Advice for Founders with Olugbenga GB Agboola

Meet Olugbenga

Olugbenga GB Agboola is the co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave; a payment technology company focused on helping banks and businesses provide seamless and secure payment experiences for their customers. Prior to co-founding Flutterwave, Olugbenga contributed to the development of fintech solutions at several tech companies and financial institutions such as PayPal, Standard Bank, among others.

I would not necessarily refer to this as a small change, in fact, it was quite big and monumental, but losing my dad has had a huge impact on my life — most especially on the decisions I make in my professional and personal life, my values, etc.

Experience is extremely important. It influences your values as a start-up founder, how you relate with people — employees, board members, stakeholders, etc. A study by MIT says that most successful start-ups are founded by people in their 40s, so I would say get experience first — extensive, diverse experience.

I focus on my ‘North Pole’. On a daily basis, I ask myself — “why am I doing this?” It helps me adjust my thoughts and actions and keeps me on task and on track.

It will definitely be the fact that you cannot copy and paste culture — culture is as unique to a company as the people who are in it.

The same way I believe extensive experience prepares you for success so does an extensive reading habit — read anything and everything, the lessons you learn from reading are invaluable. However, I would greatly recommend the book I am currently reading — Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

I don’t like to view them as mistakes, I am very pro-risk. I think you cannot learn from experience if you have not experienced a few setbacks or failures, and I pride myself on the lessons I have learned from different challenges I have faced.

In my opinion, it would be a bit naive to pick one unit of time — the past and future are constantly influencing our decisions in the present. What is most important is knowing when to let go of what has happened and when to chart a different course for the future. All three are extremely important and cannot be ignored.

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