Founders Connect

Yele Bademosi is a Tech entrepreneur and investor who is passionate about helping his home continent of Africa. Yele studied Medicine at King’s College London before opting out to focus on technology entrepreneurship.   

He is the co-founder of Nestcoin, Founder of Bundle and Founding Partner of Microtraction. He was also a director at the venture capital arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance.  

In this episode, Yele speaks to me about his journey into entrepreneurship, his passion for investment and cryptocurrency. He also sheds light on the solutions Nestcoin will be providing to expose Africans to the benefits and possibilities of Blockchain.  

Connect with Yele  https://www.linkedin.com/in/yelebademosi  

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This series of Founders Connect has been bought to you in partnership with #AfricaVerified, a new news channel that was set up to seek out and amplify factual stories from reputable and trustworthy news sources.   

Their flagship #BeyondTheHeadlines video series is a deep dive into the topics and issues that really matter to Africa today – check it out for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/c/africaverified

Adewale Yusuf is a serial entrepreneur with a demonstrated history of building tech businesses in Africa. He is the co-founder of TalentQL, Techpoint Africa and AltSchool Africa. 

Techpoint Africa is a digital media company that amplifies the best innovations out of Africa through its publications, data, and events.  Techpoint Africa hosts a variety of events, all-day seminars and conferences, including Techpoint Build, which is the largest tech and startup event in West and East Africa.  

After stepping down as CEO of Techpoint Africa, Adewale is on to his new ventures - TalentQL & AltSchool Africa. TalentQL is on a mission is to democratise access to opportunities for African tech talents while AltSchool is an educational program designed to arm young Africans with the skills and knowledge required to launch your tech career. In 2021, TalentQL went through the Techstars Toronto Incubator Program.  

Learn tech skills with AltSchool: https://altschoolafrica.com/

Get a tech job with TalentQL: https://talentql.com/

Follow Adewale on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdewaleYusuf  

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This series of Founders Connect has been bought to you in partnership with #AfricaVerified, a new news channel that was set up to seek out and amplify factual stories from reputable and trustworthy news sources.   

Their flagship #BeyondTheHeadlines video series is a deep dive into the topics and issues that really matter to Africa today – check it out for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/c/africaverified

Tomiwa Lasebikan is the co-founder and head of product at Helicarrier, a company with the mission to financially connect the African, anywhere they are in the world. 

Helicarriers are makers of some of the most innovative crypto products in Africa including Buycoins, a crypto exchange and Sendcash which helps users in the US send money back home using crypto. Before Buycoins, Tomiwa was a software engineer at Microsoft, working on Azure and Hololens. 

In this episode, Tomiwa talked to me about his background, getting scholarship to study in America, working at Microsoft, starting Buycoins and many more.

Bayo 'Lion' Adedeji is the current CEO of Wakanow. Wakanow is Africa's one-stop shop for cheap flights, hotel reservations and airport pickups. Prior to joining Wakanow, Bayo was a Senior Finance Manager at Amazon, in charge of fulfilment supporting product teams in 16 countries. Before that, he served as a senior finance professional in the consumer retails sector, including with Petsmart and Walmart Stores.  

Bayo is also a serial entrepreneur; he is the founder of Dundu Nation, a food truck business that can provide local fried yam and plantain in a clean and hygienic environment. In addition, Bayo is also the founder of Wave Beach Lagos.

I had a chat with Kelvin about this career so far, how community has helped me grow faster, his reasons for community impact, how entrepreneurship started for him and everything in between.

Douglas Kendyson is a software engineer with a lot of experience in the fintech & payments space. He has worked for the top YCombinator backed payment startups in Africa (Flutterwave & Paystack), as well as a Robo-advisory firm in the UAE (Sarwa) and Dapi, building the payment infrastructure for the Middle East. 

Douglas is also the Founder and CEO of Selar, an eCommerce tool creatives & entrepreneurs use to sell their content, products and services across borders without any hassle. Selar has over 15,000 registered users today.

Rodney is a huge fan of technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation. He is also the CTO of Prospa, a technology company building the operating system for African entrepreneurs and businesses.

Ized Uanikhehi, the CEO/CMO of Loose Media Limited, a digital-first,  Marketing and Media agency, and founder/chief evangelist of DigiClan Africa (a community of digital marketing professionals in Africa). Before Loose Media, Ized was the cofounder and CMO TORA Academy (TORA). 

TORA was a live-in academy facility dedicated to producing world-class motorcycle taxi drivers. She has also worked at Max Africa and CNN

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji calls himself an entrepreneur in the public interest. He is passionate about partnering with missionary talent and capital to build an African future. Iyinoluwa is the Founder & General Partner of Future Africa, a people-powered innovation fund that provides capital, coaching and community to mission-driven innovators turning Africa's biggest challenges into business opportunities. 

Iyin is also a co-founder of Andela and was the former managing director of Flutterwave, a business building payments technology and infrastructure to connect Africa to the global economy. E' as he is fondly called as had a fantastic career so far, and we talked about it all in this video.  

He shared a lot about how he grew up, how he got the opportunity to study at Waterloo, the initial experiments/startups he tried building before Andela, how he met Jeremy and other Andela Co-founders, why he left to join Flutterwave and why he left. He talked about The Future Africa Fund and so much more.