Company Founders

"Little is essentially a pocket money card. It comes with a personalised debit card with a security pin, for children aged nine and above to use and a mobile app for the parents to send money, monitor and set boundaries."

"Parents with children can deposit money into this wallet and their kids have access to it for needs within and/or outside school premises."

"Watever u sow u shall reap. Do unto others what you wish them to do unto You.'"

"There are 1 billion Africans and the continent’s median age is 19.4 years, both of which suggest there is a larger demographic pool of potential STEM students and eventually, professionals, in Africa than in most other continents."

"The narrative and hype that we hear about digital transformation is again being largely fueled by what people see. And what do they see – they see the tremendous opportunity and potential that is before us to truly transform this continent through digital technology."

"About 50% of Africans own a mobile phone; another 15- 20% who do not own a mobile phone have access to one, making the mobile phone access rate about 65-70%. Arising from this is a paradox: more Africans have access to mobile phones than to pretty much anything else that they really need – only 28% of Africans have access to financial services, only 33% have access to power through their home country’s national grid and only 31% have access to decent sanitation."

"Africa doesn’t have enough software developers, network and communication engineers, data analysts, data scientists and even the few that we have are looking for the next opportunity to board a plane to Canada, Germany or whichever country is the highest bidder for the world class skills that they possess."

"The digital transformation of Africa is no longer a luxury or a nice-to-have. It has become a necessity; a necessity spawned in fact by Africa’s developmental agenda setters. This is because none of our documented aspirations - the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Agenda 2063 – the Africa we want, Africa Continental Free Trade Area, Boosting Intra Africa trade, the Single African Air Transport Market can be achieved without significant advancements in information and communication technology."

"Co-working spaces are important for the development of the young tech ecosystem in Nigeria."

"A Co-working space operator cannot be a Real Estate manager; co-working spaces need to be managed by people interested in collaboration with, and growth of, the tech ecosystem."

"It is not enough to say that women are less likely to own a phone or be connected to the internet than men, which is by itself a serious problem of gender inclusion that needs addressing."

"IF WE DON'T TRY TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF GENDER INEQUALITY, NOBODY IS GOING TO SOLVE IT FOR US."

"The goal of universal access requires several billions of dollars to be invested in the expansion and improvement of digital infrastructure across Africa. African governments need to make it easier for both private and public capital to be deployed to finance the expansion of internet/digital infrastructure. All African countries must have a coherent, well-articulated and documented broadband plan that provides the public and private sector with clear guidelines and a roadmap to sector development and gives mobile network operators and other infrastructure providers the legal and regulatory certainty that promotes investments."

"Africa needs to prioritize the funding of institutes of middle and higher learning that focus on the development of STEM skills and ensure that the curriculum for these courses are aligned with the needs of companies in the market."

"And now, the end is near"

"Whatever idea or concept one has can easily be destroyed by the banks. There has to be some kind of reforms in the banking system for things to thrive."

"Nothing good comes easy. To build a successful business, it takes a lot of patience and dedication."

"I realized many companies did not have enough computers. I saw an opportunity, so I started initially by buying foreign brands and selling to my customers."

"If I had my choice, I won’t borrow from Nigerian banks because on three occasions, they threatened us over a loan."

"“I don’t have pressure of any kind, I do my work the way I should”."

"I’ve lived a life that’s full I’ve traveled each and every highway. But more, much more than this I did it my way”"

"All your hard work will never be in vain, especially if your work is clean."

"Technology is a very important part of innovation as it brings new ways of doing old things and new ways of doing new things."

"“Building a greater nation requires all hands to be on deck. Women want to be partners and collaborators on this journey and we cannot behave if we are excluded by law, cultural practices and norms.”"

"Once you set up a company, whether you are a woman or a man, and you have to pay salaries, it does not matter who is involved. When you are in a battlefield or in a competitive field, you forget whether you are a woman or a man."

"What if I slip him some money, think he’ll go away?"

"My lawyer in 2008 had been after me for a long time to set up diversionary accounts for estates purposes, the theory being that you don't have all your eggs in one basket. We put the house in it, the cars in it, the jewellery in it... [It was done] in case you fall on hard times, then creditors can't grab everything."

"He was a smart man, but he always wanted to be the big cheese, throwing money around and doing it his way"

"Never start with a chiplet design; go for the biggest chip you can imagine and build it."

"Moonshots? How about robots that will design robots that will operate robots that will design new robots."

"You could learn the language of almost anything. Once you learn the language, you can apply the language - and the application of language is generation."

"20 years ago, all of this [artificial intelligence] was science fiction. 10 years ago, it was a dream. Today, we are living it."

"Ultimately every company needs to have diversity and resilience, that resilience comes from diversity and redundancy and in order to a achieve diversity and redundancy so that every company can have greater resilience implies building fabs in the United States and elsewhere, and those fabs are incrementally more expensive. In the grand scheme of things, those have to be taken into consideration. And so, there’s a price to be paid for diversity and redundancy and we invest ourselves in our company and every large company in order to have resilience. There’s power redundancy, there’s storage redundancy, there’s security redundancy, there’s all kinds of redundancy systems. Even organizations — sales and marketing are dovetailing each other so that they can have some diversity and some redundancy so that you have greater resilience, engineering does the same thing."

"We build our entire system full stack, and then we build it end-to-end at data center scale but then when we go to market, we disaggregate this entire thing. This is the miracle of what we do, we’re full stack, we’re data center scale, we work in multiple domains, we have quantum computing here, we have computational lithography there, we have computer graphics here and this architecture runs all of these different domains, in artificial intelligence and robotics and such and we operate from the cloud to the edge and we built it in a full system, vertically integrated, but when we go to market, we disaggregate everything and we integrate it into the world’s computing fabric."

"We already work very deeply with end users and developers who do these things. We do that today and our engagement with the world’s leading important verticals that we focus on, whether it’s healthcare, automotive, of course all the AI startups, we work with some 10,000 AI startups. So industry after industry, if there are industries where we could add a lot of value, the video game industry, we have direct coverage on just about every developer. The automotive industry, we have direct coverage on just about every single car company. The healthcare industry, we’re working with just about every drug discovery company and so we already do that today. It’s just that the fulfillment of the system ultimately comes from somebody else. If you want your stack accelerated, you work with Nvidia."

"The computing fabric that compute connects processors needs to be quite high speed. The faster the processors, the greater need for high speed computing fabrics and so it’s a matter of scale and the effectiveness of the scale. For example, if you want to increase to 1000 processors, the linearity of that scale up would be less linear and it would plateau earlier if the interconnects were slower and so that’s basically the trade-off. It’s just a matter of how far can you scale and what is the effectiveness of the scaling, the linearity of the scaling."

"Your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product."

"There’s a language to proteins, there’s a language to chemicals, and if we can understand the language and represent it in computer science, imagine the scale at which we can move, we can understand, and we can generate. We can understand proteins and the functions that are associated with them, and we can generate new proteins with new properties and functions. We can do that with generative AI now, now all of a sudden those words make sense and now they’re connecting and fired up and are now applying it to all of their fields of their own companies and see opportunity after opportunity for themselves to apply it."

"The inference, the scale of inference business has gone through a step function, no doubt, and the type of inference that is being done right now where you know that video will have generative AI added to it to augment the video either to enhance the background, enhance the subject, relight the face, do eye reposing, augment with fun graphics, so on and so forth. All of that generative AI work is done in the cloud and so video has generative AI. We know that there’s imaging and 3D graphics for generative AI, video for generative AI."

"If you were building a chip company and you were taping out a chip, the tapeout of a chip is around $100 million, just the tapeout. Not to mention the tools, which are probably another $100 million, and not to mention all the engineers, all the systems you’re bringing up, things like that. In order to build one of our chips, it’s a few billion dollars. And we’re just one chip company. There’s a whole bunch of chip companies. When they tape out a chip it’s no less than $25 million. Writing, developing a large language model–taping out a chip these days, what the software industry is learning is that building these large language models is kind of like taping out a chip."

"Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer."

"You benefit from the kindness of all the people that support you."

"I am known as one of the founders of Yandex. In our minds, when we founded it, we weren’t only creating a technology company. We were helping to create a new Russia – open, progressive, integrated into the global economy, and able to bring value to the world beyond natural resources."

"Since the start of the war, I have been focused on trying to support the talented Russian engineers who took a decision to leave the country. It has been an extraordinarily complex process, helping these engineers to start a new life."

"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it. I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine – many of them my personal friends and relatives – whose houses are being bombed every day."

"I'm pretty centrist politically. If there is one political position I cannot stand, it's deceleration. It's people who believe we should use less energy. Not people who believe global warming is a problem; I agree with you. Not people who believe that saving the environment is good; I agree with you. But people who think we should use less energy. That energy usage is a moral bad. No. No. You are diminishing humanity. [Instead we should ask] How do we make more of it? How do we make it clean? How do I pay 20 cent for a megawatt hour instead of a kilowatt hour?"

"If there's two great evils in the world, it's centralization and complexity."

"I took a political approach at Comma too that I think is pretty interesting. I think Elon [Musk] takes the same political approach. You know, Google had no politics, and what ended up happening is the absolute worst kind of politics took over."

"The incentive for politicians to move up in the political structure is to add laws."

"[About AI:] We give it to everybody. And if you do anything besides give it to everybody, trust me, the bad humans will get it. Because that's who gets the power. It's always the bad humans who get power."