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
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. Â 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?
ANSWER: 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?
ANSWER: 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
ANSWER: Create your own job today.

17. What’s the address of your website?
ANSWER: www.nairaland.com

http://www.dipotepede.org/2006/10/04/interview-with-the-nairaland-king/

Nice one
just dunno how real ur information z

I see a ban loading.... OP if you need comprehensive pictures of seun and family.....pm me

I don't know what is wrong with some of you sef....can't you see a link to a website at the end of the page smh....meanwhile if seun wants to ban, he is free as long as he is convinced he did not give that interview.