hello world: sam i am
“Strive to Excel” — Air Force Military School motto
I rarely post anything publicly. During grad school what was intended initially to be a 3 month detox from Facebook resulted in me permanently shutting down my account. Twitter is the only social media account I have; it’s sufficient. Within Candidly we have our “candid series” where I share my thoughts with the team; however, externally I have maintained my privacy. I have always felt I needed to achieve a certain status (funds raised, # of employees, press etc.) before sharing more about myself and Candidly. Over the years I have drafted articles but never published. After reflecting in the last few months, I’ve decided to publish a handful of these posts starting with this one about me and how I got here. Enjoy.
hello world — I learned how to code in a little internet cafe back in Nigeria when I was 10 years old. The first thing you learn is to get the screen to print “hello world.” I made it print “hello world: sam i am” From that moment on I became fascinated by the impact software can have on the world. In college I wrote code in fortran, moved to c then to ruby. Candidly 1.0 (aka kandidly) was built on Rails. Before I go too far down this path, let’s rewind back to the journey it took to get here.
“an individual develops courage by doing courageous acts” — Aristotle
I’ve always believed that to evolve and achieve anything worthwhile, one has to go through a “rite of passage.” I have sought out uncomfortably challenging opportunities that require me to overcome obstacles in order to achieve growth at the highest level.
At the age of 11, I set the goal to attend an all boys air force military school the following year, not because I wanted to join the force afterwards but because I was skinny, shy and reserved. I was convinced that attending this school would toughen me up. After a 15 hour bus ride and upon learning that we would only be allowed to go home 3 times a year, I became terrified. My dad, who was very strict, had come to me the night before and asked if this is really what I wanted; he and my mum preferred for me to attend a co-ed private school closer to home, but I had looked him in the eye and said yes. That conversation stuck with me for the next 6 years until I graduated the best in my squadron! No matter how hard things got, I couldn’t bear the thought of facing him to request a transfer to another school.
Despite my fear of public speaking, I decided to join the debate team to address my stutter. I still stutter when I get really mad 😡 or it can come out if I speak too quickly when I am excited 🤩. I ended up leading our team to the first debate national championship in 17 years.
Coming to America — When it was time to leave my family (and friends) to study Aerospace Engineering in America, I was terrified. I received my undergraduate and masters degrees in record time with classified projects for the Air Force Research Lab, GE Aviation and Procter & Gamble. I did not stop there. I was terrified when I left my cushy job to start Candidly. Heck, I am still terrified about sharing my story publicly.
When all is said and done, I know this is the path required to get to the destination I’ve always dreamed of. It’s part of who I am, constantly pushing the limit on what I believe I can achieve; it’s how I was raised.
Candidly enters the conversation — it’s 2011 and as I finish reading Marc Andreessen’s essay “software is eating the world” I am instantly gripped by the same feeling I had when I first used a computer back in ’95. There and then, I knew I had to join the revolution to use software to impact the world. I was also getting tired of the glacial speed of execution in the corporate world and the politics — my God, politics 🙄.
The idea for Candidly came to me because of selfies. It’s 2012 and selfies are fast becoming a thing but I don’t enjoy taking selfies even though I understand fundamentally why they exist. Selfies are us choosing to self document moments we deem meaningful. The challenge for a generation that values experiences is that some moments are more meaningful than others and whenever we choose to self document, we interrupt our experience. When you look through these photos what you see is not someone who is present; what you are viewing is a collection of second-hand experiences with constant interruption as everyone involved is trying to self document.
The name Candidly comes from candid photos. I noticed that our best memories are captured in candid photos or video clips — when we are in the moment while someone else is capturing. This got me thinking — if software is eating the world, there has to be a better solution than all of us acting like we are photographers and constantly self documenting. What if something could do this for us? — know when to take photos, know when to make video clips, know when and who to share all the content with — so we can all be present during these meaningful life occasions 🤔.
Origins — Kandidly was incorporated in 2013 after getting the domain kandid.ly because I couldn’t afford candidly.com, then I sorta forgot about it. Throughout 2013, something weird started happening. Everywhere I looked I saw the need for candidly — a facebook post asking for a photographer with a “nice camera” for a birthday, but didn’t want pros or wedding photographers. Everywhere I went — at home, at work, out and about with friends, on craigslist — same. November that year, selfie was named the word of the year. At that point it became obvious I had to go build this thing. I had found my calling — to empower humanity to be present (or in the moment) during meaningful life occasions.
I cashed out my savings and 401k and set out to build the first version of kandid.ly, which launched in August 2014. We gained a little bit of traction with local photographers and customers in Cincinnati. In early 2015 I received the worst call of my life at 4am. My sister told me that my younger brother, who I’d just spoken with the previous day, had passed away. For a while I didn’t actually believe it, so I kept on texting him like he was there, pranking me. Then it gets worse — once the date of the funeral was set, I couldn’t travel back home to attend the funeral — me being the first son, this hurt to the core. At that time I was in the process of changing my immigration status, a process that should have taken no more than a year ended up taking 3 years. Imagine what that does to you; building a company is hard, but doing it within these conditions is really, really hard.
In early 2018 I finally got my green card issue resolved and the first thing I did was jump on a plane home the following week. I got to spend time with my family and also see my brother’s resting place. On getting back I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders and renewed energy to continue building. We bought candidly.com, because we could finally afford it and my co-founder and I had a lengthy conversation on how we would re-launch with a focus on what we really wanted to do — make photography accessible to the average consumer so they can be present during meaningful life occasions. We eliminated food photography, real estate photography and product photography. There are so many solutions for all of those things. We launched candidly.com in March 2018 and for the first time all I had to worry about was growing Candidly and the team. This was new to me.
2019 was even better! The goal was simple — without any additional investment, become ramen profitable. We got better at selling and we hit our goal in Q3 2019. We discovered an untapped channel for acquiring customers cost effectively; we ran tests and the results were amazing. We saw this as a great inflection point to finally re-engage investors for our next round, then the pandemic hit…I observed that investors classified companies fundraising during the pandemic into 2 categories: companies in a hot space (i.e. tele-health, remote work solutions, etc) or desperate companies. We are not desperate. After a handful of initial conversations I opted to hold onto our chips until things get better and then move forward with folks we love. The good thing is we finally got the word out; people know us, what we are building and more importantly why we are passionate about candidly.
You can’t judge that a market would be bad in the morning — Igbo Proverb
This is a proverb my mother always shared with us growing up. It has been a rocky and challenging 7 years since I first incorporated candidly, but it’s still early morning and I can’t wait to see how things play out. We are totally fine with being misunderstood, because we are playing the long game, which requires patience to nourish the strategy that could transform an industry.
We know events will pick back up; it’s only a matter of time. We are already seeing some events (<20 guests) return. We are excited and ready to go again! We are currently engaged in conversations with key strategic partners and can’t wait to share our progress for the coming year!
Feel free to follow along here on medium or on twitter, until next time, stay safe and #BePresent.
Special thanks to my co-founder, Heather Le, for being with me through this crazy journey and to Michael MacCambridge from taking time from his busy project to proof read my chicken scratch and making it readable for everyone.
Next article: Faster horses??
