Loy Okezie

Dear Readers,

For the last couple of months, I’ve been asked several questions about Startups Nigeria, so I thought it’d be nice to share the untold story behind the incident that happened on May 6, 2009.

Startups Nigeria, a technology community blog which I founded in April 2008 is currently undergoing a re-launch after the domain found at www.startupsnigeria.com was ‘unethically’ shutdown by Careers Nigeria – the organisation that provided web hosting. As a result of irreconcilable differences resulting in a ‘conflict of interest’, the organisation decided to terminate the relationship.

Apparently, the owner of the organization had repeatedly expressed his interest in a stake in Startups Nigeria, which I’ve almost always rejected. Since the site had been hosted on the organisation’s  server, a deadline of May 1, 2009 was given to transfer the domain to another server.

At the time, I was working for the organization and there had been several debates over issues of a conflict of interest between my job at the company and my involvement and commitment to building Startups Nigeria. When it became evident that my goal was to have 100% control over Startups Nigeria, my employment was terminated prematurely.

While I was making alternative arrangements to transfer domain to another server and having talks with the organisation, the owner decided to completely shutdown the site. Following this, several attempts to retrieve the site’s backup proved abortive, thus I made the decision to forgo the domain name and re-build the platform under a new domain name.

Update 1 (Aug 11): StartupsNigeria.com Has Been Redirected to Careers Nigeria website.

Update 2 (Sept 7): My Respone to the Startups Nigeria online brand attack.

Even though this incident may have affected the ‘young and emerging’ business and technology start-up industry in Nigeria, it succeeded in opening up new opportunities for collaboration, participation and engagement within the Nigerian technology community.

True, a crisis is a gift.

While it might seem that the irrational action and rash decision have drowned the hopes and dreams of Nigerian Internet businesses and entrepreneurs around the world, I am confident that it didn’t kill the idea and vision of building the largest business and technology start-up community in Nigeria. This vision will soon become a reality.

For me, a setback is a setup for a comeback!

Re-building the Startups Nigeria brand

The “new” Startups Nigeria platform will be designed as an online community for people interested in sharing business ideas, launching business start-ups, showcasing their products and innovations, business and technology-related jobs and freelancing, finding business partners, student entrepreneurs and investors.

The community will be run by several contributors and community managers, so if you’re interested in becoming a part of the team, kindly send me your CV with relevant experience via startupsnigeria [at] gmail.com or DM me via Twitter @startupsnigeria

I’ll officially be announcing the re-launch of the new Startups Nigeria platform here on this blog, so you can check back soon.

Update (Sept 1): We have pre-launched the new platform. You can sign up to get notified when we launch public beta.

Thanking you for your patience and understanding.

- Loy Okezie, founder of Startups Nigeria