Field note
9 pieces tagged Field note.
A health ID from birth, and every trade-off behind it
An experimental answer to a NITDA Builders Festival challenge: why a "health BVN" on its own would not work, why we built on the NIN instead of competing with it, why the ID is issued at birth or at the first vaccination, how bulk-issued IDs make offline registration possible, the portable summary that travels with the ID, how matching, consent and sync are designed, the bugs that taught us the most, and what is still not built.
Read →Can a stranger tell what your organisation does?
Every entry in the Nigerian startup ecosystem record now shows the sentence it came from, the page it was read on and the date. What reading 109 organisations' own websites turned up: five compromised sites, four dead addresses, and an ecosystem that runs programmes and rarely writes cheques. Plus the four things I got wrong doing it.
Read →What we found building the Nigerian ecosystem record
The Nigerian startup ecosystem record is live with 110 organisations across 34 cities. Why it has to be a source of truth rather than another index, the three domains taken over by gambling sites, the design I got wrong four times, and the problem nobody has solved: how a record like this stays true after the people who built it get busy.
Read →The Nigerian startup ecosystem map
A public, queryable map of who funds, trains, houses and builds for startups in Nigeria, city by city, maintained by those organisations themselves. Where the idea came from, the five things we considered building instead, what already exists elsewhere, and what would make us stop.
Read →How does an institution remember?
Last note I was building the company operating system and the first pieces work. They are also empty. This is the problem underneath that: almost no company has one canonical list of the people it knows, and when a person leaves, the relationships leave with them.
Read →Building a company operating system
Last note I scored us at 29 and said Demand was the constraint. So I built the demand system. Here is what I looked at first, the documents it came from, the order it got built in, and what it actually does. It is live, the score moved to 31, and you can log into it.
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The company systems index
A company is the part of the work that keeps happening without you. To find out whether we have one, I listed the machinery: 41 capabilities across eight domains, and what each one has to do. Senpai scores 29 out of 100.
Read →What is a company?
In 2021 I had two thousand members, four cohorts, revenue and graduates earning in dollars. I did not have a company. I have been trying to work out what the difference actually is, because we are now building the thing I did not have, in public.
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We spent four years training African creatives. Here is what was missing.
Between 2017 and 2021 we built a community of 2,000 African creatives. 157 students came through Design 101, 45 finished, and at least 30 of them now earn in dollars. The teaching worked. What we could not do was capture the value or sustain it. The founding cohort of the Senpai Collective is forming, so here is what was missing, what we built instead, and how we will know whether it worked.
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