When studying at NYU, the Occupy Wall Street movement was just a few blocks down. Their message that we were in an inequitable system where a small amount of people disproportionately owned all the wealth resonated with me, but I didn’t feel like they had a coherent solution. After 8 years of experience and just before finishing a graphic design degree, I realized that my current field wasn’t going to allow me to make the impact I wanted. I decided to enter finance in order to fully understand the market and how it all worked. I joined a management-consulting firm and did a project UAT testing money transfer systems for a top 3-wealth manager, among others, which in retrospect has been very helpful in my career. I also founded the Artificial Intelligence practice my firm. I left in 2014 to join AI startup Neurensic to lead technical sales and implementation for machine learning based compliance solutions, and later left to start my own AI startup. While working in AI, I started attending meet-ups, eventually joining a decentralized governance think tank, where I decided to write an essay on special economic zones in Shenzhen, China. Through my research, I met Dickson Nsofor, a native Nigerian who wrote his Masters thesis on special economic zones while studying in Shenzhen. We met up in person to further discuss his thesis, but ended up talking about blockchain instead. We saw the potential and impact of blockchain – and in one another – and co-founded Kora.

As for a quick background on Dickson, he grew up in Nigeria and attended Covenant University, also referred to as the “Harvard of Africa.” He founded 2 startups around the idea of financial inclusion through payments on low cost mobile phones, and was for a time the fastest growing mobile phone brand in Nigeria. However, for various reasons, including the naira plummeting and taking big financial hits, he sold the company to Chinese investors and left to pursue his Masters in China, before joining the UN. Dickson and I have different motivations for starting Kora, but the solution is the same. He is focused and committed to economic development while I’m looking for equitable distribution of wealth.