Founder Mythos
Building Africa's Payment Stack
If someone has a problem with the transaction, that's someone that will never trust digital payments again so we don't take it lightly.
Every failed transaction in a payments business is not a customer-service issue. It is the entire category losing one user, possibly forever.
In a market where digital payments are still being onboarded household by household, the operator who treats trust as the product wins the decade.
Spent about one year just doing the underground work. Had a wait list of about 300 customers.
Paystack launched 11 January 2016 after a year of pre-launch building - quiet integrations, regulatory work, a private waitlist. No press, no hype.
The companies that look like overnight wins are usually the ones that did twelve months of invisible work before anyone could see them.
I used to wonder, why would the CEO be trying to hire? But now, it's the only thing in my head.
Akinlade dismissed early founder advice that hiring was the CEO's full-time job. Three years in, it was the only thing he was doing.
Every other lever a founder pulls compounds through people. The team is the product before the product is.
I just figured if there's someone that can figure out payments, it probably will be me because I built world class software before.
Akinlade had spent years building enterprise software in Lagos before Paystack. He didn't pick payments because it was a market opportunity. He picked it because his existing skill stack mapped to the problem.
The right founder for a hard infrastructure problem is rarely the one with the best deck. It is the one who has already done the unglamorous work next to it.