Business Daily Meets: Iyinoluwa Aboyeji

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Nigerian tech entrepreneur on how he built two billion dollar businesses.

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji co-founded talent marketplace Andela and payments company Flutterwave, both of which have been valued at more than a billion dollars.

He tells Rob Young he wants to use his wealth to help Africa achieve its economic potential.

Presenter / producer: Rob Young Image: Iyinoluwa Aboyeji; Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Rob Young. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up an insight into building a business in Africa's biggest economy with a man who has set up multi-billion dollar ventures.
0:14.0	Sol somebody's real problem. Not the one that you read about on the newspaper or the one that some fancy venture capitalists told you is important.
0:23.0	Yaluwa Aboiiji has co-founded two hugely valuable online firms. Now he wants to turn Nigeria
0:30.3	into a powerful global technology hub. I think Nigeria becomes this country that has the most number of people working on the
0:39.7	internet. And that means a lot of foreign exchange for Nigeria, economic activity, the digital
0:46.2	economy space, and a lot of culture being exported. Being an online entrepreneur in Africa,
0:53.2	in Business Daily from the BBC.
0:58.0	In Africa, only about a handful of companies have reached the status of what is called in business jargon,
1:04.5	a unicorn that is a startup company valued at more than one billion US dollars.
1:13.7	Two of Africa's seven or so unicorns were co-founded by the man we're going to spend a bit of time with today as part of our series
1:18.5	Business Daily Meets. Ialua Aboyagi is from Nigeria. He co-founded and ran Andela, which
1:26.4	helps software engineers in Africa and elsewhere find technology jobs.
1:31.4	That firm has received investments from the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google Ventures, among others.
1:37.9	He then went on to help set up Flutter Wave, which processes online payments for businesses across Africa. That firm is now backed
1:47.0	by Mastercard and Visa. Well, Ialua Aboyagy is now the chief executive of Future Africa,
1:53.4	an early-stage venture capital firm with a portfolio of 100 companies, which together are worth
1:59.2	billions of dollars, and he is trying to turn Nigeria's
2:02.7	commercial capital Lagos into a global tech powerhouse.
2:07.5	Hello, can you hear me? Good morning. We had a chat online about Africa's tech challenges and
2:13.9	opportunities and about his story as an entrepreneur. He's now in his early 30s, but as a child,
2:20.9	did he want to run a business and in particular set up a technology firm?
2:25.1	While I was growing up, I actually had no aspirations to set up a company. I had very, very different
	...

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