliance, and observability features in place.

You ke? Na that nonsense wey dey your website you qualify as documentation?

I’m the last 16 hours, here’s the data I have Most African startups are building FINTECH SOLUTIONS Most Latin American startups are building COMMERCE SOLUTIONS Most South-east Asian startups are building SUPER APPS

Did you know that most times Investors don’t invest in your venture simply because they don’t want to be the first. It’s a very risky move. They want to see that someone has already bet on you before they can comfortably bet on you. I’M WILLING TO BE YOUR FIRST BELIEVER.

How fast is @bunjavascript? So fast it broke the setup for our test db, which runs in a docker container. Bun executed SQL before container db finished startup. Had to make a sleep fn to give the db time to start up. Wild. Never saw this with pnpm.

Starting next year I’m gonna be a full-time Startup Investor Not sure what that journey is gonna look like One thing is for sure, I’M EXCITED.

If you ever wonder how Chinese frontier models like Kimi, DeepSeek, and Qwen are trained on far fewer (and nerfed) Nvidia GPUs than US models. In 1969, NASA’s Apollo mission landed people on the moon with a computer that had just 4KB of RAM. Creativity loves constraints.

We may never see an investor as talented as Nancy Pelosi again. The end of a generational run