The Grinders Table

Erik Nygard sold Limejump, his London energy technology company, to Shell in 2019. Two years later, he moved his family to Accra and founded Kofa, a battery-swapping network for electric motorcycles, small businesses and homes, which now runs in Ghana and Kenya.Erik explains why he sold while he was trying to raise a Series B, and why his time inside Shell was the rare acquisition that worked for the founder. He also explains why reliability is the hardest problem in battery swapping. We also cover hiring, what Western investors still miss about African energy, and why Erik thinks the continent should go heavy on solar and AI data centres.

Zahra Baitie-Boateng built her career at the intersection of Africa and China - from Yale to founding Beijing's first Africa Week, to seven years building Africa's Business Heroes into a pan-African entrepreneurship institution. In this conversation, she talks candidly about the data behind the Africa-China trade relationship, why she believes implementation capacity matters more than good ideas, and the belief about strategy execution it took her seven years to unlearn.

A failing startup. A tweet he almost scrolled past. A cold email offering to work for free. Now Partner at Microtraction, one of Africa's earliest and most active pre-seed investment firms, he has been consequential in the growth of the startup ecosystem in Nigeria/Africa.In this episode, we talk about the following : The tweet and the cold email that got him into Microtraction in three weeksWhy he treats desperation as fuel, not something to hide from investorsHis contrarian take on friendship: “it should be transactional”The mother's mantra that got him through years of fundraising rejectionFollow The Grinders Table for new episodes with African tech's investors, founders, and ecosystem builders - out biweekly.

Oluseun Onigbinde co-founded BudgIT at a Lagos hackathon in 2011 with one conviction: that the gap between what Nigeria's budget data showed and what citizens could understand was itself a governance failure. Fifteen years later, he runs Africa's most recognised fiscal transparency organisation across six countries — and he'll tell you the theory he built it on may need rewriting.In this episode, we get into the founding frustration that made him walk away from First Bank, why factivism won't cure misinformation, whether the transmission line between citizen anger and institutional change is broken, what civic tech in Africa consistently gets wrong, and what he would do differently if he were starting BudgIT today.A rare conversation with a builder who has been at it long enough to question his own assumptions.

Yvonne Johnson left investment banking in New York to join the transformation team at First Bank of Nigeria. She spent eight years there, rising to Head of Strategy and Corporate Development - restructuring the operating model and building the bank's first digital finance strategy. When she left in 2018, she didn't start a lender. She co-founded Indicina, the API-driven credit infrastructure company that banks, digital lenders, and fintechs across Nigeria and Kenya now use to make faster, smarter credit decisions. This episode is a masterclass in building at the infrastructure layer - the rails, not the balance sheet.Key Topics Covered:Why she left Merrill Lynch to join First Bank - the deliberate career bet on institutional transformationWhat eight years inside Nigeria's largest retail bank taught her about stakeholder management and systemic changeThe founding decision: why Indicina was never going to be a lenderThe cost of capital argument: why banks will always win if you try to compete on balance sheetHow to sell to institutional clients with long procurement cycles and multiple sign-offsThe real friction in Africa's credit gap - it is not just a data problem, it is an accessibility problemThe opportunity cost problem: why banks choose government bonds over consumer loansWhat the next ten years looks like for African credit infrastructureWhat she would do differently - customer sequencing and the balance sheet question revisited

Eunice Ajim graduated high school at 15, moved to the US from Cameroon with almost no financial support, and built a hairstyling business to pay for college. She quit Apple inside eighteen months, got wiped out building her first company, and slept in her car before she ever raised a dollar. Then she co-founded OpenTeams, exited it, and launched Ajim Capital, a pre-seed and seed fund backing African tech founders, with no institutional backing, no famous university network, and LPs she found on the internet. In this conversation, we go from Austin to Cameroon to Africa's next category leaders.

Opeyemi Awoyemi built WhoGoHost in his first year atuniversity before Nigerian tech had a template. He co-founded Jobberman from a dormitory, grew it into the largest online recruitment platform in sub-Saharan Africa, and watched it get acquired by Ringier One Africa Media. He didn't stop there; he went on to build a venture studio and now a startup - ola.cv In this conversation, Ope breaks down what he actuallylearned by going back inside a global company after his own exit, why he calls himself a "pseudo VC," and what he means when he says he only backs "fundamentals-fluent" founders - not "venture-fluent" ones. This is a conversation about building before the playbookexists.

After co-founding Blip (acquired by Disney), running Facebook's ads product through the chaos of the post-IPO years, serving as CPTO at Deliveroo, and CPO at Monzo, Mike left banking with one conviction: the technology to move money instantly and cheaply across borders already existed. Nobody had built a front end worthy of it.That conviction became Sling Money. This week, it became Morse, named after what Mike calls the world's first global financial network.In this conversation, we get into what that rebrand actually signals, why the biggest opportunity in global fintech isn't the blockchain but the interface, and what 20 years of building across every major technology wave teaches you about product judgment.We also go somewhere most fintech conversations don't: Mike makes the case that regulation often protects incumbents more than consumers — and explains how he thinks about that tension while holding licences across the UK, EU, Netherlands, and US.What we cover:The personal moment that made building Morse feel almost impossible to avoidThe macOS vs Linux divide in stablecoin product designWhy Africa's cross-border corridors are both the biggest opportunity and the hardest problemWhat genuine product-market fit looks like in a financial product — beyond user countsHow to stay connected to customer pain when you're scaling fastWhat Mike would build if he had unlimited resources (his answer will stay with you)

What does it really take to build a digital bank for Africa’s green economy, and why might carbon credits become one of the continent’s most valuable exports? In this episode of The Grinders Table, Uwem sits down with Mélanie Keita, CEO and co‑founder of Melanin Kapital, a carbon neobank lending to agricultural, cleantech and carbon projects across 12 African markets.Mélanie shares her journey from Paris, Frankfurt and impact investing into the grind of launching a fintech while broke, why being “rich or deeply networked” matters when your product is money, and the hard lessons she’s learned about delegation, team building and surviving five-plus years of pivots. She unpacks how Melanin Kapital evolved from a diaspora crowd‑lending platform into a lender of record and now a carbon neobank using carbon credits to bring down the cost of capital for SMEs.You’ll hear a candid take on “fake it till you make it” (and why it’s a fast track to orange jumpsuits), why founders should spend 30–40% of their time on relationships instead of spreadsheets, and how banks quietly buy SME loan books as a form of exit and liquidity. We also dive into Article 6, why Ghana is ahead on carbon regulation, how Africa is leaving billions on the table, and what policymakers and founders must do to put the continent at the center of climate finance rather than at the margins.

Florent "Flo" Nduwayezu is a Nairobi-based investor at FP Capital, and one of the most consistently honest voices in African tech. He's Burundian, he's been in Nairobi for 13 years, and he has very little patience for the narratives that keep African ecosystems stuck.In this episode, Flo sits down with Uwem to challenge some of the most comfortable assumptions in African VC, starting with SaaS. His argument: African SMEs never really adopted it, and with AI agents taking over the interface layer, SaaS is about to become invisible infrastructure at best. What replaces it? Integrated solutions that meet people where they already are - on WhatsApp, on audio, offline.But the more uncomfortable conversation is about talent. Flo breaks down the math: if Kenya deployed close to $900M in venture capital, you need significant exits to justify that. You need multiple large companies. Each of those companies needs serious engineering depth. And his question, bluntly put, is whether that talent pool actually exists at the quality and concentration required.They also go deep on impact investing's unintended consequences, why African VCs need to get more involved in policy, why Rwanda is doing something the continent's "Big Four" should be paying close attention to, and why Flo thinks he might eventually have to go into politics.