Advice for Founders with John Oke

Meet John

John Oke is the co-founder/ CEO of Wallets Africa; an online digital banking platform built around the phone number that allows you to make payments, transfer funds, buy airtime and pay bills. He is a software engineer and previously co-founded Ngfeeds.com a news aggregating platform that uses pattern matching algorithms to get news, gossips and content every minute from the most visited websites in Nigeria categorize and delivers the resulting content to users over a website.

Learning how to code has been life-changing. If there is something about being able to create things, it’s the power it gives you. Creating software has set my career on a very good path.

Reading books has made a very big impact on my life. You learn a lot from reading about people and their experiences, there’s a similarity in these situations and reading opens you up to it.

The people you work with matter a lot and in a very hostile business climate like Nigeria empathy is like a superpower. There are layers to it but if you really care about the people you work with; your co-founders and your colleagues, they, in turn, care about the sustainability of the company and of course the customers you are serving. Having empathy creates some sort of network effect for you, for your colleagues and your business.

I like to think that my team and I can work on any problem right now and it’s just really because we are able to create this great relationship and rapport amongst ourselves. One thing I try to emphasize is how important you need to care about the people you work with. If you can put together the people and truly care about them, work with them and get things done together that will be really helpful.

There’s a concept in economics called path dependence and it explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past or by the events that one has experienced, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant.

So, when I was younger I was made to take exams even when I was not prepared for them which made me fight the fear of failure and when I failed some exams I was made to take the exams again. Now when I think of the challenges I go through I just tell myself that it’s all in my mind and I am path-dependent.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Pay more attention to those things money can’t buy like a healthy body and a calm mind but things like a temporary set back or you not getting a hang of things when you are just starting out shouldn’t worry you so much.

Another thing is that you can really bend the world to your will if you put in enough energy and time into something you are working on. There used to be a time when I was always scared to talk about things we are working on and sometimes thinking I was too ambitious but I have now realized while we are building Wallets Africa that if you actually spend enough time and work with a really great team there might be almost nothing that is impossible to achieve

I try not to recommend books to people but I like to read books that cover first principles like learning about evolutionary biology, learning about physics, learning about mathematics, history.

When you realize that no matter how complex the system is, it is all a combination of all the basic principles. I’ll say try to read any type of book you enjoy first so that you can inculcate the habit of reading and once you get in the habit of reading you’ll be able to define your own taste to whatever you like.

However, for founders, I’d recommend reading Paul Graham’s Essays, treat it like a Bible.

There were times we used to think it’s just all about building the product and not controlling the narrative but we quickly learned that’s not how to go about it.

Another mistake we made is not spending enough time on hiring. There were times we hired based on referrals and if we heard that someone is really good we just go all out on them just because we heard that they are really good and their Resume looks the part.

Currently, we spend a lot of time working on someone, seeing if they are a cultural fit and also talking to people in-house trying to understand what they think of the new hire. So those are the mistakes we’ve made in the past and we have kind of learned a little bit about that.

It is advisable to think long term because you want people to do business with you. I think of my life in years because it’s easier to plan and make decisions that way.

Ultimately you want to have the kind of reputation that makes people want to do business deals just because you are involved.

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