”We Just Have to Keep Building”: Shola Akinlade’s Case for Betting on Africa????????????
When Shola Akinlade, co-founder and CEO of Paystack, says “The opportunity in Africa is real. We do not need to go anywhere else to find massive problems worth solving. We just have to keep building,” he isn’t offering a slogan. He’s summarising a decade-long thesis that he’s tested with his own company — and won. […]
Black News 
When Shola Akinlade, co-founder and CEO of Paystack, says “The opportunity in Africa is real. We do not need to go anywhere else to find massive problems worth solving. We just have to keep building,” he isn’t offering a slogan. He’s summarising a decade-long thesis that he’s tested with his own company — and won.
From #Lagos to a $200 Million Exit
#SholaAkinlade co-founded Paystack in 2015 with Ezra Olubi, setting out to fix something deceptively unglamorous: accepting a payment online in Nigeria was hard. Cards, bank transfers, & mobile money all lived in separate, fragmented systems, & businesses had no simple way to pull them together. That was the “massive problem” hiding in plain sight — not in San Francisco, but in Lagos.
Paystack became the first #Nigerian company accepted into #YCombinator, grew to serve tens of thousands of businesses, & by 2020 was processing more than half of all online payments in Nigeria. That year, Stripe acquired Paystack for a reported $200 million-plus — at the time, the largest startup acquisition to come out of Nigeria & Stripe’s own biggest acquisition anywhere. Notably, Paystack wasn’t shopping itself around; the deal came to them because the underlying business, and the market it served, had become impossible to ignore.
Why “Staying” Is the Strategy
Akinlade has been candid that his early trip to Silicon Valley almost knocked his confidence — until he did the math. One billion people, over 50 countries, & payment infrastructure that was, in his words, still “super broken.” The size of the unsolved problem is the size of the opportunity.
Akinlade’s version of scale looks different — deepen #Paystack across Africa’s fragmented markets one country at a time (#Ghana, #SouthAfrica, #Kenya, & beyond), rather than treating it as a launching pad for something else.
The Real Takeaway for Builders
– Local pain points are global-caliber problems. Payments, logistics, healthcare access, and financial inclusion in African markets aren’t “smaller” versions of Silicon Valley problems — they’re enormous, underserved, & commercially real.
– Depth beats detour. Akinlade’s growth came from solving the same core problem more completely, market by market, not from chasing a flashier idea elsewhere.
– Conviction outlasts intimidation. He’s spoken openly about feeling small next to Valley pitches for novelty products. The antidote wasn’t imitation — it was doing the math on the market he already understood.
Akinlade’s line functions less as inspiration-poster material for a new generation of African founders, engineers, & investors but more as a working strategy: stop looking for permission or validation elsewhere. The problems worth solving are already here. The job is simply to #keepbuilding.
#NigeriaMagazine
#BuildInAfrica #AfricanTech #FintechAfrica #AfricanStartups #NigerianTech #AfricaRising #FoundersOfAfrica #DigitalPayments
