There is a swashbuckling quality that is attached to a 3-year old company doing something as important as enabling online payments for Nigerian businesses in a way that is, to the outside eye, radically simple.
Paystack is becoming synonymous with enabling Nigerian businesses of different sizes get paid online with a merchant base that is growing very quickly, contributing to $7.5 millon processed monthly according to its 2017 Year In Review report. The report also gives a teaser to the company’s origin story — “Two geeks with no institutional backing and no formal financial training had no business sticking their nose into fintech”. This pioneering spirit needed to attract new leaders to take on the new challenges that such traction brings. One of such challenges is powering growth and sustainably supporting it — a task that Emmanuel Quartey appears to be well suited for .
After weeks of emails trying to schedule a meeting, I was finally able to jump on a 1-hour call with Emmanuel, Paystack’s Head of Growth. Why did it take so long to arrange the meeting? In his words, “… in the middle of the largest round of recruitment we have done and my days have been a marathon of back to back interviews” in an attempt to address what keeps him up at night — hiring the right talent to maintain and amplify Paystack’s growth.
From Head Boy to Head of Growth
Emmanuel attended the SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College (SOS-HGIC) for his secondary education and got a transformative experience at the boarding school. With a student population that was 50% Ghanaian and 50% from a variety of other African countries, Emmanuel had exposure to different cultures, thinking, and views. In time, he got to see this as a privilege and gained a responsibility as Head Boy to not only do well but also help others do well.
Primed with a uniquely African education, Emmanuel went on study Architecture at Yale University, choosing the prestigious Ivy League school for two reasons. First, SOS-HGIC alumni who were now in Yale were a source of inspiration for him and Yale appeared to be “a place that cares about the entirety of a person”. I could sum it up in one word “growth”.
And then Tech happened
I studied Electrical and Electronics Engineering in university and while my colleagues and I got some deserved admiration for taking on such a difficult major, I felt it was misplaced and students at the School of Architecture should get the reverence even more.
Emmanuel’s time at Yale was all about the grind and hustle. What with building models every other week ahead of “critic-hell” where weeks of hard work can be discarded as garbage in one minute, sometimes with no words involved. You always needed to bring your A-game every single time without fail in Architecture. This was interestingly similar to the life of a technology entrepreneur and Emmanuel got introduced to the world of technology through working on an online game developed by a fellow Yale student.
Unlike building models that took weeks to complete, Emmanuel was attracted to the speed of execution when it came to software. You ship, get feedback, and iterate. This iterative way of building along with the energy diffused by the people building it attracted him into his first gig as the online community manager for this game.
With Architecture now in the rear view mirror, Emmanuel went to intern at General Assembly before heading back to Accra in 2013 to join the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, popularly known as MEST.
Mind the gap
After 3 years at MEST, Emmanuel took a brief hiatus before joining Paystack but let’s back up a bit. MEST to African entrepreneurs may be what the Juilliard School is to artists. Emmanuel puts it better when I asked him what makes MEST unique.
He said — “the unique value proposition is its on the ground education followed on by investment”. The MEST Entrepreneur-In-Training program is a fully funded 12-month program including free tuition, room and board, as well as a small monthly stipend. Graduates of the program join the MEST incubator to build their ideas with seed funding provided. MEST has now invested in about 36 startups with 4 exits — an appealing circa 10% rate — but more important is the quality its entrepreneurs have gone on to add to the African technology ecosystem.
Emmanuel hung his boots in 2016 and left MEST, but that did not deter him from helping others. During a gap year spent looking for what’s next, he was consulting and offering business advice mostly to non-tech clients on how to leverage technology in optimizing their processes. Emmanuel was sure he was not going to launch a startup though, “Startups are hard and every entrepreneur who actually starts something should be given a hug.” he said. Then, Paystack came knocking.
Enabling growth
In 2017, after a short trial run and meeting the founders, Emmanuel officially joined Paystack as their first ever Head of Growth. The startup was at place where traction was already confirmed and it just had to scale. Emmanuel describes himself as an amplifier and Paystack needed exactly that.
At the core of its value proposition was — easy onboarding for business and individuals, easy pay-ins by offering multiple payment methods and payouts via next-day and manual options, and growth. Emmanuel values the role of the user in Paystack’s growth as they have driven novel features that now put the company ahead of the curve including its [Human Readable] Smart Error Resolution and Customer Insights.
On the flip side Emmanuel states the importance of adapting the needs of the customer to the point of advocating for them with other stakeholders in the financial ecosystem. This has led to features such as the Automated Chargeback Management and Customer Verification.
As I experienced from just trying to get an interview, Emmanuel also spends a lot of his time building the team that builds Paystack — by recruiting and implementing internal tools to scale the support systems needed to keep the growth engine going for both Paystack and its users. It is a meta-growth business when you think of it — Paystack grows faster when it enables its customers grow even faster. Little wonder, the startup is about to count a government agency as a user when it starts to process tax collection for all of Lagos State.
With our chat coming to the hour mark. I asked Emmanuel what he was most excited and afraid of. He is excited about the prospects of seeing a business started in Africa running on a global stage and even more excited to be playing a role in making it a reality, starting with Paystack and by extension its users.
Attracting and keeping the needed talent to maintain and amplify Paystack’s growth keeps Emmanuel up at night though, but even there, he’s taking no quarters.
This pieces was first published on TechDrum Magazine — July 2018, Issue #2
