The interview, not the legend
Riccardo Jody Minniti founded Ernesta Labs. Jameel Abdul Waahid is the Islamic name he took in 2022. Same man. Before NIKO he made music, sold for a living, directed companies, worked in property and wrote software. There is no clean climb in his record: sales floors, songs, companies that closed, falls, recoveries, another go.
It started with a long interview, run by an AI. He answered questions about his whole life, not just the company years. The AI then went through the public record, followed names and projects back in time, and brought what it found into the interview to check, correct and push back.
The digging went further back than NIKO. It turned up his early music as J.O.B. in Reggio Calabria, company filings, property work, customer reviews, source code and later research. He supplied what documents could not: what happened to him and what it meant. An AI asked the questions, did the research and wrote it up, the way a journalist would.
Some claims here are solid. Some are only his word. Published code proves the code was published. A review proves a named customer wrote it. A public test proves a claim can now fail in public. Where no outside record exists, it is his testimony, and the page says so.
He supplied facts, answers and corrections. He did not get to choose how certain each sentence sounds. The source did. It is the rule he runs NIKO on: facts outrank the founder.
Before the founder: Reggio Calabria and J.O.B.
First came music. Videos and distribution records put J.O.B. and BRKlan in Reggio Calabria from 2011. A 2014 upload credits J.O.B., Klacat and DjFrere. A 2015 track with Mr.Green and later releases run the catalogue to 2022. Music services credit Riccardo Minniti on composition.
A transcript could not read those songs. He had to. The lines are in dialect, and the dialect changes the meaning. In that context non ho fantasia means no chill, and no calm either; it has nothing to do with imagination. Lattaria means wasting time, dragging it out. Translate them literally and you misread the songs.
Some lines split people in two: the ones who wait for you, and the ones who expect something from you. The first is presence. The second is a deal dressed up as presence. He reads gusta che sciccheria as sarcasm: a jab at someone who knows the exchange is exploitative, joins in anyway, and protects the fiction around it.
The same themes turn up later in the company's language: work, impatience, transactions, loyalty with conditions, status, the gap between how things look and how they are. Calling the songs a prophecy about NIKO would be a stretch; they are a young artist's work. What holds is narrower. Years before Ernesta Labs, he was already writing about work, exchange, control and the price of keeping up appearances.
Eighty euros and the sales floor PARTLY FOUNDER-SUPPLIED HISTORY
In 2015 he left Reggio Calabria for the United Kingdom with 80 euros and nowhere to stay. That is his account. Estate Magazine printed it in August 2026. The magazine is independent; the story came from him. Read it as his testimony, published, not as an audit of his finances.
Then the jobs: hospitality, wholesale, customer service, payments, software, property. Different products, same work. Get someone's attention. Find out what they want. Take the no. Make the offer clear. Ask for the decision.
He says he joined The Real World as a student and worked as an affiliate while it grew through affiliates. He says he was not one of its best. One of his own social profiles carries a public Andrew Tate tag. Nothing independent we found confirms his student or affiliate status, his rank, results, relationship, endorsement or any continuing link. It is here because he counts it as part of his sales education. It gets one paragraph.
In June 2022 he incorporated 3.1.2. Entertainment Ltd, an advertising agency, later dissolved. Ocean by 3.1.2 Ltd, filed as an IT consultancy with him as director and person with significant control, was dissolved too. A public profile called him founder and director of 312 Entertainment and tagged him with payment consulting and payment processing. The filings show he tried. They say nothing about revenue, size or success.
Property: claims and customers
He says he joined Tyron Ash International Real Estate in 2022 and left in 2025. Public pages called him a partner. Independent customer reviews and the company's own posts back up that he worked there for part of that time. We did not see an employment or partnership contract.
The numbers come from him and from the agency's posts. His best sale, he says, went £75,000 over asking. A March 2025 post on his property account: Chadwell Heath, 250 viewings, sold £50,000 over asking. A Tyron Ash post on Godwin House: 19 viewings, three offers, £50,000 over. Thorpe Road, credited to him and a colleague: 38 viewings, ten offers, £35,000 over. These are marketing posts. We have not seen the sale files.
The best outside evidence is smaller. On GetAgent a buyer wrote that “Riccardo was fantastic”: he backed the purchase and was quick to arrange another viewing and send information. A seller called him helpful, transparent and prompt. Another customer rated his communication very good. A few reviews prove nothing about a career. They do prove real customers knew him by name and described the work.
NIKO started on that sales floor, with a salesman asking whether software could do the whole job he did, from first contact to close.
Faith, collapse and recovery FOUNDER TESTIMONY
He says he reverted to Islam on Eid al-Fitr 2022, straight after Ramadan, and took the name Jameel Abdul Waahid. Riccardo and Jameel are one person. He does not offer his faith as proof he is a good man, or as the end of his problems. In his telling he still sins, falls and comes back. The line he holds to: “There is none worthy of worship except Allah.” That includes the founder.
Asked about the gap between the public ambition and the private life, he did not soften it. By his account he was broke and homeless, got better off, and fell again. He says he beat depression. He says he beat drug addiction. He says he still suffers, deeply. A near-marriage ended. He has not seen his son in years. This page names no child, no former partner, no custody details and no allegation. The separation is his account and his pain. It is no basis for blaming anyone else.
These are his claims about his own life. We did not ask for medical records, and digging for them to make the story more dramatic would be wrong. Suffering does not make anyone a better engineer. What carries over is a habit: fall, recover, go again. It runs through his life, and later through the systems he builds.
He says the first thing he does every morning is code. We only have his word for that. The public record shows the bigger pattern: when a company stopped, a plan failed or life got worse, he went back to building.
From projects to Ernesta Labs
When we checked, the ErnestaLabs GitHub account had 33 public repositories: GitHub marks 30 as fork: false and three as forks. That flag says nothing about originality, sole authorship, quality or use. Some repositories are templates, generated sites, imports or variants. What the account does show is a long run of public experiments: web intelligence, property, lead reactivation, education, service businesses, data tools, agent infrastructure.
The public Apify profile ties Ernesta_Labs to Riccardo Minniti and lists autonomous web scrapers and AI data pipelines. When we checked, its Forage actor showed 153 builds, 2,449 runs and five users. Small numbers, and real ones: at least one public system was built and run, again and again.
By 2026 the work had come together under Ernesta Labs. Riccardo Jody Minniti founded it. The lab publishes applied research, builds agent infrastructure and builds NIKO.
The research library holds 48 published articles and 63 source-registry records. Those totals come straight from the published catalog. The subjects: long-horizon agents, state, memory, authority, effects, learning, recovery. The count matters less than the rule every article follows. What the source found, what we think it means, and what nobody knows yet are kept apart.
How he works
We did not take his word for how he works. His working records over time show the same pattern again and again. He has no patience for motion that changes nothing: the same question asked twice, reports instead of implementation, doing by hand what a tool already does, green tests that prove nothing about the live system.
The impatience can be forceful. What matters more is that he backs down when the evidence says so. In one investigation he read a zero match rate as a bug. When the evidence showed a test teardown had wiped the measurement, he accepted it and refused to touch production logic that was working. In another, a reviewer invented a credit-consumption requirement. No billing model needed it, so he quarantined it and killed it.
He keeps apart things teams usually blur: a passing test and a working system, a configured provider and one that answers, a draft and a sent email, an interested prospect and a customer, a useful artifact and the final result. He corrects names when the name changes the decision. He throws out true facts that are muddying the problem in front of him.
He is not always right. He asks to be judged the way he judges: show the evidence, show what changed, and reverse when the facts say so.
The salesman building the salesperson
Everything in the interview ends up at NIKO: Ernesta Labs' own product and experiment, a full-cycle autonomous salesperson still being built. You cannot buy it yet. It is not an AI SDR, a lead-gen dashboard, a sales copilot or a chatbot. The claim is bigger than any of those, so it is harder to prove.
He wants the software to do the job: research the market and the prospects, decide who is worth contacting, start the conversation, follow up, qualify, handle objections, negotiate inside its authority, ask for the commitment, close. The software is the worker. People, tools and services can support it. NIKO is still the one selling.
After years of selling, he is trying to build a machine that does the work he learned. So the question about his life and the question about the product are the same one: can a salesman build the salesperson?
His sales record, his code and his research do not answer it. They explain why he is trying. They do not show NIKO can sell.
Experiment Zero
Current phase: Phase 1. The dated public record measures verified NIKO-attributed waitlist signups. A signup shows a conversion. It is not revenue, and it is not a paying customer.
The later terminal phase asks whether NIKO can autonomously find, win and close its own first real customer. Minniti has committed NIKO to one fair, valid attempt. Before that phase starts, the final boundary has to be published and frozen. Infrastructure can be repaired before a valid start. No human may secretly choose prospects, write sales messages, rescue negotiations or close the deal, then hand the machine the credit.
A signup is not a customer. A sent email is not a sale. A reply is not a close. Useful market intelligence is not the terminal outcome. Success requires a real external customer, a real transaction and verified payment, with the commercial chain performed by NIKO. A legitimate lost deal is not automatically wrongdoing, but it can still be failure under the experiment's declared boundary.
If a valid Experiment Zero ends in failure, the NIKO product claim does not receive a quiet second attempt under a new label. The evidence, research and reusable infrastructure may survive. The claim does not. That is the founder's precommitment. Whether he keeps it will itself become part of the public record.
The experiment is unresolved. For where it stands today, check the dated record on Watch, not this biography.
Wealth without worship
He wants to be extremely rich. He says so, and we will not dress it up or apologise for it. Ernesta Labs is a business.
The rule he attaches to the money is just as blunt: “We do not make money without creating value in the world.” In the Reverse SaaS thesis the customer buys the service, not access to one more tool. Running costs are real. The deal is meant to be fair to both sides, with no show of the provider heroically taking every risk.
Same with status. “Forget VIPs,” he says. “There are people. And people are very important.” It is an order of rank: Allah above the founder, facts above his opinion, people above celebrity.
The sources, and what each one proves
- Companies House officer record INDEPENDENT PUBLIC RECORD
- Estate Magazine profile PUBLISHED FOUNDER ACCOUNT
- GetAgent reviews naming Riccardo INDEPENDENT USER REVIEWS
- J.O.B. and BRKlan: 2014 public music archive PRIMARY CREATIVE RECORD
- J.O.B.: 2015 public music archive PRIMARY CREATIVE RECORD
- ErnestaLabs on GitHub FIRST-PARTY PUBLIC CODE
- Ernesta_Labs on Apify PUBLIC TECHNICAL PROFILE
- Minniti Group Real Estate archive FIRST-PARTY HISTORY
- Ernesta Labs Research SOURCES + LABS INTERPRETATION
- Experiment Zero live record PUBLIC TEST
Outside records confirm his identity, his companies, his public work and named customer reviews. His own records show what he and Ernesta Labs published. His testimony covers faith, recovery, family and parts of his work history. Our interpretation joins them up. It cannot make any claim stronger than its source.
An unfinished life
Founder stories like to end by making every bad year look necessary. This one will not. Homelessness was not a product strategy. Addiction was not leadership training. Family separation is not an origin myth. Pain does not turn good because somebody builds something afterwards.
What he controlled was the next move. Artist. Seller. Director. Property operator. Builder. Founder. None of them wiped out the one before. He carried something from each into the next attempt.
NIKO may fail. Ernesta Labs may be wrong about Reverse SaaS. The idea that a software worker's experience compounds may not survive deployment. Doing it in public protects him from none of that. It only makes the result harder to rewrite later.
No victory lap, then. He kept going back to the work, and his biggest claim now sits where anyone can check it.
Arrived with 80 euros. Still at it.