Founders Connect

About Founders Connect

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.

Publisher

Founders Connect

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Oct 2021

Latest episode

10 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

115 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 Jun 2026

   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.

2. 

   23 May 2026

   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.

3. 

   19 May 2026

   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.

Who has been a guest on Founders Connect

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Olumide Akintola
• Nichole Yembra
• Temilola Adepetun
• Samuel Okwuada
• Benjamin Dada

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

2,438,679

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

28 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 71 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

73

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

77