#98 - Shola Akinlade

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Greg Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Shola Akinlade. Shola is CEO and co-founder of Paystack. Paystack helps businesses in Africa get paid online and offline. They're based in Lagos, Nigeria, and they were part of the Winter 2016 batch. You can learn more about them at paystack.com. And Shola's on Twitter at sholesman.
All right, here we go.
I think many people kind of know about Paystack, but can you give us the one line explanation?

**Shola Akinlade** (0:33)
Yeah, we're a payments company. We help merchants in Africa accept payments from their customers. So businesses will connect to Paystack, and almost immediately the customers can pay them with credit cards, debit cards, and different payment methods. I know you said one line description, but.
We're currently live in Nigeria, and we're trying to just go into other markets very quickly.

**Craig Cannon** (0:56)
Nice. And how long you guys been around?

**Shola Akinlade** (0:59)
We launched in January 2016

**Craig Cannon** (1:01)
Okay. And so before that, you were also a founder, right?

**Shola Akinlade** (1:05)
Yes, yes, yes. I can take it back a little.
So yeah, I grew up in Lagos, grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. Spent all my life there, actually. After college, I studied computer science. After college, I worked with Aynikin, the Bayer Company, I did that for two years. And then I left, I left because I thought I was, I just thought I should be, I'm a maker, I should be making things.

**Craig Cannon** (1:29)
Okay, were you pushing code at Aynikin?

**Shola Akinlade** (1:32)
No, no, no, no, I was management trainee.

**Craig Cannon** (1:34)
Oh, okay.

**Shola Akinlade** (1:34)
Exactly.
So I wrote with my co-founder then, Mayawa. We taught Dropbox, that was 2007, 2008 We taught Dropbox was cloud and cloud in emerging markets, like was a good concept. I don't know, I was naive, I think. And so we said, you know, what if someone builds like a Dropbox on-premise and people, you don't need cloud, you already brought that and all that. So we did it, we called it Pequiro. We put it up on SourceForge. SourceForge was very big then. And I think it went well. We had over 200,000 companies using it.
It was available in six languages. So it went very well. I did that for about five years. And then banks in Nigeria started reaching out to me to help them build software. So I built software for about three banks. And quickly I said, you know what? This payments, like I always knew the state of payments wasn't where it should be, but I didn't think it was going to be me. So, but just working with the banks, just, I don't know, I just figured, you know, if there's someone that can figure out the rents, it probably will be me because I had built Walker software before.
And now I just have access. I understand how the financial system works. So started Paystack very quickly.
Spent about one year just doing the underground work. Had a wait list of about 300 customers. And I was calling all of them, just talking through what they wanted and building for them.
And then one day, one of my friends actually sent an email, copied all the YC photos. It was late because Nigeria is nine hours, I think it was nine hours ahead or eight hours. So it was about 1 a.m. I saw that email and said, hey YC, blah, but this is Paystack. He just sent that email and copied all, everybody, Sam, Michael, everybody. And I'm like, what is this? And then, well, like I slept and then I woke up in the morning and Michael had responded, Michael said, hey Shola, tell me more about Paystack. Like, whoa. So I spent about five hours trying to compose the best email ever, which worked because Michael responded with another one line.
So we had back and forth. They asked me to apply. I applied for YC Fellowship and I didn't get in actually. I think it was August. So immediately they asked me to apply again for the YC. I think it was October. So I applied. Thankfully I got in. We became the first Nigerian company to get into YC. Now I think there are over 10 other companies that I've gotten in just two years, which is really amazing and exciting.
Yeah, and we launched Paystack, and it's grown so fast since we launched.

**Craig Cannon** (4:18)
And you guys just raised again.

**Shola Akinlade** (4:19)
Yes, yes. We just raised a series of $8 million from Stripe and Visa.