Founders Connect

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Jun 2026

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Founders Connect is on a mission to document the stories, journeys and ideologies of leading and emerging African entrepreneurs and operators. The podcast aims to create meaningful insights that can be shared and beneficial to other founders, entrepreneurs, knowledge seekers, consumers and the world in general - targeting a wide variety of audiences.

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June 10, 20261 hr 6 min

What Nobody Tells You About Building a Fintech in Nigeria | Babatunde Akin-Moses of Sycamore NG

What does it actually take to build a fintech company in Nigeria for five years with almost no visibility, no big splash, and no shortcut — and still come out standing?Babatunde Akin-Moses had a plan. Work for ten years, save money, then start a business. He did not want to be Bill Gates, he knew he was not from that kind of family. He looked at the Nigerian entrepreneurs he admired and every single one of them had worked first. So that was the plan: Shell for NYSC because the pay was good, then KPMG and PWC to learn the kind of rigor that makes you review a document and send it back because the margin was 1.5 when it should have been 1.6. That kind of rigor.But plans move. By the time he had the idea — a credit business for the growing businesses stuck in the middle, too big for microfinance and too small for the banks to care — he had been through enough to know that the business was not just an opportunity. It was a problem he had lived. He tried to start a digital laundry company in 2013 and could not get a business loan. As an employee, the salary loan was easy. As a business owner, the bank was not interested. That gap never left him.Sycamore started as a peer-to-peer lending platform, built because they had no capital and needed to be the middle, not the lender. For two years before their first VC round, they ran on angels, friends, and family. They were closing transactions on Google Forms. And Babatunde, sitting across from a potential investor, was asked if they were raising a SAFE and had to quietly ask what a SAFE was.In this episode he goes deep on all of it, the five years of building without noise while watching louder fintech companies make headlines and then quietly disappear, the regulatory crisis where someone impersonated Sycamore and got them removed from an approved lenders list, the co-founder he nearly lost and the personal sacrifice he almost made to save the business that he has never spoken about publicly until now.He talks about the milestone nobody knows about: building their own internal financial infrastructure before they could even launch the mobile app, in a shoestring budget, in weeks. He talks about being the first digital lender formally approved in Nigeria in 2022. He talks about coming first out of 7,000 competitors at the NSIA Prize for Innovation, which sent him to Silicon Valley for six weeks and landed him on the front page of Punch. He talks about the private note that was oversubscribed, and the Cascador win that brought ₦1.5 billion and a level of public attention he still cannot fully explain.But more than the milestones, this conversation is about the philosophy underneath all of it. How he built trust in fintech — an industry where trust is the whole product — by personalizing the brand, keeping every single promise, and staying long enough for customers who were doing ₦100k transactions to grow into customers doing ₦5 million. How he thinks about servant leadership, about not being able to overcommunicate, about the tension between rewarding exceptional performance and maintaining team cohesion. How he almost never applies for grants or competitions and still keeps winning them.And what he is actually building toward: not small business support, but a platform for growing businesses — the ones with 100 employees who need debt to become the ones with 1,000. The ones who will become the Interswitches and Dangotes of tomorrow if someone will just give them the credit line they need. And eventually, a financial services product that works for Africans wherever they are in the world.

May 23, 20261 hr 1 min

He Turned an MIT Class Project Into One of Africa's Most Ambitious Bets on Transportation | Adetayo Bamiduro of MAX.ng

What does it actually take to build one of Africa's most ambitious infrastructure companies from scratch and keep building through a regulatory shutdown, a global pandemic, and a currency collapse that wiped out over 70% of your revenue overnight?Adetayo Bamiduro, co-founder and CEO of Max, the mobility and logistics platform he launched out of MIT in 2015, answers that question with a level of candour that most founders simply do not offer publicly.Tayo grew up in Ibadan in a household shaped by two very different kinds of intensity. His father, a professor who never missed a day of work during a year-long ASUU strike, modelled a dedication to mission that went far beyond personal reward. His mother, known in her media circle as the Iron Lady of Africa work, drove herself from Ibadan to Sokoto State alone for a union meeting in the early 90s. He inherited both of them fully.His path to Max was not a straight line. He taught himself to code in Visual Basic, built software for vehicle tracking before anyone was calling it a startup, worked at the UAC Group, spent time at Nigeria LNG on Bonny Island where he witnessed for the first time that things in Nigeria could actually work — that order, precision, and organisation were possible within the same country where everything else felt chaotic. That experience changed something in him. He went to MIT to find a bigger platform, and it was there, in an entrepreneurship class taught by Bill Aulet, that Max began as a class project.Seven co-founders started the journey. By the time reality hit and student loan bills came due, only Ty and Chinedu remained. They won a pitch competition they arrived late to. They came second at TechCrunch Battlefield in London and received a crate of beer as their prize — neither of them drinks. They raised a million dollars on the back of $120,000 from Techstars and went back to Nigeria to build.In this conversation, Tayo walks through the hardest chapters without softening them. The three years between seed and Series A surviving on under a million dollars. The Lagos regulatory ban in 2020 that forced them to shut down 80% of their revenues overnight while he walked into the Lagos State House of Assembly every single day trying to carve out a legal space for the business. COVID hitting two months later. The 2022 currency devaluation that pulled term sheets off the table and turned every investor conversation into a 30-minute defence of Nigeria's macroeconomic outlook — a conversation he had zero control over and found more frustrating than anything else in a decade of building.He also challenges one of the most common founder instincts — the fear of competition. When Gokada and Opay entered the motorcycle ride-hailing space, his first reaction was protective. In hindsight, he says the opposite is true: investors back movements, not companies. If you are the only one in a space, they wonder why. If ten people are in the space, they look for the best one to back. Competition validated Max in the eyes of investors who would never have deployed capital otherwise.And then there is what is coming. Petrol in Nigeria has gone from roughly ₦200 to over ₦1,400 in a decade. Max is now pairing electric vehicles with solar-powered charging stations — and the goal is to lock in energy prices 20 to 30 years in advance, making the cost of movement predictable for people who have no margin for uncertainty. When Ty talks about this, something shifts in his voice. This is the most excited he gets in the entire conversation. His most important lesson from ten years of building: it is the people. If you are building anything in Africa, or thinking about it, this one is not optional.

May 19, 20261 hr 44 min

This Is How a Multipotentialite Builds an Empire Without Losing Her Mind, Her Health, or Integrity | Adaora Mbelu on Founders Connect

She once walked into Badagry, found Babas with trucks parked on the side of the road, convinced twelve of them to show up at a location in Surulere for an inspection — and won a contract she had no equipment to fulfil. She was twenty-three. That is the first business she ever ran when she moved back to Nigeria. And it tells you everything you need to know about how Adora thinks.This is not an interview about a personal brand or a career. It is an interview about a life — the choices that shaped it, the losses that cracked it open, and the philosophy that has held it together across more than two decades of building, creating, and refusing to be put in a box.Adaora opens up about the health scare that changed everything. There was a period where she simply did not know what was wrong with her. She was going from oncologists to cardiologists, taking medication, getting no answers. At one point, her heart actually stopped. A doctor told her she had two choices: keep chasing a diagnosis, or go inward and find out what was causing it. She chose the second. That season became the foundation of her album Heart Check — what she calls a spiritual arteriogram, a journey inwards to find out what was really going on.She talks about losing her brother and Z-Space in the same week. Z-Space was her lifelong dream — a creative hub she had spent years building, importing equipment from China, setting everything up. They had not yet opened when the message came: three days notice, demolition because of the coastal road. The morning they buried her brother was the morning that message arrived. She talks about what that grief has looked and felt like across the last two years, why it never really goes, and what her brother used to say about her — that she was like a basketball, bouncing and bouncing, until suddenly she entered the net.She talks about multipotentiality and why she refuses to accept that focus means narrowing your expression. For Adaora, the mission is singular: elevate human consciousness. The expressions are many. Music. Visual art. Writing. Consulting. Community building. They are not scattered — they are an ecosystem, and she is the architect of it. She makes a compelling case that sticking to one thing has crippled more creatives than it has helped, and that what looks like rigidity from the outside is simply sustainability from the inside.There is also the money conversation. One of the biggest cheques she has ever received came from her art — a painting she created in six days that sold for multiple six figures in dollars. Nobody knew. She is not saying that is what she makes now — she is saying that is what happens when you stop building a box around what you think is monetizable and let your gifts surprise you.She talks about her relationship with God not from a religious performance angle, but from the perspective of someone who has done deep theological work, who leans into God as friend rather than God as judge, and who has been a Daystar member since she was fifteen. She talks about what her liberal, love-centred upbringing gave her that most African households do not, about the Global Young Leaders Conference in New York that pushed her into leadership as a teenager, and about what parenting an eleven-year-old who teaches himself trumpet, drums, and keyboard from YouTube has taught her about herself.And she talks about Creatorium — the creative hub she is building in place of what was lost — and why creators building for creators is entirely different from tech founders building tools for creators. She wrote the first article about Africa's creator economy in 2011. She has been thinking about this for twenty years. Now she is building it.This is a conversation about what it actually costs to build a life on your own terms — and why Adaora believes it is the only life worth building.

May 12, 20261 hr 52 min

Paystack, Piggyvest, Moniepoint — The Investor Behind Africa's Biggest Exits Tells All | Kola Aina

What does it actually take to back Africa's most consequential companies — and what does it cost you personally to get there? Kola Aina is the founder and managing partner of Ventures Platform, the fund behind Paystack, Piggyvest, Moniepoint, Lemfi, Omni Retail, Raenest, Verto, and over 90 other startups. Over a decade, the firm has supported more than 140 founders and helped drive over $1 billion in follow-on capital. But this conversation is not about the portfolio. It is about the judgment, the values, the failures, and the philosophy that made all of it possible.Kola opens with something most investors never say out loud: he did not come from nothing. He grew up in a comfortable, entrepreneurial family, had a driver and an official car in his early 20s, and was effectively in line to take over a sizable family business with 200 employees. He walked away. That decision — and the painful months that followed, including a period of deep unhappiness and a father who had to find a way to forgive him — is where his real story begins.He talks about what it meant to prove he could do it on his own. The six months he spent in the DMV area in the US networking at events just to find a co-founder. The hundreds of rejections he got trying to raise equity and debt for his enterprise technology company Emergent Platforms. The moment he decided to start Ventures Platform in 2016 — not with a grand plan, but as an experiment, funded entirely by his own family's nest egg because he had gotten so many no's from the world and wanted to prove that you could invest in young people and they could build great things.He breaks down the three common traits he has seen in every successful African business he has backed. First, market-creating innovation — businesses that convert non-consumers into consumers, because the vast majority of people in Africa cannot access the standard version of goods and services. Second, communal business models — the ones where multiple stakeholders benefit, not just the company. The Moniepoint example here is striking. Third, deep local context — the kind you cannot replicate from a desk in the Valley.He also explains why picking great companies is not actually the secret to Ventures Platform's success. The real edge, he says, is in what happens after the check is written. Being the investor that founders call when things go wrong. Replying emails. Showing up when the business is struggling, not just when there is a term sheet on the table. He calls it retention versus acquisition — and it is the reason the best deals keep coming to them.He is brutally honest about the mistakes. He compromised his own principles twice — backing founders he knew were not good people because the traction was too compelling. Both investments blew up. Both companies failed not because they ran out of money or missed product-market fit, but because of what he calls founder suicide. That lesson is now non-negotiable at the firm.He talks about how to find a co-founder, what a prenup for business partnerships actually looks like, why the Nigerian demographic of 250 million people is one of the most dangerous numbers in African tech, and why staying in the game across vintages matters more than being the best picker in any single year.And he closes with the one lesson he would pass on to anyone: in Yoruba, they say "eniyan ni aṣọ mi" meaning people are my cover. He does not believe he can ever be poor. Not because of money, but because of the depth of the relationships he has built and invested in over 20 years.This is one of the most substantive, honest conversations about African venture capital and long-term institution building that we have had on Founders Connect. Whether you are a founder, an operator, an investor, or someone trying to understand how Africa's tech ecosystem actually works — this is essential listening.🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a Founders Connect episode.

May 5, 20261 hr 0 min

How to Invest Through Inflation, Clear Debt and Still Build Wealth : A Financial Masterclass

What does it actually cost to build wealth in Nigeria right now — when purchasing power is shrinking, the Naira is under pressure, and the standard financial advice was written for a completely different economy? In this episode of Founders Connect, Tosin Oladokun, founder of Money Africa and one of the continent's most trusted voices in financial literacy, sits down for a candid, wide-ranging conversation that is equal parts masterclass and personal testimony.Tosin reaches over 750,000 people across platforms. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a Mandela Washington Fellow, and the winner of a $100,000 NSIA Prize for Innovation. Jack Ma named her one of Africa's top business heroes. But this conversation is not about the accolades. It is about what she has learned — and had to unlearn — in seven years of building, and what she wants every Nigerian listening to walk away knowing.She starts where most financial conversations refuse to: the mindset. By the age of seven, a child's beliefs about money are already set. That is why people in their 30s and 40s are still trying to unlearn patterns they never chose. Tosin breaks down why 80% of the personal finance journey is psychological — and why she recommends therapy as a genuine asset class, not a luxury. She also introduces the concept of the mastermind group and why the most successful people you know did not build their networks by accident.Then she gets into the frameworks. She walks through the four CNBC-researched paths to wealth — saver-investors, dreamers, climbers, and the exceptional 1% — and explains why the most guaranteed path is one that most people dismiss. She gives the actual numbers: $50 a month from your 20s at 10% per annum compounds to a million dollars by retirement. Investing 20,000 Naira a month does the same in Naira terms — which is also exactly why she insists that every Nigerian must hold a portion of their investments in USD.She breaks down the S&P 500 in plain language — what it is, how it works, why a cocktail of 500 companies across sectors is the safest starting point for most investors — and explains the single biggest mistake she sees people make with it: selling too early. She talks about the portfolio that performs best according to research. The answer is dead people. Because they cannot touch their investments.The conversation gets personal when she talks about the health challenge she stepped away from work to address — something most people on the outside never saw. She speaks about what it taught her about delegation, about trust, about putting yourself first as an entrepreneur. She also gets brutally honest about the funding gap for women in business, and reveals that in 2023 alone, her team applied to 116 opportunities and heard back from six. Her response was not to wait for the table to be set. It was to build her own funding pipeline.She talks about when not to invest — the season of life when building your skill matters more than saving. She gives practical advice on managing debt alongside investing, the 50-30-20 rule and why it breaks down in an inflationary Nigerian economy, and why gradual habit change always beats going cold turkey. She also settles the real estate versus S&P 500 debate — with a clear answer for first-time investors.And she closes with the one thing she wants every young Nigerian to remember: optimism is a financial asset. Not blind optimism. Deliberate, working, delusional-where-necessary optimism — because the mind that believes it can find the opportunity will find it.This is one of the most practically useful money conversations we have ever had on Founders Connect. Whether you are just starting out, rebuilding, or trying to figure out what to do next — this one is for you.🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss conversations like this.

April 27, 20261 hr 24 min

Grief, Growth and $4.4M: What Five Years of Showing Up Really Looks Like for a Nigerian Founder

Kelvin saves his name in people's phones as "Kelvin Bumpa." Not as a stunt. Not as a branding exercise. It is just what happens when you spend five years pouring yourself so completely into something that the line between you and the thing you are building stops making sense.In this episode of Founders Connect, Kelvin, co-founder and CEO of Bumpa Nigeria's commerce operating system, sits down to talk through what five years of building actually feels like from the inside. Not the metrics version. The real version. The version where you are managing a team of 70, carrying the weight of $4.4 million raised, showing up every single day with high energy, and doing it all after losing the person who built it with you.In 2019, he met Iyin Aboyeji. A few conversations about what it means to actually build something and that part of Kelvin that had been dormant since shutting down Voice App in his final year woke back up. He resigned without a plan, walked into CcHub, and started working with founders. Then lockdown hit. TJ reached out. They released what would become Bumpa in a matter of days and had close to a thousand customers almost immediately.By 2021, Bumpa had officially launched. By the time of this conversation, over 100,000 businesses are using the platform across Nigeria, with Kenya just beginning.But the story of the last five years is not just about growth numbers. It is about what Kelvin calls the pressure - the pressure to prove that it can still work after TJ passed. The pressure to carry the normal day-to-day without showing weakness. The pressure to keep showing up for a team that was also grieving, for a co-founder's family watching to see what becomes of what he built, and for 100,000 business owners who depend on the platform every day.He talks about what fundraising actually looks like under the hood, not 200 nos and then a yes, but months of back-and-forth conversations, investor calls stacked on top of product work, lead rounds that take three extra months to close, and the peculiar loneliness of doing all of that with a small team while trying to stay close to the product at the same time. He talks about why he personally took over Bumpa's social media presence after watching an influencer deliver a soulless, scripted video about a brand he had spent years building. He talks about why he shoots his content in one take, lets his team handle the rest, and what that discipline has done for how people perceive Bumpa in the market.He also lays out his vision for what commerce in Africa is actually becoming. The fragmentation problem that forces a business owner to open 15 to 20 apps a day just to run their operations, the cross-border trade opportunity that the Africa Free Trade Agreement has so far only managed on paper, and what Bumpa's AI-powered future looks like: a world where a business owner wakes up to a nudge telling them exactly when to run a sale, at what discount, to which customers, and then watches Bumpa execute all of it while they focus on growth.And through all of it, one thing. Keep showing up.That is how Kelvin describes the last five years. Not perfectly. Not without loss. But consistently, stubbornly, showing up — for the business, for the team, for TJ's memory, and for the 100,000 businesses that need Bumpa to keep working.

April 22, 20261 hr 48 min

Paul Onwuanibe on Building a $150M Empire: The Secret Most African Founders Will Never Know!

Send money with Sendwave from the US, UK and Canada to Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Fast and easy. Use the code FoundersConnect when you make your first transfer from the US, UK, or Canada to Nigeria or Kenya — and you'll get $10 or £10 on that transfer when you send a minimum of $10 or £10: https://try.sendwave.com/kjap/nenwbcpdHe received a 7-day eviction notice while on a cruise. What followed was the demolition of over $30 million in assets, $10 million in lost revenue, and the livelihoods of 3,000 people all gone.But this is not a story about loss. It is a story about what happens when someone who has already rebuilt once decides to do it again.Paul Onwuanibe grew up in London dreaming of becoming a dustbin driver. His father had different ideas and shipped him off to boarding school in Nigeria at age 10. That decision set off a chain of events that would take Paul through four master's degrees, a job at a scrappy startup called Regus where he visited 167 countries in six years, and eventually to founding Landmark, one of Africa's most ambitious live, work, and play destinations.He built Landmark's serviced office business from scratch across 14 African cities. Then he sold it to his former boss, Mark Dixon, for over $20 million. He took those proceeds and looked out at a piece of marshland in Lagos and decided to build a city within a city.Then came September 11. Then came the eviction notice. Then came the demolition.And then came the decision to keep going.This conversation covers what it really takes to build across Africa, why entrepreneurship is an extreme sport, what 40 years of street-level business principles actually look like, and how to turn empathy into equity when everything around you falls apart.If you are building something or thinking about starting, this one is for you

March 31, 20261 hr 48 min

How Olumide Akintola Built Three Completely Different Business Models for Three African Markets

What does it actually take to go from walking Ibadan markets in sandals - because your shoe size didn't exist in Nigeria — to scaling a brand to 800,000 customers while spending less than 30% of your marketing budget? That's not a metaphor. That's Olumide Akinsola's actual origin story, and it tells you everything you need to know about how he thinks.Olumide started the way most people in this country start: with nothing except nerve. His first job was as a canvasser — dress corporate, carry a briefcase full of admission forms, walk the whole of Ibadan, and convince total strangers to trust a school nobody had ever heard of. He earned ₦6,005 a month. He wore sandals to the job because no shop in the city stocked his shoe size. And he generated so much demand that the school had to schedule four separate entrance exams to handle the traffic.That chapter set the template for everything that followed: understand what people actually want, go where they are, and earn trust before you ask for anything.In this episode, Olumide breaks down the full arc — from those Ibadan markets to heading marketing at SaveBoda, where he scaled the company to over 800,000 customers while spending under 30% of his allocated marketing budget to get there. He talks about what most people misunderstand about growth: that the little things — walking around, listening, watching what people don't say — often drive results that no paid acquisition campaign ever will.Then QuickBus, where as VP of Growth, he had to build three completely different operational and commercial models for Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, same goal, wildly different execution, because cultural nuance is not optional. He also explains the counterintuitive moment when he stopped doing marketing entirely — when QuickBus pivoted from marketplace to asset financing company — and why data analytics replaced the entire marketing function.He talks about the years in between: shuttling Ibadan to Lagos every single day for months, sleeping on friends' mattresses on the floor, doing business development at an events company for a woman who flatly refused to honour their payment agreement — and walking away anyway, with receipts. He talks about the early days of Twitter Premier League and how football banter accidentally became his professional network. He talks about the music industry, the A&R work on a song you definitely know, and why his background in entertainment became one of his most underrated sales assets.And now he's building again — as Country Director for Digitax, a B2B SaaS tax compliance business — and he makes the case for why this role is the one that pulls together everything he's done over nearly 20 years: sales, operations, marketing, data, and the patience to build from scratch without the founder title.

March 10, 20261 hr 30 min

This Investor Who Has Seen 500M+ in Deals Explains Why Startups Shouldn't Take VC | Nichole Yembra

Nichole Yembra is a force of nature in the African tech ecosystem. As a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and an Obama Foundation Leader, she has overseen over $500 million in capital raises and fostered the growth of giants like Flutterwave and Max. In this deep-dive interview on Found Connect, Nichole shares the raw, unfiltered reality of what it takes to build, fail, and scale in Nigeria and beyond.Nichole discusses her transition from a high-flying career at EY in Atlanta and Brazil to becoming the "Chief Problem Solver" in Lagos. She opens up about the "Mamba Mentality" she adopted from Kobe Bryant—a relentless, competitive drive that pushed her to leave her comfort zone and redefine success. She explains why she dropped "loyalty" as a top value after facing a betrayal that forced her to start from scratch, and why she now prioritizes authenticity and curiosity above all else.This conversation goes beyond business metrics. Nichole talks about the physiological nature of emotions, the "cognitive loneliness" of leadership, and the power of female friendships. She breaks down why most businesses are actually not "venture-backable" and provides a masterclass for founders on the importance of timing, execution, and customer money over investor funding. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, an investor, or someone looking for the motivation to "craft your life," this episode is packed with gems.From her early days as a "terrible child" jumping gates in Lagos to building 143—a wellness and Pilates sanctuary—Nichole’s story is one of evolution. Learn how she balances being a mother of twins, a managing partner, and a creative spirit while maintaining a deep sense of gratitude and peace in the chaos of Nigeria. Subscribe to Found Connect for more stories of the founders shaping Africa’s future.Timestamps00:00 - Intro03:38 - Growing up as a creative and competitive child in Lagos06:01 - A childhood lesson on earning money and honesty10:51 - Turning 39 and the legacy of her mother12:11 - Why being in Nigeria is more liberating than the US14:42 - Breaking down core values: Freedom and Authenticity20:43 - The Mamba Mentality: How Kobe Bryant influenced her drive22:54 - The mindset of greatness vs. mediocrity33:25 - Moving back to Nigeria36:34 - Building Greenhouse Lab and the Google partnership37:42 - The truth about raising your first $1M in Africa43:55 - Why Venture Capital often "makes no sense"56:29 - What Chrysalis Capital actually does for companies1:07:02 - Transitioning into the wellness industry with 1431:11:15 - Losing everything and starting over from scratch1:20:47 - The Trust Equation: Competence, Reliability, and Authenticity1:26:19 - The importance of ambitious female friendships

March 9, 20261 hr 16 min

She left Oil & Gas at 40 With No Business Experience to build a Billion-Naira Empire

What does it actually take to build a business that lasts 25 years in Nigeria — through recessions, exchange rate crashes, COVID, counterfeit competitors, and a rapidly changing economy? Mrs. Temilola Adepetun has the answer, and it is not what most people expect.This episode of Founders Connect is one of the most layered and honest conversations about what entrepreneurship really looks like over the long term. Temilola breaks down exactly how she validated a business idea in her head before there was internet, how she dragged inventory through the streets of New York in winter with stiff hands and no nails left just to keep the business stocked, and how she survived two major competitors rising up to take her market — not by going to war with them, but by refusing to compromise on quality until her customers came back to her on their own.She talks about the real cost of growing too fast, the discipline of growing organically, and why staying focused on your lane in the early years is one of the most underrated business decisions a founder can make. She walks through what it took to go from being the sole operator of a seasonal business to building a head office, hiring a COO thirteen years in, doubling revenue within two years of that hire, and then using that momentum to attract private equity. She explains what due diligence actually looked like for a brick-and-mortar business and why the most powerful thing she ever did was bank every single naira she made and keep audited records from day one.She also shares her mental model for leaving corporate life, the Yoruba philosophy that shaped her decision to take the leap, how she read the market before anyone else saw it, and the specific mindset shift that helped her see a seasonal business not as a limitation but as a puzzle to solve. And she opens up about succession planning, the deliberate decision to pass operational control to a younger leader whose values aligned with hers, and why she believes that letting other people in — truly in — is the most important thing a founder can do to make their business outlast them.If you have ever wondered whether it is too late to start, whether a simple idea can become something serious, whether a non-tech business can scale, attract capital, and compete globally, this episode is the answer. Do not miss it.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro02:21 - Walking the Runway at Lagos Fashion Week at 6506:06 - What It Really Takes to Run a Business for 25 Years09:14 - The Solution-Oriented Mindset That Saved the Business11:23 - Was It Risky to Start a Business at 40 With a Family?20:52 - On Mistakes: The Estate That Fought Back & Lessons in Cutting Losses24:05 - Recruitment Errors, Internal Fraud & Trusting the Wrong People25:42 - Balancing a Business, Travel & Three Sons28:45 - Parenting Lessons for Female Founders: What Actually Works33:57 - On Integrity: Why Honesty Is a Business Strategy, Not Just a Value37:27 - Staying Relevant Through Recessions, COVID & Changing Technology41:52 - From Bootstrapping to Private Equity: How the Deal Happened42:56 - The Four Divisions Most People Don't Know About44:28 - UNICEF, Humanitarian Aid & the Year That Made Her First Billion50:05 - How COVID Lockdown Became Their Most Productive Period55:19 - Succession Planning1:00:13 - Two Life Lessons She Learned the Hard Way1:01:37 - What She Loves (and What Surprised Her) About Getting Older1:08:42 - One Word to Describe Her Life Journey1:10:00 - Final Thoughts: On Faith, Conviction & Minimizing Regret1:15:30 - Closing: On Legacy, Succession & What the Business Is Really ForFollow Founders Connect for more conversations with the builders, operators, and entrepreneurs shaping the African business landscape.