A chat with 18-year-old Ibrahim Salami aka D’phenomenal on being a tech co-founder

When Ibrahim Salami wants to introduce himself, he wants you to know all the details – Co-founder and CEO of Devtranet, Engineering Operations at Codetivate, and Partnerships Manager at GenZtechies.

You will be amazed that an 18-year-old’s CV is almost rich enough to compete big in the labour market.

His story with tech started with hardware when he was in Primary Five.

I was fascinated by hardware. I loved to build, using leggos.

Ibrahim Salami

For him, the reception was not so good until they started seeing the ‘fruits of his labour’.

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Salami began his core tech journey with robotics, then AI, but “right now, I think I am more focused on being a techpreneur,” which is the intersection of tech and entrepreneurship.

The teenager wants to code, but entrepreneurship is a life-long ambition, and he is starting with Devtranet – a global network for developers and technologists to connect, build, and discover opportunities.

Ibrahim Salami, aka D’phenomenal

Ibrahim Salami, aka D’phenomenal, is the Engineering Operations Lead at Codetivate, Partnerships Manager at GenZtechies, and also the Co-founder and CEO of Devtranet. He is building the official network for developers to accelerate their careers alongside Jakub Markowski, a Software Engineer at Google, who previously worked on game core technologies at Roblox.

Over the past year, Ibrahim has spearheaded fundraising for The Dynamics, Codetivate, and GenZtechies, raising more than half a million dollars in monetary and in-kind support for all three initiatives from top tech companies like Amazon, DigitalOcean, and more.

In 2021, Codetivate was supported by two Forbes 30 under 30 individuals, the first-ever maker researcher at Intel, and a Thiel Fellow whose maker community is backed by one of the co-founders of GitHub, the founder of Ethereum, and Elon Musk.

Since joining GenZtechies, he has helped organise great initiatives like the GenZ HackFest 2022, Africa’s largest tech conference & hackathon to develop solutions to societal problems.

D’phenomenal is keen, determined, and passionate about the intersection of tech, sales, and operations.

In this interview, Ibrahim Salami talked about his academics – how he wanted to get into MIT, his earnings/savings culture, his time as a ‘tech bro’, and has words for people who want to be techies too, or are already techies.

Watch the full interview on YouTube:

In case you want to be like Ibrahim Salami, read this article: 5 tech summer camps to consider