Hey lander's the thread is open for us to interview the king of Nairaland

This was one of the past interview let start a new one with him now

One on One WIth the King:

interview : I am very excited and overjoyed just posting this interview with Seun- the Nairaland creator and administrator. Why? You may wonder. His story depicts a 24-year old Nigerian who decided to cause a change rather than being influenced by a society surrounded with all manners of issues. Seun has become an icon of “anything is possible if you believe”. I rubbed minds with him, on himself, his dreams, his popular site that registers more than 56,000 Nigerians and friends of Nigerians and on issues surrounding unemployment in Nigeria.  Please, read on

1.      May we know your full name?

ANSWER: Oluwaseun Osewa   


2.      May we meet you; primary, secondary, and university
background, where you come from, etc? ANSWER: I’m a capitalist, and I come from Nigeria.



3.      Would you say your educational background influenced your
present dispositions?

ANSWER: No.



4.      Who (anyone that influences you) would you regard as your
source of motivation?

ANSWER: Milton Friendman, the Nobel Prize winning economist. I admire his
well-researched views on the role of government, which is to maintain
law and order only.


5.      What inspires you?

ANSWER: A strong desire to be financially independent and achieve good things
that will affect millions of people and last even after I’ve died of
old age.



6.      When did the idea of Nairaland come to you?

ANSWER: I learnt that one could make money by starting a popular website and
placing adverts on it, but I couldn’t make my blog popular enough to
be profitable, so I decided to start various forums where people can
post on various topics that I have no personal interest in.

When the offtopic forum of my mobile phone forum proved popular, I
decided to start a new discussion forum named Nairaland which would
cover all topics that Nigerians care about.  I was able to get enough
traffic on this new forum to earn a decent income.   



7.      What challenges did you face and kindly give strategies
adopted to overcome such challenges?

ANSWER: Spam and scammers are a constant nuisance on the forum.  I try my best

7.      What challenges did you face and kindly give strategies
adopted to overcome such challenges?

ANSWER: Spam and scammers are a constant nuisance on the forum.  I try my best


to remove members who engage in such acts and their posts.  I also
have private messaging disabled so spamming and scamming can’t be done
covertly.

Well-intentioned members who ignore the rules of the forum are also a
problem.  I find that I have to ban them frequently to convince them
to either follow the rules or stay away.

The ‘best’ problem I experience as the administrator of Nairaland is
that sometimes, during peak periods, there’s so much traffic that my
web server can’t keep up.  This is very frustrating because it
prevents further growth of the Nairaland Forum.  After upgrading my
hosting plan once, I’ve resorted to constant modification of the
software behind the forum to make it fast enough to run under my
current hosting plan.

 

8.      Before Nairaland, what other projects have you undertaken?
Would you say they were successful?

ANSWER: All my business projects before Nairaland were failures, except the
one that became Nairaland.  My web hosting business failed after just
3 months because I ran out of money, while I couldn’t execute many
other projects I researched due to shyness and lack of capital.  My
blogs and the mobile phone forum that preceded Nairaland were
successful but not profitable.  However, it was on that foundation
that Nairaland was built.



9.      Would you say your passion and strength as a programmer
helped you create a world-class forum that Nigerians can be proud of?

ANSWER: All the programming I do today involves modification of PHP scripts
and SQL queries.  And you know what?  As a programmer, I looked down
on both languages and ignored them!  My programming experience wasn’t
very useful. Even if I wasn’t a programmer from the beginning, I’ll
have learnt just enough PHP and SQL to make Nairaland a reality.  My

determination was and is much more important.



10.  Nairaland has been a sort of refuge (information, knowledge
sharing, escapism, etc) to Nigerians especially Nigerians in diaspora.
Would you say you foresaw this when building this project?

ANSWER: Yes.  Before starting Nairaland, I noticed that other Nigerian
websites had more Nigerians abroad than Nigerians at home as members.

In fact, I sought to reverse this trend, and to a certain extent I
succeeded.  The country with the highest number of Nairaland visitors
at this time is Nigeria.  Earlier this year, it was the USA, as it is
for most Nigerian websites.



11.  I remember speaking with you five years ago and you spoke of
developing software that will beat Windows? Are you still holding that
vision?

ANSWER: No. It was a foolish vision. Linux has already beaten Windows and few
people care.




12.  I also remembered how much you loved Linux that you refused
to install Windows in you computer. Do you still have that passion for
Linux?

ANSWER: Even though I still use Linux from the command line on my web server,
my desktop operating system is Windows.  I want to experience the
Nairaland Forum the way others experience it, so when they have
problems I’ll be able to help them.




13.  What has been your driving force?

ANSWER: Survival, a strong desire for independence, and a desire to be influential.



14. The job situation in Nigeria is getting worse and worse?
Secondary School Students are dreaming of universities and avoiding
polytechnics. There is a great imbalance in the system. Jobs are few
compared with the job seekers. Would you advocate entrepreneurship?

I always tell job seekers to create their own jobs, because nobody
owes them a job.

“Look for a painful problem that others are facing, and then devise a
way to make people pay you for the solution. Look for problems that
don’t require much capital to solve. In a developing country like
Nigeria, there are so many problems waiting to be solved. One man’s
problem is another man’s profit! Competition is often weak which
means you’ll make a lot of money. So what are you waiting for?”

Unemployment is a problem of highly regulated and unionized countries
where job creation is made difficult by politicians and labor leaders.
Nigerians should not be talking about unemployment at all. There are
so many obvious opportunities around us waiting to be exploited.
Being jobless in Nigeria is a big shame indeed.

15. Taking Nigeria into consideration, you have been successful
as an entrepreneur. What secrets (strategy) would you share with
would-be entrepreneurs?

With only one success so far, I am yet to prove myself. If I am able
to start 2 or 3 other business projects and they succeed, then I will
feel confident enough to teach others how to succeed (I’m currently
looking into movie production).

However, one thing I know is that as a businessman, you have not
failed until you run out of capital or give up on your business.
Hence, one should be very careful not to spend money unecessarily.
And one should keep trying until one succeeds.

16. Just one word, phrase, clause, sentence for youths in Nigeria

Create your own job today.

17. What’s the address of your website?

www.nairaland.com

Feel free to ask the King more question!

All right reserve (c) 2007 nairaland

Are you working with Seun?

Uzor,

Nice interview, just a qestion was it a Monolog or a Dialog?

Nautillus:

Uzor,

Nice interview, just a qestion was it a Monolog or a Dialog?

or perharps a soliloquy.lol

@post
wasn't this on google. type in "smiley" and like the 20th page, you'll see seun's pic. . .the one he was wearing a dark green shirt. then this interview will come up. i know i've seen it on google before

if u earn your livelihood from a mere website that has nothing technical or anything to prove u have used your brain, then you are not doing anything - u are just earning money from what other people had made, e.g. the developers of the forum software which anyone can buy and start his own - chikena.

InCar_Nav has been banned from the forum.

Na wa oooooo!!!!

Seun, the guy stated his opinion . Now how did that merit a ban

na wao Oga Seun - me think u get temper and you dont like criticisms and free speech. hmmm- shame. i may be d next to be banned o.

N-joy:

na wao Oga Seun - me think u get temper and you don't like criticisms and free speech. hmmm- shame. i may be d next to be banned o.

you should. . .you think i don't know about you and your many IDs. . . i warned you biarch. . . i'll make your nairaland live hell for being one nasty biarch . . . forming many Ids to insult people. . .now that's the real shame ^{**shakes head**}

Now I dieing to know who this N-joy is, abeg toyinrayo fill me in before I pass out

the slowpoke that was talking Sh^t yest. . . he's actually InCar_Nav, his_grace, and N-Joy. . . i won't rest until seun ban this fool. . . dares to waste 4 pages of a good thread disrespecting women. . .o ma se.

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-102270.64.html

check this whole thread out. how did i know they were one? one signs out, post a comment, the other signs in. they took turns posting disgusting disrespectful things.

Thanks dear, I 've always thought those two where the same, now I can rest.

you're welcome.
it's not hard to tell they're the same. . . there level of ignorance is the same. . .they write in the same nasty nature.

Wow! this is a pasted thread,then seun was my good friend, but now he no longer chat with me 

I intend to showcase Seun (Nairaland) as the January 2008 personality of the month on my blog.

In my opinion, I think he has achieved enough to be recognised bearing in mind the circumstances in naija. I believe it would inspire other Nigerians home and away.

What do you guys think?

Oga Seun, we would all like to meet this powerful young man doing magic