This is a very news worthy story irrespective of the founder's origin. The founder being Nigerian makes it much more newsworthy. We all know what Nigeria's reputation is like on this thread.
Irrespective of what people would want to agree with, there is pattern matching going on. It is not exclusive to this thread or HN. See other blogs and the absence of comments. If it was a randon former Stanford grad and ex-Facebook employeee, he would have been a toast of the US tech world and definitely the HN thread. If it were a post about deciphering the motivation or techniques of scammers, everyone will have an opinion.
This is not the first time I am seeing this here and on the tech circuit. When a Nigeria company BASED in Nigeria raised $8 million, the tech newswire and HN was quiet. Do any of you remember this story? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810466
It is nobody's fault or responsibility so I cannot or will not apportion blame. It is just how things are. It is only a reminder.
I am proud of Chinedu not only because he we attended the same High School with me, but that he surmounted the odds and has had a massive successful and useful exit. Hopefully, he will serve as an inspiration and motivate more Nigerians/ Africans to tackle problems on a gbobal scale.
Why? TechCrunch publishes stories every day about US companies acquiring US companies. These stories are newsworthy. But if an entrepreneur who happens to have been born in Nigeria sells his company to Apple it is not newsworthy? Did he have to be living on a tree and subsisting on wild fruits and nuts in the Niger Delta swamps for it to be newsworthy?
Relax, bro. He just means that the US-based founder's country of origin is not that significant to this audience, since many American startups have been founded by immigrants from all over the world. This came up because the title of this submission emphasised the founder's country of origin, which in turn is because the post was originally written for a Nigerian audience, for whom the founder's country of origin IS newsworthy.
What tptacek, rdouble and james_madison said is accurate.
Also I don't consider most acquisitions all that interesting, but I would have been interested in reading about the Nigerian startup scene (if there is such a scene).
Bittersweet for me. I love hearing good news in the tech space out of Africa. Yay!. But then as a Windows Phone fan, I see that with this announcement they've promptly canned their support for the platform. Boo!
What's interesting here is that there's value in providing better solutions than the official ones.
Every transit system on HopStop has its official site, with its (usually crappy) website. I assume most of the info in HopStop is either scraped or consumed through undocumented APIs.
Nigeria could probably use more Engineers and less MBA's. I just hope it doesn't twists the local populations mind into thinking that MBA degrees are useful.
Irrespective of what people would want to agree with, there is pattern matching going on. It is not exclusive to this thread or HN. See other blogs and the absence of comments. If it was a randon former Stanford grad and ex-Facebook employeee, he would have been a toast of the US tech world and definitely the HN thread. If it were a post about deciphering the motivation or techniques of scammers, everyone will have an opinion.
This is not the first time I am seeing this here and on the tech circuit. When a Nigeria company BASED in Nigeria raised $8 million, the tech newswire and HN was quiet. Do any of you remember this story? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810466
It is nobody's fault or responsibility so I cannot or will not apportion blame. It is just how things are. It is only a reminder.
I am proud of Chinedu not only because he we attended the same High School with me, but that he surmounted the odds and has had a massive successful and useful exit. Hopefully, he will serve as an inspiration and motivate more Nigerians/ Africans to tackle problems on a gbobal scale.
PS: I actually mentioned him 3 years ago when I wrote about the dearth of black founders of globally renowned startups. http://oonwoye.com/2010/04/05/black-founders/