Building The Future Podcast

This special live podcast session was recorded at Ventures Park, Lagos, during Ventures Platform’s in-person mixer for portfolio founders on July 27, 2024 -- My guest today is Deepankar Rustagi, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and one of the sharpest minds in Nigeria’s B2B commerce space. I’ve known Deepankar for over seven years, going back to his days at Vconnect. He was one of the very first guest...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Dare Okoudjou, Founder & CEO of Onafriq (formerly known as MFS Africa). Dare has built a long-running startup success streak on the continent, having started the business over a decade ago to become a multimillion dollar revenue company today.  Onafriq is building a “network of networks” to enable payments int...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Uka Eje, the co-founder and CEO of ThriveAgric. I've known Uka since 2017, when he and his co-founder, Ayo, received their first institutional investment from Ventures Platform.  ThriveAgric empowers nearly one million smallholder farmers on the continent with technology, credit, and access-to-market. The company...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Deepankar Rustagi, a seasoned tech entrepreneur in Nigeria. I've known Deepankar for over 7 years, dating back to his days at Vconnect. He was one of the first entrepreneurs featured on this podcast—check out episode 8 to hear about his journey from Nigeria to India and back, where he initially worked for Tolaram...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Elo Umeh, founder and CEO of Terragon Group, a leading data and marketing cloud company in Africa. I've known Elo personally for some time; his leadership at Terragon has been transformative. Founded in 2009, Terragon initially focused on mobile websites and launched Twinpine, a mobile ad network, in 2012. Under E...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Daniel Yu, founder and CEO of Wasoko, a B2B e-commerce platform serving over 220,000 informal retailers across the continent. The first time I saw Daniel, he was playing the keyboard as part of a live band in Nairobi. Since then, we've met at more serious events where we've shared banter about pan-African expansio...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Bode Abifarin, one of the leading startup operators I know on the continent. I first met Bode in 2017 when she had just joined Flutterwave, where she served as Chief Operating Officer. I've been continually impressed by Bode’s unique ability to blend operational dexterity with high level strategic thinking. Bode h...

This season of Building the Future was made possible by Moniepoint My guest today is Mark Straub, founder & CEO of Smile ID.  Smile ID is building identity verification infrastructure for businesses in Africa. Mark and I were connected by a mutual friend, but I’ve always been fascinated by his transition from being a venture investor to becoming a startup founder — especially considering that...

My guest today is Anu Adedoyin-Adasolum, the co-founder and CEO of Sabi. Sabi is a B2B e-commerce startup that provides digital infrastructure to Africa's informal economy. In October 2023, they announced reaching $1B annual GMV. I've always been fascinated by Sabi, especially their ability to bring seemingly disjointed and complex pieces together in a connected business model. In this episode, we...

My guest today is Shola Akinlade. I met Shola in 2016, while he and his co-founder, Ezra, were at the YC accelerator program. It was the beginning of their Paystack journey, and even then, I was struck by his clarity of thought and radical focus on product development. Today, Paystack has scaled to seven markets and is responsible for over 40x the value processed online in Nigeria at the time of t...

My guest today is Tosin Eniolorunda, CEO and co-founder of Moniepoint. I met Tosin in Kigali at the Africa Tech Summit in 2020, just before the world went into lockdown. We spent hours discussing the offline distribution of fintech products after our introduction. Since then, I've had the opportunity to be an investor, C-level executive, and board observer at Moniepoint. This has allowed me to und...

It's been a while. I haven't held the podcast mic for a long time. I must admit, I'm a bit rusty. I’m overwhelmed by the advancements in the podcast space since my sabbatical. The African tech ecosystem has also grown in leaps and bounds, with its fair share of troughs too. And I'm still privileged to be an active participating observer in it.  Several people have asked me privately and publicly w...

My guest today is Sangu Delle. Sangu is an entrepreneur, an investor, author, and someone who is deeply rooted in Pan-African ideology. His latest book Making the futures: Young entrepreneurs in a dynamic Africa explored similar themes and topics that I've often explore on this podcast. So it's not surprising that we started the conversation in this episode talking about the book. We discussed the...

My guest today is Andrew Alli. Andrew is a real-life and virtual mentor to a lot of investment professionals in Africa. He is the Partner and Group CEO at Southbridge a pan-African financial advisory firm. Before then, he was the president and CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation, where he was responsible for over $4,5 billion of investments in 30 countries. Andrew's career is an inspiration and...

My guest today is Eloho Gihan-Mbelu; she is the founding Managing Director & CEO of Endeavor Nigeria. Endeavor is a mission-oriented, global organisation that is supporting high-impact entrepreneurship in close to 40 underserved markets across the world. Eloho and I got introduced a few years ago when she started her role with Endeavor Nigeria, and I find her intellectual honesty very refreshi...

My guest today is Tokunbo Ishmael. She's the co-founder and Managing Director of Alitheia Capital, an African focussed PE and VC firm. Alitheia Capital investments include businesses that enable the provision of financial services to the unbanked, and underbanked through traditional and branchless banking models. Alitheia Capital focuses on doing social good and also having a good return on invest...

My guest today is Eric Idiahi. Eric is the co-founder and partner at Verod Capital, a private equity firm based out of Lagos Nigeria. Verod is one of the top PE firms in the continent with a significant number of successful exits as well as admirable money multiples record from their previous fund. Eric is someone I've known from a distance, so when we met at a dinner late last year I invited him...

My guest today is Nnena. Nnena is a Principal at Digame Investment, a growth capital investment firm that back tech-enabled businesses in Africa. Their portfolio companies include GetSmarter an online education company based in Cape Town and London that work some of the top global universities to offer premium online short courses to working professionals around the world. GetSmarter was acquired...

This is the second part of my conversation with Yele Bademosi, you can listen to the first part of this conversation in the last episode of this podcast series. Apart from being the founding partner at Microtraction, Yele is also the founder and CEO of Bundle a social application for cash and cryptocurrency transactions. Yele is the first person I go-to for any question I have on blockchain and cr...

My guest today is Yele Bademosi. Yele is the founder of Microtraction, an angel investment platform that funds Africa’s technology entrepreneurs in their early stage. Microtraction is one of the most active pre-seed investment firms in Nigeria.  Yele and I have known each other for some time. We’ve worked together closely in the past, when he became the first person to join my previous company, St...

Venture-backed startups are disrupting existing business models, redefining market potentials and creating new verticals. In Africa, startups are finding innovative models for addressing underserved market segments, repurposing under-utilised resources and facilitating efficiencies and visibilities where none exists before. These companies have catalysed wider conversations, policies and actions f...

We have now come to the end of season 3! It has been such an exciting journey, one I hope you enjoyed as well. Please listen to my review of the season, what you can expect from next season and when we will be returning.

Steve Grin is the Managing Partner at Lateral Capital, a firm that invests in early and growth stage opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa. Their Fund backs technology-enabled businesses that profitably solve significant pain points across critical infrastructure verticals: financial services, energy, healthcare, and education. Steven is a seasoned entrepreneur and investment professional with twent...

  Dustyn Winder is the co-founder and managing partner at Akili. Vc Akili is a pre-seed to Series A fund tailored for Africa. Their philosophy is based on the belief that there are very interesting problems that are often difficult for entrepreneurs to execute on, whether because they are hidden inside corporations, neglected in disaffected communities, or in geographies that present different cha...

  Adam Grunewald is the co-founder and CEO of Lynk, a platform designed to provide technology-based solutions for the massive informal labour sectors in Kenya. Adam has worked at Google as a project manager on new and emerging projects in the United States and Kenya. Driven by the urge to create a reliable employment system for manual workers in Kenya,  he created Lynk in late 2015. Lynk has raise...