I grew up in Mile 4, Limbe, in the South West Region of Cameroon. It's a coastal town at the foot of Mount Cameroon — humid, loud, and small enough that everyone eventually knows your name. My mother, NDO AGNES, is a seamstress and entrepreneur. She taught me what it means to build something from nothing, stitch by stitch.
I started in electrical engineering. Form 1 and 2 at Government Bilingual Technical High School, Isokolo, Limbe. Then Form 3 and 4 at King Bilingual Community Comprehensive College, Mile 4. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I fell in love with code — with security, with the web, with the idea that a person could write text into a file and have that file do something. That's still the strangest magic trick I know.
The CAP detour
I earned my CAP — Certified Analytics Professional in Electrical Engineering — back at Government Bilingual Technical High School, because King's didn't offer it. The credential was real, the exam was real, and I sat it at a school I had already left. That detail matters more to me than it probably should. I didn't wait for the institution I was in to offer what I needed. I went back to the one that did.
Cameroon's technical education system has a particular rhythm. You move through forms, you sit exams, you collect certificates, and the certificates stack up in a folder that eventually becomes a career. I understood the rhythm. I just didn't want to keep following it.
Finishing faster than the system allows
By the time I was in Form 4, I was already spending most of my evenings writing code. Small projects — a calculator, then a small web page, then a login form, then a script that scraped a website I liked. I was reading security blogs by people who were building things I couldn't yet build. I wanted to be in that world, and I wanted to be there now.
So I made a decision that was mine to make: I decided to finish high school faster than the system was built to allow. Cameroon has a pathway for that — the GED, the General Educational Development test used as a high school equivalency credential. I sat it. I passed. I got my certificate.
Alongside the GED, I picked up two certifications from Programming Hub: one in Data Science, one in Statistical Analysis. Neither was going to be a résumé line. Both were for the thing I was already trying to build in my head.
Coppin State, and the decision not to go further
I applied to Coppin State University for Data Science. I was admitted. I accepted. I committed. That was supposed to be the next chapter — a Cameroonian kid from Mile 4 showing up at a Maryland campus with a backpack and a plan.
Then the ground shifted. The Trump administration began deporting students in numbers that were hard to argue with. People I knew — friends, classmates, people in the diaspora WhatsApp groups I was part of — started leaving. Not because of anything they had done. Because the rules had changed, and the rules were not on their side.
I made a decision that was mine to make: I stopped. I didn't go further.
I don't fully know how to explain that decision to someone who didn't live through those months. It wasn't fear, exactly. It wasn't defeat either. It was a re-reading of the room. I looked at the path I had been accepted onto and I decided it was not a path I was willing to walk. So I turned around and built something else.
NEXSIM, and District Seal
What came next was NEXSIM LLC — a company registered in Montana, in the United States — and, through it, District Seal.
I built District Seal because standard e-signatures are a fiction. When you click "Sign" on a DocuSign or HelloSign document, all the platform can prove is that someone accessed a link and clicked a button. An email address. An IP address. A typed name. That's it. And when a client later says "I never signed that, my roommate did" — none of it holds up in court. You cannot cross-examine an IP address.
District Seal closes that gap. Every signing ceremony produces a court-admissible certificate that captures six things:
- WebAuthn hardware-backed device authentication — the device signs a challenge with a private key stored in secure hardware.
- Forced document scroll — the Sign button stays disabled until the document has been scrolled to 100%. Informed consent, in the legal sense.
- Recorded verbal consent — stated on camera.
- Randomized spoken challenge phrase — spoken aloud, verified by speech-to-text. Defeats pre-recorded replay attacks.
- Head-turn liveness check — a directional cue. Defeats 2D photo spoofing.
- Biometric face match — liveness frame compared against the reference photograph.
All processing happens locally. Zero biometric media retention. The certificate is bound to the exact document by SHA-256, with a public QR code that anyone can scan to independently verify the signature.
I'm not a notary. I'm not a lawyer. I built the evidence layer that lets both of them sleep at night. That's the whole job.
What Mile 4 taught me
Looking back, I don't think I could have built District Seal anywhere else. Limbe is a place where you learn to make things work with what's available. Where a plan is only as good as its backup plan. Where "there's no pathway for that" is not a fact, it's an inconvenience you route around.
The CAP certificate that King's didn't offer, I went back and got. The GED that would let me skip ahead, I sat and passed. The university that accepted me, I turned down. The company I founded is registered eight thousand kilometers from where I grew up.
The pathway exists. You just have to be willing to build it while you're walking on it.