The Grinders Table

Dr. Dotun Olowoporoku didn't take the typical route to venture capital. He started as a PhD researcher on air quality and climate change, stumbled into entrepreneurship with an online food delivery startup, became CCO at Moniepoint during its most critical growth years, and then became Managing Partner at Ventures Platform, one of Africa's most founder-supportive seed funds.

In this episode, we go deep on the questions the ecosystem rarely asks out loud: What does portfolio support actually look like when a company is dying? When does investor support become dependency? Which African companies does VC money quietly destroy? And is the AI wave signal or hype?

Dotun also shares how he spotted Tosin Eniolorunda's thesis before Moniepoint was Moniepoint, why he evaluates every investment as a research hypothesis, and what the Capitec Bank story from South Africa taught him about the future of African fintech.

If you're a founder, an investor, or anyone building on this continent, this one will make you think differently.

Most fintech founders talk about financial inclusion. Stone Atwine actually started there, watching his grandmother get stressed at a Moneygram agent because she had no ID, carrying $200 in cash on a one-hour bus ride back to her farm. That frustration became the foundation of Eversend, now one of Africa's most ambitious cross-border payments and neobanking platforms.

In this episode, Stone and Uwem go deep on what it actually takes to build a durable fintech across 12 markets - the regulatory complexity most founders underestimate, why blitzscaling fails when your users will abandon you the day you start charging, and how stablecoins quietly became Eversend's treasury and payments backbone years before the rest of the market caught on.

Stone also shares a genuinely contrarian view on vibe coding, AI, and why the biggest beneficiaries of the AI revolution may not be the youngest engineers, but operators in their 40s with deep market knowledge and the tools to finally act on it.

This is not a panel version of Stone's story. This is the one with the real decisions.

Ethel Cofie didn't plan to build Africa's largest Women in Tech network. She just wanted to create a place for women in tech to find each other in a male-dominated industry. Today, Women in Tech Africa has 5,000+ members across 30+ countries and won the UN EQUALS Award.

But Ethel's work goes beyond WITA. As CEO of EDEL Technology Consulting, she sits on boards from insurance to fintech, advises governments on digital strategy, and serves on investment committees. Her secret? A willingness to show up, even when it's inconvenient.

In this episode:

• The "inconvenience yourself" philosophy of community building
• Why she left Vodafone after being told "it's not what you do, it's how you do it"
• How context shapes everything in African tech markets
• Her controversial banking hot take
• Why regulators and startups talk past each other

For: Founders who think they can go it alone, leaders building ecosystems, anyone who's ever felt like they're shouting into the void.

Ethel Cofie proves that the most powerful role isn't king, it's kingmaker.

What happens when you tell a country demanding jobs to create them instead? Rym Baouendi did exactly that in post-revolution Tunisia, co-founding the country's first coworking space and fundamentally changing how a generation thought about opportunity.

Now Director of Alumni Innovation & Engagement at Harvard Innovation Lab, Rym has lived across continents, building bridges between innovation ecosystems. In this conversation, she shares her unique philosophy on why innovation ecosystems should be built like gardens (not factories), why working with children is like going to the gym for your creativity, and how ancient desert wisdom beats modern sustainability solutions.

Key Highlights:

• Why innovation ecosystems are gardens that need cultivation
• Learning from ancient civilisations to solve modern problems
• The global language of entrepreneurship and how to connect ecosystems
• AI as the great equaliser for global innovation

• Treating your career like a portfolio
• The importance of building bridges over replication

Memorable Quote: "Working with children is almost like going to the gym, but to develop your creativity and imagination muscle. We should all be doing it regularly."

What happens when you read the Bitcoin whitepaper to find loopholes and make quick money? For Brenton Naicker, Principal at CV VC Africa, those 8 pages completely changed his life trajectory.

In this episode of The Grinders Table, Brenton shares his journey from aspiring Wall Street banker to one of Africa's most influential blockchain advocates. We dive deep into his philosophy on exceptionalism, his thoughts on work-life balance for truly exceptional people, and his contrarian view that the future will be brand-based rather than firm-based.

Key Topics Covered:

• The moment Bitcoin clicked and changed everything
• Mission-driven vs money-driven entrepreneurship
• Why Africa is ground zero for blockchain innovation
• The philosophy of sacrifice and success
• How trust is fundamentally changing in business
• Building sustainable blockchain ecosystems in emerging markets

Notable Quotes:"If you persistently work harder at something than everybody else over a long arc of time, it's almost impossible to fail."

"The worst advice given to entrepreneurs: Just build it and they will come."

Whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or just curious about the future of technology in Africa, this conversation will challenge how you think about success, sacrifice, and what it takes to be truly exceptional.

In this episode, we sit down with Wale Akanbi, one of the co-founders of Aella. Aella became the first African lending fintech admitted to Y Combinator in 2017 and has since served over 2 million users across Nigeria and the Philippines.

Wale's journey, from teaching himself programming in Nigerian cyber cafes to building AI-powered financial inclusion tools, is a masterclass in persistence, vision, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.

He's currently building solutions at the intersection of AI and blockchain to solve cross-border trust challenges.

What we cover:

• The pressure and lessons from being one of YC's first African lending fintech
• Why every engineer doubled as customer service for their first 500K users
• The evolution from rule-based credit scoring to AI models predicting "willingness to pay"
• Building cross-functional teams in the age of AI
• His current work at the intersection of AI and blockchain for cross-border trust
• Why helping people matters more than power, fame, or money

What do you do when you discover a $281 billion problem that global pharmaceutical companies can't solve? If you're Ayodeji Alaran, you leave your corporate job and build the solution from your house in Lagos.

In this episode, Ayodeji shares the remarkable journey from pharmacy school to founding PBR Life Sciences, now building one of Africa's largest healthcare datasets. This isn't just another startup story - it's a masterclass in strategic thinking, long-term vision, and the power of being an outlier.

What You'll Learn:

• The "precedence principle" he uses to hire only outliers for his team
• How PBR builds products customers actually want (hint: they never build based on their own ideas)
• Why he believes African businesses suffer from "short-sightedness"
• The difference between building AI models from scratch vs. adapting Western algorithms for African markets
• Why "your entrepreneurial life started way before you started entrepreneurship"

Ayodeji's philosophy that "every problem has a solution" isn't just optimism - it's the foundation for building solutions that could reshape how the world thinks about African healthcare.

Connect with Ayodeji on LinkedIn and follow PBR Life Sciences for updates on their expansion across Africa.

Bernard Laurendeau built Ethiopia's first licensed payment system operator, advised the Prime Minister's office on job creation, and now operates from Tokyo helping Japanese billions find their way into African markets. But he has a contrarian message: Africa needs to stop chasing sexy tech and focus on boring infrastructure first.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why he respects unknown Lagos entrepreneurs more than Mark Zuckerberg
• How Ethiopia needs 10,000 new jobs daily to avoid catastrophe

• Why aid has been "market disrupting" for African development
• The difference between being a cultural chameleon and having real cultural intelligence
• His journey from management consultant to fintech CEO and back
• Why African entrepreneurs are the "Indiana Jones and MacGyvers" of business

Bernard shares candid insights about building in hostile environments, the importance of patient capital, and why African leaders need to become more comfortable with power. His unique perspective as someone who's navigated Ethiopian, French, American, and Japanese business cultures offers invaluable lessons for anyone interested in emerging markets.

Dr. Houda Ghozzi, founder of Open Startup (OST), shares her journey from professor to pan-African ecosystem builder. Following Tunisia's revolution, she transformed uncertainty into opportunity, now helping young entrepreneurs across 19 African countries develop through "hope, skills, and exposure."

Houda discusses entrepreneurship as a common language that transcends borders, the evolution of OST into the "Y-Combinator of deep tech," and why Africa's innovation story requires patience rather than just focusing on exits.

Her insights on cross-border collaboration, AI opportunities, and policy frameworks reveal a compelling vision for Africa's entrepreneurial future—one in which young people build solutions to local problems with global relevance.

After a decade as Nigeria's leading financial literacy advocate, Tunji Andrews realized education alone wasn't enough. Inspired by an elderly lottery agent from his childhood who fell into poverty, he founded Awabah to bring pension solutions to Nigeria's informal sector workers.

In this candid conversation, Tunji reveals how his company is using local language and cultural understanding to make retirement planning accessible to everyone from street vendors to market wholesalers. He shares surprising insights about customer behaviour, his contrary bet on focusing on pensions rather than payments or loans, and the personal cost of founder resilience.

Listen for valuable lessons on market segmentation, regulatory relationships, and why sometimes you need to "survive first, then scale."