Iyinoluwa Aboyeji
* This article was first published by Africa’s Business Heroes
In this conversation, Iyin Aboyeji reflects on his journey building Andela, a platform connecting tech professionals from emerging markets with companies seeking remote talent, and Flutterwave, a payments company. He also discusses his move into investing with Future Africa and his belief that African founders should design for the 94% of the population rather than the elite six per cent. He shares candid insights on what he has learned about survival, scale, and discipline in the African context, as well as how faith has guided some of his boldest decisions.
Your LinkedIn tagline says you “help African businesses grow global.” Can you walk us through what that looks like in practice, and what you have learned about enabling African businesses to compete internationally?
It begins with acknowledging that the problems African founders tackle are rarely provincial. They are global problems that we experience more intensely because of our constraints, which forces us to invent unusually creative and resilient solutions. When those solutions meet the scale and purchasing power available elsewhere, they often travel naturally. My career has been about identifying the continent’s biggest wicked problems, backing founders who solve them first for our context because context produces the insights that make solutions durable, and then helping them commercialise and scale beyond our borders. Andela is a clear example. We framed it as importing jobs via the internet to address structural youth unemployment. It turned out that many countries far from Africa were wrestling with similar talent needs, so a solution built here became globally relevant.
Some argue that founders in Africa must think globally because local purchasing power is limited. You offered a nuance about not reducing the continent to its mean. What did you mean by that?
It is dangerous to talk about Africa as if it were a single average consumer. There is no such thing as everyone in Africa. In Nigeria’s subscriber base, for instance, a small segment of about 6% spends at levels that would surprise many observers, and that six per cent still represents millions of people. If you build exclusively for that cohort, the Silicon Valley analog, you cap your total addressable market and distort your product decisions. The real opportunity lives in designing for the remaining 94%, which forces you to reimagine affordability, distribution, and user experience from first principles. Precision about who you are serving is everything. When founders confuse these segments, they end up serving neither well. When they choose a segment deliberately, scale becomes possible.
You built companies that reached extraordinary scale, then became an investor. What inspired that transition to Future Africa, and what actually changed for you?
Less changed than people think. I had been writing angel checks since 2014, right after Andela’s first round, and my earliest investments taught me humility because we lost money. In 2017, I even took a loan against my Andela and Flutterwave shares, invested in a handful of companies, and exited a few. During the pandemic, when DFIs pulled back, we rallied about 400 angels and deployed roughly $10 million into around 85 startups through club investing. That effort matured into the Future Africa platform. The core mindset remains entrepreneurial. Money is the least important ingredient. If a product does not help an African customer survive, that customer will extract whatever value is on the table and move on. Our role is to increase the odds of survival by bringing networks, structure, and discipline, not to pretend that we can abolish the risk of failure.
In 2020 to 2022, many startups raised millions and still failed. How do you help companies avoid that fate? What is the secret sauce entrepreneurs can learn from?
First, do not mythologise us. Many Future Africa companies fail. In startups, failure is the default endpoint, and every day is a disciplined attempt to delay that outcome. Three practices matter. Customer obsession comes first. You must know your customer at a level that borders on forensic – where they live, what they value most, what would make them leave tomorrow – and you must keep learning faster than any competitor. Second is capital humility. Treat capital like oxygen, not fireworks, and anchor on unit economics that breathe. Profit is proof of life, and without that proof, time runs out. Third is optionality. Maintain multiple ways to stay alive through pricing levers, channel diversity, and creative financing so that a single shock does not end the company. These are unglamorous muscles, but they keep you in the game long enough to win.
Bringing this down to an example, what early decisions at Flutterwave set the company on its trajectory, especially around team, customers, and capital?
Team quality came first. We did not optimise for being best friends. We optimised for competent, complementary professionals who were the best at what they did. That gave us resilience when things got hard. Focus came next. For the first six months we served one customer, Access Bank, and built their merchant platform end to end. That depth taught us the terrain far better than chasing ten logos would have. Finally, capital quality mattered as much as quantity. We preferred our initial $500,000 from the right people and the platform effects of Y Combinator over headline valuations. Not all dollars are equal. The right investors add relationships and credibility that compound enterprise value.
Payments are complex across Africa. What hurdles did you face expanding country to country, and what does that experience tell you about the continent’s readiness for regional integration under African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)?
Every market required a different regulatory posture. In some countries we engaged the regulator directly. In others we acquired capability. In others we partnered through intermediaries. We entered with pan-African anchors such as Access Bank and later Ecobank, and with reputable customers such as Ethiopian Airlines and Uber, so we arrived as a trusted introduction rather than an unknown outsider. Talent was another hurdle because cultures operate differently. We created cultural unison by immersing leaders in Lagos for a season to raise the bar on pace and ownership. On AfCFTA, my view is practical. Businesses should trade, encounter friction, and then push policymakers to fix what is real rather than wait for a perfect rulebook. We also need more pan-African champions that can truly use the treaty, and we must solve air connectivity. Cross-border commerce cannot require private jets.
Founders here often find themselves solving policy gaps, infrastructure gaps, and talent gaps on top of the core product. How do you decide what is worth solving and what is a distraction?
Three categories are existential rather than optional. Policy creates markets, so operating in legal gray zones is a ceiling on scale. If you show up with ready-made, comparative policy language and a coalition, many regulators will adopt it because you have done the hard work. Infrastructure should be repurposed before it is rebuilt. Founders burn precious equity building assets that could have been rented, shared, or reconfigured. Talent must be developed deliberately. Your company will fall to the level of your people unless you give young operators real agency within guardrails and groom them. Everything else is usually noise imported from other contexts. Serve your customer where they are, not a hypothetical European one.
You have said capital is not a justice issue but an opportunity issue. From your vantage point now, how should African founders approach fundraising and investor selection?
Capital flows to perceived return. Pattern matching and bias exist, but guilting someone into a cheque rarely produces a healthy partnership. Win on the opportunity and on trust. Early investing is a character and track-record business. Who has actually seen you create value, work through adversity, or make someone money? Too many founders skip building trust networks. We have also overused equity as a financing instrument. Often the right answer is working capital or structured credit, with equity used as backstop. Even when equity is abundant, behave as if capital has a cost, because that bill always comes due through dilution, valuation pressure, or currency effects.
You are open about faith. How has it supported you as an entrepreneur, and did it shape any unconventional decisions?
Faith is central to my work because building here requires believing past what is visible. When I left Andela right after the Zuckerberg investment decision and a very public round, it looked irrational on paper. I tried to rationalise it by juggling Stanford and part-time work, but the conviction was clear: go build again. That obedience led to Flutterwave, which reached unicorn status before Andela did. Many of my pivotal moves came from seeking guidance, then acting even when the path was not obvious. In an environment like ours, that inner compass is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
Beyond scripture, what do you read that has helped you as a founder and investor?
I gravitate to biographies, especially ones that linger on the struggle rather than the victory lap. Founders at Work and books like it matter because they normalise setbacks and hard choices. When you see how others navigated long, messy middles, you gain patience for your own road and perspective for your own decisions.
At Flutterwave you identified Access Bank as a strategic partner. How do you recognise a good partner, and how do you sustain that relationship over years?
Corporations are not real. People are. We had strong personal relationships up and down the organisation, from executives to the security team, and we showed up as value-adding collaborators, not just vendors demanding terms. Two of my co-founders came out of Access, which deepened trust. We were indistinguishable from staff at times because we were present, generous with ideas, and focused on solving their problem even if it meant doing unglamorous work. That posture built a foundation that endured.
How long did you work with Access Bank before approaching Ecobank, and what milestones did you aim to hit before expanding?
In total we were intertwined for roughly nine to 12 months, with about six months of intense build after the product crystallised and another six months of relationship and scoping before that. We focused on making one customer successful at depth, end-to-end merchant capability, so that we genuinely understood the workflows, compliance realities, and operational pain. Once that foundation held, the patterns mapped cleanly to regional partners like Ecobank.
How did you meet your co-founders, and what did you do when you lost great talent you did not want to lose?
We met on the job. Access sent them to work with us on a problem, we shipped together, built trust in the trenches, and then decided to solve it as a company rather than as a bank project. On talent, I assume loss is inevitable and design for it. If someone is truly irreplaceable, they probably belong in the founding group, and even founders must be replaceable. A business that cannot survive a person’s departure is not a business. It is a project. We groom successors and ensure critical skills are distributed across multiple leaders.
Ego can make that philosophy hard to live. How do you separate self from mission in practice?
I ask a simple question: do you love your mission more than your ego? Would you be equally happy if someone else solved it? If the honest answer is no, you are not my top investment prospect, because the company risks becoming an extension of self rather than a response to a real problem. Institutions outlast people when the mission is bigger than any one identity.
We have seen companies slow down after raising growth rounds. Are there early strategies in the VC model that do not scale, and what advice do you have about the pressure to grow fast?
Many teams lose depth on the force multiplier that made them special and start optimising around what is safest today. Andela’s core was talent at scale, but at one stage the company drifted toward a safer outsourcing posture and lost momentum before finding its way back. Great companies keep pushing the boundaries of the original mission, even when it introduces discomfort and risk. Choose investors who reinforce that mission focus rather than only press for near-term revenue optics.
With AI reshaping work, high interest rates, and talent flight, where is Africa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem right now, and what should founders prepare for?
We are in an efficiency era. The combination of expensive capital, rapid automation, and scarce senior talent rewards teams that create value resourcefully. If you learn to combine AI leverage with disciplined operations and local insight, you can win at home and be competitive globally because expectations everywhere are resetting. Scarcity becomes a feature when you convert it into advantage.
What is one mistake you would advise entrepreneurs not to make, or one you wish you had made differently?
I wish I had made more mistakes earlier. I sometimes played it too safe. I also spent a stretch focused on what I wanted from entrepreneurship rather than on what success required. When I shifted to following the customer and taking bolder, faster bets within guardrails, outcomes improved. The paradox is that thoughtful risk accelerates learning, which is the only durable edge.
Closing thought:
Business changes society. If we are disciplined about customers, capital, policy, and people, and if we keep mission above ego, we can build companies that solve our hardest problems and prove it with results.
