Let's make him welcome. Come on.
Thank you, Julie. Please have a seat.
All right. Please, you may have your seat.
Many people wonder who is behind certain things that have gained a level of acclaim. And part of what we do at Find Your Voice is to make people tell a bit of their story, hoping that those stories will inspire the next generation of builders. Today, we've had Kejo Joseph, who was a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, share a story through her career. Tosio Shukoya shared his story towards the starting and now growing commercial partners with his other partners. In time past, we've had many other people. Chen, who is here today, runs Credit Director, and last year we enjoyed his story. It's very similar to Zone for people who are here last year.
Let's appreciate Chokes one more time. Yeah.
GB, yeah, it's popularly called GB by the... is to help people to be able to call you easily, right? Or it started like as a nickname or something, or you coined it. Let's even know who GB is. I know you are very quiet, unassuming, easygoing, perhaps. Who is GB?
Um, great to be here. Thank you, sir, for having me here. Really appreciate the honor to be here today.
So very simply, I'm just a software engineer. All right, that's who GB is. Software engineer background. Started my career with PayPal in the UK, worked for a bunch of banks from PayPal to GT Bank to Sterling, Access, Standard Bank, before starting a company that was acquired and then starting Flutterwave. So I've always been someone who is searching for how to solve problems, and I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. I set out to solve problems, and in that process...
You didn't start out to be an entrepreneur.
I did not. The goal was not to be an entrepreneur. The goal was to solve problems that I saw. And I also believe very strongly that entrepreneurship does not really mean you have big ideas. It means that you can identify areas of frustration. And when you solve that, that makes you either an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. Doesn't matter which one, but what is very key is solving problems.
So GB, slow down. You mentioned two things: entrepreneur, intrapreneur. Just for the sake of a young person, 21 or 20 here, who is an entrepreneur?
So entrepreneur is someone that is running their own business. Intrapreneur is someone that is solving problems working for other people. And both are very, very noble, right.
Can you say that again? Both are very, very noble. Can everybody in the congregation say it with me? Both are very, very noble. Why I'm stretching this is for somebody to understand that there's no point rushing to become an entrepreneur.
Yeah. In fact, when the last speaker was talking about commercial partners, and he mentioned he had an amazing job, an amazing 9-to-5, he was doing really well there. Where Machan Banker institution. That you don't get there just anyhow. And he chose to leave, right? I think what people don't see about what we do is that it's more difficult to be an intrapreneur than to be an entrepreneur. There are headaches that we go through. I'm sure GB knows what I'm talking about right now that we don't talk about.
You know, you could be having a great day at 9:00 a.m. in the morning, and at 9:30 a.m. it's chaos, and 9:45 a.m. is amazing. And that's the roller coaster that comes with being an entrepreneur, right? So very, very strongly, a lot of people understand that entrepreneurship is equally as noble as intrapreneurship. In fact, the sad truth about entrepreneurship is that most of us will not succeed, actually, and that is okay, right? But you have a better shot at being successful being an intrapreneur than being an entrepreneur.
I think he deserves a round of applause for that advice. So you have a better chance of being also extremely successful being an intrapreneur. Imagine the guys who get to work with some of the big companies around the world like Microsoft, Apple. It's not only the founders that were millionaires or billionaires. Some of those guys also become millionaires or billionaires just because they stay put and build with them. All right. And you know, also the Bible says that Paul planted, Apollos watered. It's not everybody that will plant. Some people, their work is watering. And when you are an expert in watering, that's what GB calls an intrapreneur. And you also get the reward as good as the planter. All right. Very good. Now GB, so I see you and I see a problem solver. Yeah. Because that's how you describe yourself. You didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. That means the journey of building starts with seeing problems to solve. I want you to tell us something about, you know, before Flutterwave became a major African technology company. What problems were you seeing in the market that opened up the idea of Flutterwave?
So a very important point as well in my journey, and the question you're asking, sir, is the fact that you have to be naturally curious as a person, right? You have to be curious. You have to be able to get information very, very quickly. It's very important. Processing might take a while, that's fine, but you have to have that as somebody who wants to be excellent in anything in life, right? And then naturally with that comes discipleship or apprenticeship. But look at it. When you have that, you have a chance to see the problem up close, and then the next step is now don't just see it up close. How do you want to be a part of the solution, or be the solution, or think of solutions, right? Very, very key. And that was my story because I used to work for a very, very amazing bank. And my job then was to build technology systems for the bank across Africa.
And I recall very strongly that one of our customers then was trying to expand across the continent from South Africa specifically, and that customer wanted to pay their staff salary in Nigeria and in Nairobi, in Nigeria, Kenya, I think in Ghana, and we were a bank in all those markets. And I thought it was going to be very simple. Technically it's simple. There was a rude shock for me when I was told we can't do it. I'm like, 'But we're a bank in Nigeria. We're a bank in Ghana. We're a bank in Kenya. Why can't we do it?' They were like, 'Oh, even though we're a bank in all these markets, we're not just one bank. We're banks in each country. So even though we own the banks across the continent, each bank is a standalone bank. The core banking is standalone. The regulation regarding cross-border money movement does not allow us to move money that way, or we break some rules.' And that was when I asked, how do we solve this problem? They go, we can't solve it. I'm like, no, there must be a way to solve this problem. And that was where I saw that there was a gap for a non-bank player that can complement a bank and build a solution for cross-border money movement across Africa. And that was where that came from. And it came just because I recall that I was not in commercial banking or corporate banking. I was in technology, right? It came because I was curious about the problem my commercial banking team were trying to solve for so much that I would follow them to the customer's office to do a presentation on how to sell the customer. I wasn't doing sales, I was in technology, but I understood that technology is not a means to an end. It will drive a particular value proposition, and I'm interested in how that value is shaped for my client. And that was what got me literally into business, because I'm very curious, and I think we should all be. That helped me to see problems that otherwise I could sit down in engineering and say, oh, I've written this software, it's working, it's working, but it is not creating value. So being able to link curiosity to value creation is very important. Also being able to stay under the discipleship of learning from the guys who have been there, even though they didn't solve the problem, they have the experiences that will form the ingredients of the solution in the future. Very, very key.
That's important. Let's put our hands together for him. Curiosity, and not just being curious for curiosity's sake, following through to create something through it. Now GB, let's look at this about building infrastructure across markets. The African market has really opened up. Now you're playing on a global scale right now. Recently Flutterwave celebrated 10 years, just like commercial partners, you know, and other organizations that started about the same time. Flutterwave is one of the claimed unicorns out of Africa. If there's anything like a senior unicorn now, we should give you senior. Now building across, you know, different markets that do not operate the same way. What has that taught you about resilience and navigating complex cities? Because some people are just trying to build between Ibadan and Lagos and Port Harcourt, and already they're already throwing in the towel just like you open shop in Port Harcourt and Abuja. They're not sleeping again. Some of them are here. Yeah. But building across Africa now, extending into, because recently you made an acquisition in the US, you know, of a bank. I don't know whether you have announced that already. I think you have announced it, right? Okay. So scratch that, that has not been announced yet. But I want you to help me help somebody here who is dealing with complexity. This is GB, doesn't have two heads. He has people around him. He has his, you know, somebody may be saying, no, PG, maybe you're not seeing it. He has four actually, not two, but not just seeing it physically. What does it entail?
Um, I do have two heads, by the way. And it's called head, by the help of God. So I think for me, the first piece is I have this confidence that I cannot fail, and that comes from being very rooted in my faith. That's number one for me. That's key.
Now I also believe in the fact that no one promised that it will be easy. No one. The only promise that we have is that it will be worth it at the end of the day. But that easy wasn't promised, right? So I don't expect easy. There was one country that we went to. We applied for a license seven times. We were denied six times. Yes, this happened. This is a real story. You know what I used to do? I would tell my team, if they will give us the result of the application on Monday, prepare a new application on Sunday, because I know they will tell us no. So they tell us no on Tuesday, we apply again. It got to a point like, okay, you are crazy. Let's just give this license and get it over with, because you're not going to let go. And that was true. We are built to be resilient at Flutterwave. My team knows that we understand the fact that building is not supposed to be a simple exercise. It will require investment, emotional investment, mental investment, financial investment, physical investment, spiritual, so many kinds of investment will go into building, and you have to do that from day one. So I think the first key is you imagining that it's supposed to be easy. It's not supposed to be easy. But if it was easy, it should have been done, right? If it's not been done, it's proof that it's not easy. So that is the first thing that we should think about. The other piece is you have to just be naturally resilient. You must be willing to live in the gray. There's white and there's black and there's also gray in between. The gray is also a color. You must understand gray. You must be able to live in uncertainty. I walk into some meetings with uncertainty. All I do is I just pray for that meeting. I'm like, I'm going to get in. When I get in, it's to get done. But telling my team that about this meeting, but the point is resilience is very, very key. Being grounded in your faith is also very, when all fails, you can go to that and get pumped up again and restart and restart. That's also important for me, and that's helped me because of my career. And as you grow, the problems are not going to stop. They will change the way they come in different phases, different stages, but they are part of the process for growth, right? I feel like you have to pay that school fees, you know, to move forward. And that's what is key for us to know. And just know that we're in an emerging market. There's so many problems to solve. For me, it's an opportunity. That's why I see it, because if you solve it well now, imagine where you will be in another 10, 20 years' time, right? I had no business starting Flutterwave. Like the last speaker, I had a great job. One of the youngest senior managers in the bank in Nigeria. I had no business starting a company, right? But again, I had a vision. I saw the problem. I saw the frustration, and I went to go and solve it, right? But yes, that process has been sometimes painful, sometimes crazy, but the goal is it has to be worth it, right? But the whole point is in that entire process, being resilient is very, very key, and you're going to stumble. We stumbled so many times as a company. We had our Kenyan crisis. We stumbled. We recovered. We kept moving, right? Those things are going to happen, right? You just have to keep going and keep reinventing yourself and staying and just stay grounded. Very, very key.
Please just appreciate you. Last week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Flutterwave had an event in New York. I was having a conversation with some friends and I heard about your event. I was at ANGA and I showed up at your event and we had a great time. But one of the things I learned from the event was when you know the person I'm talking about, somebody made a remark and talked about, oh, there was a time that you had some issues as a consultant, you came to him, Mr. Celestine, to be precise, who used to run KPMG around Africa, and the way they consulted for you and resolved the issues. Issues exist at different levels. All right, there are small issues of I want to fund my business. There's another issue of business is outgrowing us because at some point in the story of Flutterwave, it looked like the business was outgrowing all of you, you and your founding partners and everybody, and it was like swimming in the Atlantic Ocean at a point. When you, I want you to go back to that experience. You did not drown, and that's why you are here today. And if you have never almost drowned before, you won't know. I had an experience many years ago, like maybe like 25, no, 30 years ago, in this at Takwa Bay where we were swimming. We went to the beach. It was a picnic, and then I couldn't swim well then, and the water almost took me away. But for some fishermen that rescued me, because God will always send you fishermen. So I believe that God sent you fishermen then. Who rescued you? I saw that even some people dragged you, different things happened. How do you navigate the emotional side of things in those kind of situations when you almost drowned?
