About Me

I'm David Elikwu

To be brutally honest, I'm just a nerd with some fountain pens who hasn't stopped writing since he was five.

• I started sharing everything I learned online and a few thousand people signed up to come along for the ride.
• This is the place where you'll find everything you'll need to know about thinking deeper, working smarter, and making better decisions.
• 'The Knowledge' is named after one of the hardest exams in the world - an infamously gruelling test for taxi drivers in London. London 'cabbies' study the Knowledge to memorise the 25,000 roads, alleys, nooks and crannies spread across a sprawling city. Likewise, this platform maps data points for navigating the world around us. I'm building a cognitive compass. A place you go to figure things out.
• In addition to my newsletter and podcast, I run a course helping people like you build kick-ass careers, and coach driven operators!

My career journey

As a more professional introduction, I started my career early, working on marketing campaigns for companies like Amazon, Krispy Kreme, and Credit Suisse.

I interned at Google, moved to Shanghai, came back when I ran out of money and nabbed a grad job in consulting. I hadn't graduated but I brought on four Tier-1 clients in 6 months before being offered my 'dream job' working on billion dollar deals in Corporate Law.

It took half a decade to realise I had bigger dreams. At some point I'd picked up photography as a hobby, was shooting New York and London fashion weeks within two years, and turned the side gig into a brand strategy consulting practice.

After consulting for a bunch of startups I pivoted to technology full-time, joining a startup as Chief of Staff and then transitioning to Product Strategy and Operations.

I built a few businesses along the way including:

• Skytribe (Baba's Flight Club), a global collective of +2000 millennial travellers;
• The Knowledge, a media platform helping +15,000 curious professionals think deeper and work smarter;
• Democratic Republic, a value-led brand supporting global artisanship through African coffee and biodynamic wine, and;
• Jendaya (co-founder), an Africa-first luxury e-commerce platform.

That's the boring stuff out of the way! If you want brutally honest accounts of my early career experiences, go here and here.

But trust me - the content only gets better once you subscribe.

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62: The hard thing about hard work ⚒️

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favourite authors. If he writes something I’m going to eat it up. But not immediately. Because Brandon likes to write big beefy books that could double as self-defence weapons or stools for small cats. He writes a LOT. He recently surprised his entire

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43: Searching for easy answers

Pattern-matching and robust thinking are more important than tactics and abstraction Hey friends - I have a few announcements before digging into this week’s letter. First, welcome to all the new subscribers. I hope you find this newsletter useful. Please feel free to get involved, share recommendat…

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Why subscribe?

Because none of us know everything about what it takes to navigate this spinning blue marble, but by communicating ideas and learnings we can have a bloody good crack at it. I’m addicted to learning. The things I study are consolidated here for you to read and share.

Subscribe for frank, oft sarcastic, and generally humorous thoughts on things I’m exploring and ideas that matter.