Advice for Founders with Segun Adeyemi

Meet Segun

Segun Adeyemi is the co-founder of Amplified Payment (exited to OneFi); a payment platform that makes it easy for businesses to accept and manage their recurring and subscription-based payments online. He recently sold his company to OneFi (Carbon) and he is deeply passionate about the economic prosperity of Africa.

Guarding my time very jealously is one small change that has made a big impact on my life. I have realized that what essentially makes up our lives as humans is our time and we have to be very deliberate and conscious of what we give our time to.

Previously, I used to jump into things and say yes to everything but with time I decided to start saying “No” to certain things. I have realized that doing that has made me save enough time and it has significantly made an impact on my life because I’m able to dedicate more time to building my business and generally being more self-aware.

The advice I’ll give to someone starting a company is to know the reason why you want to start a company. The reason should not just be because you just want to own a company but because you have identified a problem you want to solve.

I’ll also advise that you know the market you are getting into and your “why” as it will help you to know if an opportunity is ideal for you. I strongly believe that we all have our unique capabilities and unique strengths and we should always play to our strengths as founders.

The last advice I’ll give is that you work with people you trust and have fun while at it. Enjoy the journey and find a way to ensure that you have fun at every stage of building your company.

Something I have learned and I lean on daily is to write things down because as much as you think you are smart and authentic if you don’t write things down you tend to lose a lot of details. Writing things down just basically helps us keep track of daily activities, ideas, insights and things you have been thinking about. I actually do learn a lot from writing things down.

The second thing will be listening to podcasts or reading books daily because even if I am not actively studying I have realized that there is a reserve where all these are and they will help when you need to make an important judgment. It also helps shape how you think about issues and about life generally.

It is okay not to have all the right answers. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself partly because of the experiences I had growing up. When I was younger, I will constantly compare myself to other people and what I wish I knew much sooner is that even the people you think have it all figured out are just “winging” it.

No one has all the answers and we all have our fears, worries, and insecurities. What happens over time is that you get to a level where you are able to manage it a lot better and come out looking confident, like you have all the answers.

The first book I’ll recommend is the Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. He is the co-founder and current chairman emeritus of Nike, Inc. and the book basically detailed his experience growing up, how he stumbled on things, the level of details and thoughts that went into his business and the importance of passion. Its an encouragement to founders that there’ll be good times and bad times, ups and downs, so it’s important every founder reads the book.

The second one is zero to one by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel. I like the book because it gives you a different way to think. It explains different concepts and ideas that founders can learn from.

The third one will be blogs from Paul Graham. His essays are really good as he helps refine your thought process as an individual. I’ll also advise you read articles written by Jason Njoku.

We all make mistakes and one mistake we all make is compromising when it comes to hiring talents. Talent is extremely important because there were times I didn’t hire some people because I felt like they were requesting something that was too much.

One mistake I made in the past was undervaluing the importance of paying for talent and I can’t really tell if I’ve been able to fully overcome it. Sometimes I still think that maybe not making those compromises changed certain things that I wanted to happen differently.

The second mistake is not making decisions fast enough. I’m a very thoughtful person but the implication of being very thoughtful is that you will want to have enough information before you make decisions and the truth is that not all decisions require that level of thought.

There are some decisions that you need to make fast without overthinking even if its a bad decision. It is important to understand when the decision is to be made and one of the mistakes I made is not making certain decisions fast.

For a startup, It is advisable to do things in quarters because you are in an experimental phase and you want to try out different things and check if those things are working. However, you don’t want to do it daily, weekly or monthly because you don’t have enough information to actually see if something is working or not. Three months is enough stretch for you to actually have enough data and at the same time, it’s not too long such that you won’t have the resources to keep going.

On a personal note, it is good to have quiet time to reflect every day because you are making decisions every day and at the end of the day our time in this world is limited. You have to look for a way to be calm maybe before you sleep or when you wake up in the morning. Quiet time is so important.

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