What the founder of JOS is building between a technology podcast and the people who watch it, how far along it is, and who he’d like an introduction to.
On the JOS podcast, Richard Browning of Gravity Industries talked through the engineering behind his Jet Suit: how the system uses distributed turbine thrust and the movement of the pilot’s own body for control. For the host, a conversation like that is half the job.
“I don’t want someone to watch an engineer explain how they built something and then simply scroll to the next video,” Joshua Olaiya says. “I want them to be able to say, ‘I want to learn this.’ And JOS should be able to say, ‘Here is where you start.’”
The problem he describes isn’t a shortage of material. “The information exists,” he says. “But the learning journey is fragmented. You can consume thousands of pieces of content and still not know what to do next.” Supply is not the question. UNESCO’s 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report counted at least 220 million students in massive open online courses in 2021, up from none in 2012.
Joshua is the founder of the Joshua Olaiya Show, known as JOS, a media and education technology company with two divisions. JOS TV makes the podcast, along with storytelling, animation and educational media about technology and the people building it. JOS Academy is being built to turn the interest that creates into structured learning: courses, projects, live sessions and mentorship in artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, software engineering, aerospace and STEM. The JOS website currently displays more than 120,000 learners and listeners. His phrase for the whole thing is “from curiosity to competence.”
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What Happens After the Episode
The design is a sequence. Someone finds JOS because they’re curious about robotics, for example. From there, as Joshua describes it, they find a course, build a project, meet another person who shares the interest, learn from an engineer, attend a live session and listen to a founder on the podcast. “I don’t want JOS to be something people simply watch,” he says.
He’s specific about where the path is meant to lead. After “Here is where you start,” JOS should be able to say “Here is the project,” then “Here is the community,” then “Here is someone you can learn from,” and eventually “Here is an opportunity to use what you’ve learned.”
The distinction underneath is between knowing and doing. “I don’t want JOS to simply produce people who know more,” he says. “I want to help produce people who can do more.”
“There is a difference between knowing what a robot is and being able to build one. There is a difference between watching an AI tutorial and being able to build an AI system.”
Joshua Olaiya, Founder, Joshua Olaiya Show (JOS)
Parts of that path exist today and parts are still being built, and he is careful about which is which.
Two Hundred Applications in a Week
“JOS is real, but it is still early,” Joshua says. “I actually think it is important to say that clearly.”
What is real: the podcast is active. Its guests have included Richard Browning and Lee Rosen, former Vice President of SpaceX Mission and Launch Operations. JOS has built an audience around technology and education across its social platforms, which Joshua says is larger than the figure on the website. Favikon ranked him 18th worldwide in Robotics in 2024 and first in Nigeria in Robotics and Deep Tech in 2026. He has written that more than 1,000 people have joined the JOS waitlist, and that about $10,000 in AWS credits, received through the AWS Activate programme, supports the technology being built.
JOS has also partnered with around ten companies so far. One of them, he says, had already raised £1 million and worked with JOS partly because of the audience it had built. The result was roughly 200 applications in a week, with very little promotion.
“It showed me that the audience isn’t just an audience,” he says. “There is actual distribution value there.”
That result is the centre of what he puts to investors. He is looking, he says, for people “who understand what happens when media becomes the top of a learning ecosystem.” He lays the layers out one at a time: “The podcast creates attention. The educational content creates curiosity. The Academy creates structured learning. Projects allow people to apply what they have learned.”
Learning by building is how he learned himself.
Teaching Himself Engineering
Joshua describes his engineering background as self-taught. Beside it he lists experience building startups (three, he has written), working in manufacturing, and building and leading technology projects, along with engineering and technical training, an Oxford entrepreneurship programme and Y Combinator’s Startup School. Asked what teaching himself gave him, he starts with being wrong.
“The biggest thing self-learning gave me was permission to make mistakes,” he says. “You try something. It fails. You try again. It fails differently.” The test, as he sees it, sits outside any classroom: “When you are building something yourself, the real world is the assessment.”
“The machine either works or it doesn’t. The customer either wants it or doesn’t. The product either solves the problem or it doesn’t. The code either runs or it crashes. Reality gives you the grade.”
Joshua, Founder, Joshua Olaiya Show (JOS)
He doesn’t turn this into a case against degrees. “I don’t think that means university is unnecessary,” he says, and he lists what universities can provide: knowledge, research environments, mentors, laboratories, peers and opportunities. What self-learning taught him, in his words, was “something complementary: I don’t have to wait for permission to learn.”
It also left a habit. “If I see something I don’t understand, I find it difficult to simply accept it,” he says. “I want to know why.” He adds: “I don’t like knowing just enough to repeat an answer. I want to understand the mechanism underneath it.”
He asks the same kind of question about companies.
“Who Actually Needs This?”
Asked why most deep tech ideas never turn into anything, Joshua’s first answer is that “people fall in love with the technology before they fall in love with the problem.”
“You can have an incredible robot, an impressive AI model, a beautiful piece of hardware or an extremely sophisticated engineering system and still have something that nobody actually needs,” he says. The uncomfortable question, as he calls it, is “Who actually needs this?”
His second answer is the team. “Deep tech is rarely a one-person problem,” he says. People leave, get tired, disagree, move to another country or stop believing in the original idea, and a company needs “people who can carry the company when another person is having a difficult period.” His third is time. “I don’t think building a company is about being motivated every day,” he says. “Nobody can be motivated every day. It is about continuing to work even when the excitement is gone.”
He holds both halves of the argument at once: “a great idea without execution is still just an idea. And execution without a market can become a very expensive hobby.”
He puts the same test to himself. One of the hardest parts of building companies, he says, has been “learning that not everything depends on how hard you personally work.” His conclusion: “Sometimes working harder isn’t the answer. Sometimes the answer is changing the system.”
Among the people who have shaped how he thinks, he names Elon Musk, Alexander the Great, Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein, each for a different reason. From the first he takes first principles. “Instead of accepting, ‘This is how the industry does it,’ I like asking, ‘Why does it have to be this way?’”
“You Can Build This Too”
“The reason I am building JOS is not simply because I like technology,” Joshua says. “I like technology, but that isn’t enough of a reason to build a company. What bothers me is seeing how much human potential exists and how many people never get the opportunity to develop it.”
He gives the examples himself: “There are young people who are fascinated by robotics but have never touched a robot. There are people who want to learn artificial intelligence but don’t know where to start.” Time with the tools is short even where the tools exist. The same UNESCO report found that, even in the world’s richest countries, only about 10% of 15-year-old students used digital devices for more than an hour a week in mathematics and science.
“There are students who watch engineers building incredible things and think those people belong to another world. I don’t believe they do.”
Joshua, Founder, Joshua Olaiya Show (JOS)
What he thinks many of them need is access: to information, people, equipment, mentors, structured learning and opportunities, “and sometimes, access to someone who simply tells them: ‘You can build this too.’”
He doesn’t limit that to one place. “I want someone in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, India, the UK, the United States or anywhere else to discover JOS and realise that the technologies shaping the future are not completely out of reach.”
Where Joshua Is Now
Joshua describes JOS today as “an early-stage company with an existing audience, an operating media platform, an emerging education platform, early partnerships and a much larger vision still being built.” The list of what remains is his own: a bigger Academy, more courses, more live learning, more engineers and experts involved, better project-based learning, stronger community infrastructure, more partnerships and more podcast guests. “We are not finished,” he says. “And honestly, I like saying that.”
The investors he wants to reach are those who understand education, technology, media, creator businesses, African technology and the future of work. On the last of those, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. He’d like to be in a position to close a funding round by late next year, if the company reaches the milestones that justify it. “But I don’t want funding to become the goal,” he says. “The goal is to build something valuable enough that the right investors, partners and people want to be part of it.”
The rest of the ask is people. He wants engineers, founders and researchers as podcast guests, companies that could collaborate with JOS learners, and mentors for students. He also wants introductions. “Sometimes the most valuable thing someone can give you is not money,” he says. “It is an introduction.” If he had to reduce what he wants from this article to one thing, he says, it would be connection.
Outside work, it’s history. “I spend a lot of time thinking about history because I don’t believe you can fully understand the future without understanding how people got here,” he says.
What’s next, as he wants it quoted: “I’m building JOS to become one of Africa’s largest learning-media and technology companies, and I want millions of people to go from being curious about the future to becoming capable of building it.”
The measure he has set for it isn’t the audience figure. “I don’t want JOS to be remembered simply for the number of people who watched our videos,” he says. “I want it to be remembered for the people who became capable because they found us.”
Five Lines from Joshua’s Diary
- “Reality gives you the grade.”
- “One introduction can change the trajectory of a company.”
- “Knowledge matters, but capability is what changes things.”
- “I don’t have to wait for permission to learn.”
- “Every person who says no tells you something.”
From the Diary of Joshua Olaiya
Joshua Olaiya is a United Kingdom-based self-taught engineer and the Founder of the Joshua Olaiya Show (JOS).
| Role | Founder, Joshua Olaiya Show (JOS) |
| Based in | United Kingdom |
| Also | iAurora |
“I want to turn curiosity into capability, and capability into something that can change the world.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Joshua Olaiya because he describes an early company at its actual size. He separates what JOS has built (an active podcast, an audience, early partnerships) from what it is still building (the Academy and the path beyond it), and he asked that the two not be blurred. What convinced the editors is one result he reports plainly: roughly 200 applications in a week for a partner company, with very little promotion. The piece is written for the people he says he wants to meet: investors, engineers, founders, researchers and mentors.
Executives Diary, Editorial
