The boy with the
water sachets.

I was born in Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria, into a household that did not have the luxury of long planning horizons. My parents had no formal education. We measured the week in meals, not in calendars. From very young, I understood that my mother skipped food so the children could eat, and that my father took whatever work he could find to keep us above the line.

I started selling sachets of pure water on the street to put my own contribution into the household. I was nine when I first did it, and fourteen when it became routine. Anyone who has done this kind of hawking in a Nigerian city knows the rules. You walk fast. You learn the traffic patterns. You count your coins twice. You come home with every naira accounted for.

I did not know it then, but the discipline of that work, the obsessive accounting, the comfort with long hours, the assumption that nobody is coming to rescue you, became the bedrock under everything I have built since.

I was fourteen when men in a van took me. It was an ordinary day in Agbor. I had a tray of water sachets balanced on my head and a few hundred naira folded inside my shirt. The next time I felt safe, more than two years had passed.

We travelled north through Nigeria into Niger, then into the Sahara. I do not have a clean memory of how many days that part took. We crossed parts of Algeria on foot. There is a stretch of mountains outside Djanet where we walked for an entire day without water. Some of the people I was with collapsed and did not get up. I will not pretend I have processed that part. I have learned to carry it.

We made Ghat, in Libya, where we were finally fed. From Ghat we moved to Sabha, where I was sold at auction. I was then shipped to farms outside Benghazi, where I was held for the better part of two years.

At some point in the first year on those farms, I made a decision that has not changed since. If I survived this, I would use education to make sure no one in my family was ever this powerless again. Not safety. Not comfort. Power. The capacity to act in the world with leverage.

I did not know what shape the work would take. I had not heard the words analytics or artificial intelligence. I had heard of doctors and lawyers and engineers. I knew enough to know that whatever I chose, the path would run through schools I could not yet afford and rooms I had no right to be in.

That decision is the only thing I have ever made that I have not revisited.

I was sixteen when I made it home. My classmates had been finishing secondary school. I had been farming under threat in another country. There is no version of that situation in which you simply slot back in. I worked every job I could find. I studied at night. I took the exams that needed taking. I was, quietly and without ceremony, two years behind people who had been allowed to be children.

I refused to let those two years define my ceiling. That phrase has become a small prayer to me, the kind of thing I repeat under my breath on hard days.

I became the first person in my family to finish university. I read for a Bachelor of Management Studies at the University of Mumbai and graduated First Class with Distinction as Class Valedictorian. I had imagined a path through finance and business strategy.

That changed when I encountered a different kind of leverage. I watched data and software solve problems that consultants had been circling for a decade, in months instead of years, with budgets that did not require a sovereign client. So I went back to school and read for a Master of Science in Data Science at Georgia State University. I taught myself to code. I built things, broke them, rebuilt them, and started shipping.

I am now finishing the Executive MBA at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan — the part of the journey I think of as adding the executive grammar to the technical voice.

Over the last eleven-plus years I have done analytics and AI work for United Airlines, Cisco Systems, Spotify, UnitedHealth Optum, Verizon, and Wellstar Health System. I am now on the operator side of state government, leading enterprise analytics, AI, and data at the State of Connecticut, across 100+ agencies serving 3.7 million citizens. I have watched how decisions get made inside organisations with a hundred thousand employees and how they get made inside startups with twelve. The differences matter less than people think.

The work I am proudest of in those engagements is rarely the novel model. It is the unglamorous infrastructure that allowed the model to be trusted. The data contract that survived a reorg. The semantic layer that prevented three departments from arguing about the same number for the next five years. The HIPAA documentation that meant the clinical pilot could go live without a six-month legal hold.

Solution Cabin is the consulting holding I have run since 2015. Through it I have advised executives, designed analytics platforms, and built and shipped applied AI for clients in regulated industries. Out of that work I built DocSensei, a document intelligence platform that runs to roughly thirty-seven thousand lines of production code. I licensed it to a Fortune 1000 insurance broker, who now uses it on their commercial policy work.

Out of that practice came two more independent builds. ORCA, an asset-level liability and exposure model that fuses satellite-derived signals, regulatory schedules, and operator data into a single risk index, surfaced under-reporting patterns for a national operator. Setup Score is a multi-factor signal generator across momentum, volatility regime, options flow, and earnings drift — a personal research stack that keeps me close to live markets while I do my day work.

I started these because I do not believe in waiting for the perfect employer, and because I think the next generation of useful AI will be built by operators who carry the weight of their own balance sheet.

There is a version of my life in which I stop after the Fortune 100 consulting income reaches a comfortable number. That version is easy to picture. It is also a version that does not honour the decision I made on a farm outside Benghazi when I was fifteen.

I keep going because the leverage is still building. Because the kids selling sachets in Agbor today are being failed by systems I now have the skills to repair. Because there is a difference between proving you survived and using what you learned in the surviving to lift other people out. I am here for the second one.

If you are evaluating whether to bring me into a serious problem, what you are getting is somebody whose definition of a real outcome is not negotiable, who will not take the work if I cannot do it well, and who treats every engagement as if a family is depending on the result. Because in my house, one is.