Biography of Seun Osewa; Founder of Nairaland

This is one of the numerous Biographies that got me motivated, and I hope it does the same to you. Seun Osewa originated from Sango Ota in Ogun state. He was not born with a silver spoon as many supposed. Although, he grew up learning and knowing the technological part of life.

As for Seun Osewa, internet business as always being his dream. He has always wanted to make a living through the internet. This urge made him venture into series of online businesses; some of which failed within their first year.

Seun enrolled as a student in the University Of Ile-Ife to study electrical engineering in 1998, but he did not finish. No, he wasn’t rusticated. Too brilliant to be. Looks like he dropped out of the school to pursue his programming dream and here he is today.

CAREER AND LIFE

Seun started his internet career in the year 2003 after going into the web hosting business. He had attempted to start a web hosting business, but after 3 months he could only boast of one customer, so he ran out of capital and the business died..after several ideas and other trials he decided to start a web forum, because it was the only idea that required no additional capital. He created 3 forums in November 2003 (one for higher institution students, one for IT discussions, and one to cover the emerging GSM industry; the Mobile Nigeria Forum at MobileNigeria.com).

The Mobile Nigeria Forum took off, so he relaunched it in February 2005 with the assistance of Mr. John Sagai Adams, who posted a link to the forum on his mailing list
and participated enthusiastically in those early days. In a month or so, the forum had about 300 members, but the growth potential didn’t satisfy him.

He decided to start Nairaland when he noticed two odd things about MobileNigeria:

(1) Despite its narrow focus, it was the only Nigerian community that gave a voice to Nigerians at home. Most other Nigerian sites were owned and dominated by Nigerians in the US or UK. They covered only issues of interests to Nigerianst abroad.

(2) The off topic section of the forum, covering topics outside telecoms, like romance and jokes, was becoming more vibrant than the Mobile Nigeria Forum itself, suggesting the need for a more general-purpose Nigerian forum. This gave him the confidence to take forums like Naijaryders and Talknaija head on by starting a general purpose discussion forum with a strong bias towards issues of interest to Nigerians at home. He felt that such a site could attract enough traffic to make enough money. Nairaland got much higher traffic than expected making his income on Nairaland much more than expected.

DO YOU KNOW WHY WE STARTED HAVING MODERATORS?

As Nairaland grows Seun had problems with spammers flooding the forum so he started getting helps from moderators he selected. Seun got help in updating the forum’s frontpage and keeping it clean by moderators like
Mukina2 a female mod who has been working with Seun since 2007 and others.

In 2011 Seun was approached by a group of company who wants to buy nairaland for 1million dollars which is 155million naira but he rejected the approach, and even nairaland’s estimated worth by a site ranker for the year 2011 was 512million naira making it the most expensive nigerian site. Despite all these money Seun whom is expected to be leaving in one huge mansion in estates like Banana island Lagos only lives in his hometown Sango Ota Ogun state a very close little city to Lagos state.

Fame power, money we all love and seek to have. But as someone that knows Seun quite well -even if not physically yet, and may never – the guy just doesn’t appear to like the celebrity status. Some people use money to buy fame, Seun uses money to run away from it! There are people that will pay to meet Seun Osewa in person, but he has refused to show himself. With the largest African online forum under his control, more than half a million people that depend on his online website to make their day, Seun can easily wield power. But all those appear not to be his style.

A case in point: when he was listed by the organizers of The Future Awards in the controversial “Nigeria’s 100 Best” list, which presented him with an opportunity to dine with the celebrities in Aso Rock (what some people will pay millions to get), it didn’t even freak the Ota-based geek. Rather, he sarcastically commented on my Facebook wall when I raised a criticism of the TFA list that, “oh, it’s a good list because I saw my name there”. Oh, he only saw his name there, he didn’t partake in anything – a free ticket to visit Aso rock but he never went. Such is Seun’s abhorrence for fame.

We shall conclude Seun looks up to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as they both have same attribute of seriousness in their field, facebbook founder wore just one tie throughout a whole year to show a sign of seriousness in making facebook a real big thing and so Seun also used just one profile picture in all his online accounts including nairaland for over 2 years in which he is till using as at 2014 to show a sign of seriousness in making nairaland much more huge. Seun once aspired to be a movie producer but never was, may be he is going start in future.

Some people do think Seun is a (born again christian) because of some of his gentle gentle pretense but he is totally not. It looks like he is a great fan of actress Tonto Dikeh has he get involved with posts related to her often on Nairaland. He is also a great fan of a popular TV series “GAME OF THRONES.”

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