August 20, 2015. Ope was awake but dreaming: that sweaty Thursday, he sat in front of his computer and sent a cold email.

“Hi,” his email said, “I’m Aikomo Opemipo, a 23-year-old Nigerian, and I’d like an opportunity to intern with Bakken & Bæck in January 2016 as a frontend developer.”

Ope’s email was the first step of his grand plan. Bakken & Bæck wasn’t just any agency – it was the agency. A four-year-old product development studio in Oslo, Norway, Bakken & Bæck had an established design team, and Ope wanted to be a part of that for at least six months. He’d built a decent portfolio by writing code for two years and designing for longer. By the time his internship ended, he’d have figured out what he wanted to do. 

But his loftiest aspiration, according to his email, beyond gaining practical exposure with a team he admired, was to advance digital design in Nigeria as a discipline after his Master’s. Every day, he stalked their website. He learnt about the people and studied their work, from their blogs to case studies and pet projects – like the two beehives on their rooftop and the 100,000 bees.  So he sent the email. Norway remains one of 159 countries where Nigerians need more than desire and good intent to enter. So he applied for a visa.

To his internship request, Bakken & Bæck responded with an enthusiastic yes. But his visa request was an emphatic no from the Norwegian government. In December 2015, his visa was rejected without explanation. 

Ope felt stuck, but his friend, Ezra, had an idea. “Why not come here and work on this product with us until Norway clicks?”

Ezra Olubi was in America, working on a nifty little product out of a small flat in Sunnyvale with his co-founder and friend, Shola Akinlade. That November, Paystack had just been accepted into the W16 batch of Y-Combinator, YC, the biggest startup accelerator in the world, where they’d get access to mentorship, an ambitious network, and, most importantly, funding. 

Amongst the 3,000 startups funded since 2005 by YC, many have gone on to affect millions of people everywhere – from Airbnb, helping strangers host other strangers in their homes to Stripe and their mission to increase the GDP of the internet. When these companies first entered YC, they were often nifty little tools with big ideas. With a 300-person waitlist, Paystack was one of those ideas.

Paystack’s first application to YC was rejected early in 2015. It happened shortly after demoing this idea to his friend and another tech entrepreneur, Oo Nwoye. 

“Guy!” Oo said when Shola showed him his idea, “This is a company! This is Stripe!”

After Paystack’s rejection, Oo emailed Michael Siebel, who’d just turned CEO of YC. Michael replied, asking Shola to tell him about Paystack. A few improvements and one YC batch later, Paystack became the first Nigerian startup to get into YC.

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The decisive day for Ope’s next move came in December 2015.

“How far?” Shola said. “Do you have a US visa?” Ope did; his mum had helped him get a visa. “Come to Yankee.” Ope went.

In August 2015, Shola contracted Ope to work on some of Paystack’s frontend. Paystack promised a continuation of an old, flourishing thing: going with Ezra on a new adventure. Ope knew Ezra before Ezra knew him. Most young people who actively belonged in the Lagos tech ecosystem did. And If you didn’t know Ezra, you probably used some technology he built. 

In 2007, Ezra worked on SoftPurse, a product which helped people add money to a digital wallet to buy airtime. That year, up to 10,000 people credited their wallets. By 2010, when he was 24 years old, Ezra built the first version of Eyowo at Softcom. 

Three years later, he led the effort to take Jobberman from dedicated servers to the cloud as CTO. Shortly after they’d migrated to the cloud, an engineer accidentally hit delete on Jobberman’s entire database, wiping out the data of thousands of companies and job seekers. AWS, their cloud service, has a point-in-time recovery feature that helps them restore all the lost data by simply returning to a time before the deletion. They'd have lost everything if they still used their previous setup. 

Ezra joined Delivery Science as CTO in 2014, a startup helping FMCGs build efficient technology for their logistics. Ope and Ezra were coworkers at Delivery Science, but neither remembers precisely when they became friends. They agree it happened at Ezra’s house through a mutual friend and colleague, Yomi Osamiluyi, with whom Ope had been friends.

Yomi and Ezra lived in the same neighbourhood, so a visit to Yomi’s house inevitably meant they’d all hang out at Ezra’s. They spent their evenings bonding over Archer, ranting about being broke while eating whatever Ezra’s cook made, mainly rice dishes. 

In those moments in front of the TV, side projects materialised and became a lifeline. Ezra and Yomi were backend engineers, and Ope was the designer and frontend developer. There were the “let’s try this” projects, the “it might be worth nothing, but what if” projects, and most importantly, the “there’s this gig, let’s work on it and split the money” projects. 

By mid-September 2015, Ezra had grown disillusioned about his time at Delivery Science – the business was in dire straits. The company owed as much as four months’ salaries – Ezra, a senior hire, even longer. He’d lost confidence in the leadership of the business.

He spent less time at his office, but to ensure he left the house, he started working out of another office close to home: Klein Devort. One of the co-founders of this business was his friend, Shola Akinlade. 

Shola and Ezra met two decades ago as first-year computer science students at Babcock University. Ezra, who had applied for the same course, was assigned to the agric department. He eventually switched to computer science the following semester.

Every year at Babcock, there was a computer science students' exhibition. That year, many Computer Science students demoed exciting things. Ezra, an agric student, wrote a script that approximated the processor clock speed of computers by benchmarking how fast they could do math. Ezra's approach not only worked, it also aligned with the basic principles of computer science. It earned him Programmer of the Year – and a friendship with Shola. They exhibited every year, and in their final year in 2006, Shola and Ezra exhibited as a tag team: their winning demo was a program that helped them remotely control other computers. 

When they remotely ejected a disc from another computer in front of a crowd, everyone went berserk.

Shola went corporate after graduation, working in a Business Intelligence role at Nigerian Breweries. But he quickly grew disillusioned and started Klein Devort less than two years later with Mayowa Okegbenle, another friend from Babcock. For much of the next decade, Shola spent his time at  Klein Devort building software and consulting for businesses. Their flagship product was Precurio, a collaboration and document workflow tool for businesses.

One of Shola’s last projects at Klein Devort was with Access Bank, where he worked with their Digital Factory and Innovation team to build a product called PayWithCapture. The product helped customers make payments easily; the flagship feature was a QR scanner that helped customers make contactless payments in stores. 

PayWithCapture planted seeds in two people: Shola, the consultant, who went on to build Paystack, and Gbenga Agboola, the Head of the Digital Factory and Innovation team, who went on to build Flutterwave. 

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Before Ezra’s Delivery Science disillusionment, before the first YC application, much earlier in 2015, Shola dragged Ezra to a corner at a birthday party. He pulled out his computer to show Ezra something he’d been working on. He inputted his card details into the code editor and hit enter. His card was automatically debited. 

“Wait, what?” Ezra said.

In 2015, if you built a website and tried to sell stuff on it, you’d have to hire a software engineer to set up with a payment processing company like Interswitch, pay ₦150,000 for access to their APIs, receive a PDF with all the API documentation required to integrate and go through a review process before your website went live. 

In that corner with Shola, against a loud office party with junk food and cheap drinks, Ezra had just watched Shola legally enter a house without a gatekeeper. No payment companies and long review processes. Paystack progressed with Ezra reviewing  some of its architecture, testing and offering feedback. He hadn’t joined Paystack, but he enthusiastically followed its development. 

Before everyone took to Twitter to announce new raises and critique products, the ecosystem convened at Radar, a now-defunct online community forum for tech enthusiasts, to discuss everything. One day in September 2015, Ezra shared his longest post, then rounded up his rant about Nigeria’s online payments problem with a P.S. 

“Payments is still a real and interesting problem to solve in Nigeria today, and I am definitely interested in getting on board with anyone looking to do so, pro bono. A couple of friends over at Paystack are on to something interesting and are worth keeping an eye out for.”

It was the first time Paystack was mentioned in public. Ezra had started speaking to Shola about his general disillusionment and feeling stuck at the time. And so, when Shola asked him to be his cofounder a month later, Ezra said yes. They moved to Sunnyvale, California, soon after.
Ope joined them in January 2016. He planned to spend only three months working on Paystack before re-applying to Norway. 

Ezra, Shola and Ope built early Paystack features in that tiny apartment. Once they had an idea, they worked asynchronously to build it, from APIs to frontend and backend. Ope and Ezra shared a room but hardly ever slept in it at the same time – whenever one was awake or working, the other was asleep. Shola, too, spent some time in development, but he divided his attention between building features and meetings with potential investors. 

Consider software development like building a house. Before laying the first brick, a vision of the final structure is essential. The foundation of this digital ‘house’ is backend engineering, providing essential stability and form, much like a house's physical foundation, walls, and floors. 

The software also needs ‘plumbing and electricity’ – the APIs. These channels within the software allow seamless communication, just like plumbing and electrical systems ensure that a house's water flow and power distribution are uninterrupted. 

Then, there’s the frontend of the software that mirrors the tangible aspects of a house – everything you interact with and experience directly. It focuses on user interaction and design, ensuring that each element functions as intended, just as doors lead to the correct rooms and switches reliably light up a room.

Ope would write out the documentation for the APIs, and even before he had a backend, he’d start writing out the code for elements of the frontend and designing, knowing where everything would be. Ezra would focus on the backend while working on the APIs in places beyond Ope’s scope. It’s like a no-look pass in a game, where a player passes the ball to their opponent without looking, confident that their teammate will receive it.

In 1965, American psychologist Bruce Tuckman proposed a model for understanding team development in his article “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups”. Based on his observations on how they affect productivity, teams developed in four stages. 

In the forming stage, team members first meet and begin to understand the objectives and their roles in the team. It’s also when members begin to know each other. Then, they start expressing each other’s ideas and perspectives, which can lead to conflicts; this is the storming stage. When they resolve these conflicts, they develop a sense of cohesion, entering the norming stage. Things start to really pick up at the performing stage; the team’s energy is channelled into the objective, and everyone understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Many factors came together to help them reach their performing stage quickly in that Sunnyvale apartment. Ezra and Ope’s work history meant that tools, templates, and tempo were already familiar. Ezra was Ope’s manager at their last job and a collaborator on side projects. There wasn’t much of a learning curve for how to work, and so they worked as a unit.

They were huddled together in one flat, away from Lagos worries like electricity; the TV never ran out of shows, and the fridge never ran out of ice cream. Ezra made sure. They went grocery shopping for the house together every week. They’d bought the furniture for the house together from IKEA, too. Whatever ideas anyone had, Ope was always down for the adventure, whether it was seeing an observatory or trying out a Mongolian restaurant. 

By the end of 2016, the long toil over the years begun to take its toll on Ezra. He was tired, and everything took longer. Suffice it to say, he was burnt out. The way Ezra remembers it, he was setting the team back. But Ope disagrees; he barely even registered it.

A significant part of their friendship dynamic had been Ope looking up to Ezra. Watching him take extreme ownership of his work and be understanding, Ezra’s awe for Ope found new heights and remains to this day.  The work also didn’t slow down because Paystack had a growing formidable engineering team in Ibrahim, Loknan, and Douglas.

In their book about startups and scale, Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh discuss the five stages of team growth. They describe companies at the nation stage as having over 10,000 employees, city stage at 1,000-9,999, village at 100-999, tribe at 10-99, and a family stage at 1-9 employees. 

In this family stage, a team might be a high-performing team that won’t call themselves family, but they tend to have a strong sense of intimacy and shared purpose. 

Back in Lagos, Paystack was taking shape. Pockets of old friendships were nurtured as new ones formed. One of the first ten employees was Abiola, the Swiss army woman: she ran analysis, customer support, business ops, HR, and did whatever needed to get done. She’d followed Shola from Klein Devort. She straddled every role until a function needed deeper solutions, and someone had to be hired to do it. Seike, another of the first ten employees, joined Paystack as its customer support and operational needs grew. She’d worked with Ezra before Paystack. Loknan came from Delivery Science, while Ibrahim worked with Shola before Paystack.

Seun Runsewe joined Paystack from KPMG after her maternity leave to lead the newly formed Business function. Some days, she showed up to work with her four-month-old, and everyone took turns to babysit. Other days, she took time off for hospital runs without fear of reproach for being out of office too long. Seun Odusanya joined the business team as the tenth member of the team. 

Douglas would go the extra mile with his ingenuity, making tools that helped Seun’s work pitching businesses easier. Seike would go to bed and wake up to see that Loknan from Engineering had resolved all the support issues that popped up while she slept. 

Everyone owned something. Everyone owned everything.

By the end of 2016, Paystack’s growth strongly indicated they were up to something. They had 1,407 live customers who’d processed about 200,000 transactions valued at over 1.1 billion naira. Investors also believed that they were onto something, and so not only did they secure the standard $120,000 investment from YC, but they also raised another $1.3 million from other investors.

The small but enthusiastic team was now established. Their shared sense of values and purpose had brought them this far, but all of this first became ingrained in the culture code through Emmanuel Quartey. 

In mid-2017, a few months after Quartey rounded off his work as General Manager of MEST Incubator in Ghana, Shola asked him to come and advise Paystack on how to think about growth. He spent one month with the team, speaking to everyone and exploring what Paystack was already doing well and what it could do better. 

Everyone he spoke to sounded like they owned the business, in the depth of their knowledge and the intensity of their care. 

After witnessing a passionate debate over why the front desk had to be beautiful and observing the entire company transform a customer disaster into a moment of care, Quartey knew he wanted to stay. 

In the week Quartey’s one-month session would’ve ended, Shola asked if he’d be interested in joining Paystack to lead the growth effort. He said yes in a heartbeat. He’d effectively decided to uproot his life in Ghana to join Paystack in Lagos. 

Quartey would go on to codify how Paystack, as a team, viewed the world. Shola had an idea at almost twenty employees: he believed the team had the right vibe and wanted it codified somehow, so he asked Quartey to figure it out. And so, Shola led a session where everyone sat in a room and talked about themselves. His prompt to the room for everyone to answer was, “If you knew me, you’d know X”. He also went first and put everything on the table, sharing things people outside the team might never know.

And so, across the room, one after the other, each person poured. Quartey swears that everything good that has happened at Paystack originated from that day. The exercise made them always see themselves as whole human beings and created a deep well of collective understanding they continue to sip from. Shola still holds these sessions with new employees, albeit voluntarily. 

Quartey then spent the next few days collecting feedback from people on what they believed Paystack’s values were. What people sent back overlapped – what they had wasn’t ideals they aspired to, it was traits they already embodied as a collective. 

They created a decision-making mental model to guide how they hired, what they rewarded, what they discouraged, and how they solved problems. This became Paystack’s core values, a framework for how people at Paystack see themselves and the world.

In the 1970s, MIT researcher Thomas J. Allen developed the Theory of Proximity or Allen Curve, a pivotal theory in organisational behaviour at the time: the closer people are to each other, the more likely they are to communicate with each other, create spontaneous interactions, generate better ideas, and inevitably drive serendipitous innovation. 

Ope and Ezra’s productivity in Sunnyvale proved this theory; it also came in handy for Paystack’s growth. For instance, they had to rent an apartment close to the office to ease Quartey's relocation. Shola took out a room in that apartment and thus began the idea of a Paystack House, executed by Abiola, whose focus had been streamlined to HR and Admin. 

When employees who lived far away from the office at Ikeja needed to be closer to work, they moved into a room rented by Paystack. For about a year starting in 2017, if two Stacks – they call themselves that – wanted to rent a space, and it sat in a particular radius around the office, they could get support from HR. 

More and more Stacks began to live close to each other. They went to work and the gym and often hung out around the Paystack Houses. It felt like a closely-knit community had been created amongst the Stacks.

The Paystack team’s closeness took its first major beating in 2020 when COVID hit and the relentless flu tested their cohesion. Like most companies everywhere who had to go remote, they found inventive ways to huddle. Ope’s team, for example, would stay on Looms all day,  hopping into conversations when needed or listening for sounds of life to fill the gap created by isolation. 

As the company navigated its new COVID reality, something else was happening within the leadership team: Stripe had begun conversations to acquire Paystack. It wasn’t the first time Stripe’s possible acquisition was on the table, but Paystack thought it was too early. Stripe decided to invest in their Series A fundraising round instead in 2018.  The second time, it still didn’t feel like the right time, but when Stripe came back with an acquisition offer of over $200 million, the Stacks had a new home at Stripe.

You might get issued stocks – the atomic unit of ownership – when you join a startup, especially in its early stages. At the moment you join, they are not very valuable. But as the company grows and its value increases, so does your share. When a company like Stripe acquires the company you work at, they’re buying off your stocks for cash or stocks in their own company. For acquisitions like Paystack’s, people’s fortunes changed forever.

After months of due diligence and paperwork, Paystack’s acquisition was announced. This announcement also came in mid-October, as young Nigerians across the country and abroad organised around the #EndSARS movement, protesting against police brutality that often targets young people, including those who’d look like the average person at Paystack. 

There was some concern over the time of the announcement internally, and whether it’d distract from the protests, but when it went out, it was cogent proof of why people were out protesting: if young Nigerians feel safe being themselves, they make incredible things.

Many things have changed at Paystack. The team no longer works from just one office; they’re scattered across three continents, but Shola, who now runs a football club while leading Paystack, continues to advocate for the nimble spirit. 

Ope and Ezra haven’t worked as closely in years. Ope leads a team of designers at Paystack, while Ezra leads engineering. They’ll still be found on calls together, hashing out high-level stuff, but never really hand in the mud, shoulder to shoulder.

 In 1977, twelve years after he proposed his team development model, a fifth stage was added to Tuckman’s original model: adjourning or mourning. A sense of achievement marks this stage and sometimes a yearning as team members are separated and move to their next endeavour. In 2021, Ope yearned to collaborate closely with Ezra. But in November 2023, he remembers it differently. 

Their work at Paystack began as taking that code Shola had written and showed Ezra, building an experience around it, and then working with hundreds of Stacks to serve it to people everywhere, billions of times. You start out being a big part of a small toolbox, then become a small part of a massive engine. They formed, barely stormed, performed exceptionally, and now, this is their adjournment – what a run.

Now, you can have an idea at dawn tomorrow and start receiving payments before dusk. You could try to sell e-books; the next thing you know, you have the largest creator platform in Africa. You could have an idea to make cravings arrive faster, and after eighteen months, you’ve helped people pay 1 billion naira. Your idea could make it easy for people to automate their daily, weekly, or monthly savings. 

Consider that all these ideas and thousands more – every app or website that enables payments – were made possible because of Paystack and businesses like it. 

In the 90s, British musician Brian Eno described a word to his friend: Scenius. He believed that significant changes in history resulted from large numbers of people and circumstances to create something new. Scenius is the communal concept of genius, a collective intelligence and intuition that resides in the scene where it’s happening beyond the genes of the people in it. 

Quartey believes this is the point – to bring people together in good faith, work on a collective mission where people feel whole, and create pure vibes – to create scenius. 

In this way, Paystack’s mission as a business is not just powering a new generation of enterprises across Africa. It’s also creating a culture that won’t revolve around a cult figure but around a cult of Paystack – where people could become their best selves while building a community of practice.

Ezra, Ope and other friends – Tolu, Fatima and Tomi – meet every year for a week in Abuja. They get a lovely apartment, cook, and catch up while eating.  They want to buy a beach house together somewhere, each with a key to use anytime. And they’d hang out for no reason – dolce far niente.

Ope was supposed to spend only three months at Paystack, but he’s added another eighty-eight months to those three and is still going. He’s built a multidisciplinary design team at Paystack. Outside Paystack, he’s started a production studio for passion projects. 

One day, Ope ended up at a bar in Oslo, having drinks with people he knew and respected and who also knew and respected him. That evening was happening because Ope had sent another email, “Hi Johan, I’m in Oslo! Arrived today. Let me know when to stop by the office.” 

There had been many emails in between, but this last one landed on August 20, 2023, exactly six years since the first one to Bakken & Bæck. Ope has drank with his heroes. 

The date was unplanned. The date was perfect. 

Notes

It took a village and a lot of time to put this together.

• First, you’re reading this story because of Vistanium’s backers. It takes a lot of time and resources to make this happen, and they make it possible.

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• There are many ways to tell a Paystack story or any startup’s story, but my curiosity about this angle began in 2021. I’d read James Somers’ essay about Jeff and Sanjay, two of Google’s earliest engineers. The story wasn’t about Google in the true sense, it was about friendship at work and the impact it can have in creating meaningful work. And so, I thought, what would it look like to explore this theme in the context of my environment? Thank you, James, for writing. 

• The first conversation was had in 2021. The most obvious person to talk to when exploring a company’s founding is the CEO. But I wanted to explore what it’d look like to do this without talking to the CEO. Thank you, Ope, for setting it up, Ezra, for taking the time, and both of you for talking to me. 

• Ope Adedeji and Ruka, my editors, left some early feedback on the outline, but the story just wasn’t there yet. They knew it, I knew it. 

• The story had to be about chemistry, so I tried to get some practice on another one: The Flutterwave Store.

• I kept taking stabs at it between 2021 and now, but reached a point of no return a few weeks ago. Solomon made some of the first edits, and asked good questions in this final round. The gaps started to become apparent. 

• So, I went back to look for more stories to fill them. Seike was my guide for this part, so thank you for guiding me through the rabbithole, and answering my plenty questions. And getting Seun on the phone.

• I was trying to figure out what the point of it might be. Why does this code and value system matter, and what can it make possible? I wasn’t sure of the language, but Quartey was the one who tied it up for me, especially introducing me to the concept of scenius. Many of the Early Stacks think of Quartey as some sort of oracle – I agree with them.

• I spoke to six people inside Paystack for this story across two years, and they all tended to say the same thing in different words. But I still wanted to get an extra perspective from someone who wasn't an employee but had been in the room a lot – Seyi – and it still checked. Dami and Seyi of Dá led the creation of Paystack’s timeless brand identity.

• In all, it was Ruka who dragged this story to the finish line, making me almost cry and throw up and wonder who sent me message. 

• One day, while I was whining about how stressful this story was, Binjo said, “Publish.“

• Penzu did all the illustration and motion.

• David did a typo check, and Ezra did a final factcheck. 

• I’m writing this way past midnight, so thank you, Nana, for not dragging me to bed, and tolerating me as I whined endlessly about this story.

• I really set out to explore teams, and how they come together to make incredible things. I hope I accomplished that for you too. 

An  extra PS: 

A few weeks ago, Shola announced that they were laying off people. Losing a job is hard, and I thought it was done as ethically/thoughtfully as possible, but it feels like anyone who comes to read this might find this context, especially the handling of it, useful.

Corrections: The “if you knew me“ prompt was Shola’s idea; an earlier version said it was Quartey’s.

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In Ikorodu, there’s the Majidun Creek. On the river bank, there’s a jetty and a few houses, one or two on stilts; you can see them when you cross the bridge. Beyond the bank, old houses are crammed on narrow streets to make up the Majidun Community. 

In March 2018, Tunde alighted with his friends at the Majidun Bus Stop one Sunday after playing instruments in church with them. 

“Are you sure?” one of them asked, giggling, as they hopped off the danfo with them. He knew they didn’t live in Majidun but always stopped there. On that day, he had his curiosity and time on his hands. 

A few minutes later, they arrived at a shed. Under it, there were soldiers away from their duty post huddled together. Thugs stood beside them, and next to those thugs stood children whose voices cracked from smoke faster than puberty could.  

They were all smoking weed. 

His friends came here off their church high to find a new high. Tunde wasn’t a smoker, so he sat quietly, soaking in the scene before him.

One of the thugs had a scar that ran from his right shoulder to his left waist. He’d gotten shot and attacked with a machete, he explained to Tunde when he caught him staring. When the attack ended, his intestines were outside his body, his life hanging by a thread. 

Tunde returned with his friends the following Sunday – there was no place more important to be. This time, he was comfortable enough to pull out his chess board and play himself while everyone else played with their wraps. 

“Kíni yẹn?” one of the kids asked, pointing to a chess piece in Tunde’s hand. 

“What does it look like?” Tunde responded in Yoruba. 

“It looks like a church.”

Tunde smiled. Other kids drew close, naming the pieces; the king looked like a bottle, and according to a teenage mechanic apprentice who’d come to smoke, the rook looked like a part of the gearbox.

Tunde didn’t know what a gearbox looked like, but he agreed. 

Maybe it was the second-hand high or the kids’ enthusiasm, but at that moment, Tunde knew what he wanted to do when he returned to Majidun the following Sunday. 

Thirteen years before that Sunday, Tunde stood in a tiny barbershop in Ikorodu. It was a school morning, but the shop was packed with schoolboys who gathered in a corner around a television, some with their school shirts in hand, others with Playstation pads. 

It could only have been Winning Eleven on the screen. 

Unlike the other boys, he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He hadn’t worn one in over a year. 

As the match pressed on, Tunde’s mind wandered elsewhere. In another corner of the shop, a man’s face was buried behind a book, photocopied and bound between a see-through plastic sleeve and a blue cover. 

A chequered board with carved playing pieces was on a stool before him. He’d frown at the board, then back into the book. Then he’d move a piece, move another, take one off, then rearrange the board. 

It was as if nothing else existed, not the screaming boys, not Tunde staring enthralled, just his book and the board. 

“Bros B,” Tunde said, pointing at a playing piece on the board, “What’s this thing?”

“What does it look like?” Bros B asked as he lowered the book from his face, revealing a  frown. 

“It looks like a horse,” Tunde responded. 

“Yes,” Bros B smirked, “it’s called a knight.”

“What about this one?” Tunde pointed at another piece. 

“That’s a pawn.”

“Porn?” Tunde flinched. 

The boys overheard and teased briefly before returning to their game. 

“Pawn,” Bros B corrected. He was running out of patience. 

“Come and teach me how to play it.”

“No, no,” Bros B said, shooing him off, “you’re too small to learn it.”

Tunde was ten. 

Bros B was every boy’s È̩gbọ́n in the neighbourhood. The boys came for Playstation, fresh cuts, and sometimes, advice. They liked that he was an older person who didn’t force them to do anything or beat them. 

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Every day, after his parents left home for work, Tunde went to Bros B’s and stayed until his younger brother came looking for him when he returned from school or before dark, just as his parents were heading home from work. 

Tunde had spent months doing nothing: uniformless, schoolless. His parents worked hard all day but could only afford to cover one of their son’s school fees. To keep him engaged, his parents enrolled him as an apprentice to a refrigerator repairer. That didn’t last for long – his teacher beat him too much, so he stopped going. 

He couldn’t afford to play Winning Eleven like the other boys, but with chess, there was no price, only curiosity. And so, chess filled the space that idleness had occupied in his mind.  He went there every day to watch Bros. B play himself. Bros B still wouldn’t allow him to play. He often said, “Chess is for smart people,” and “How you play chess reflects your personality,” but this didn’t stop Tunde from watching and learning. 

One day, all the watching paid off. Bros B’s friends, young but skilled players, came to play, and they offered him a seat. 

That was only the beginning. As he continued to learn, he decided to take practice home – he made his own chess board with scrap cardboard paper, a ruler and a pencil. For the pieces, he used bottle corks. Next, he taught his brother to play, unleashing everything he’d learned watching Bros B and his friends. 

He played him whenever they could, but this didn’t last long. Not long after, their mum walked in on them playing chess. She ripped the cardboard to pieces. It wasn’t the first time she’d ripped something to make a statement. Before then, it was the comics he drew with his notebooks.

For his parents, he was only allowed to be a doctor and a shining, focused example for his younger brother. Everything else was a distraction. They weren’t going out early every morning and coming back late at night for him to be drawing comics and playing funny board games. 

Tunde’s father drove a danfo on the Ikorodu - Lagos Island route every day, multiple times a day. He left home with the early morning commuters and returned as the markets emptied on the island. Tunde’s mother, a trader at the market in Idumota, moved with her husband on the first and last trips. 

And even with all their hours, it wasn’t enough to keep both boys in school or make Tunde a doctor. 

One morning, Tunde’s mother stopped going to the market. After a few days of staying home all day with Tunde, she’d had enough. She grabbed her purse, walked to a school in the neighbourhood, straight to the principal’s office and asked for a job. She didn’t want a salary; she just wanted her son to become a student at the school.

Mrs. Esan, the principal, said no without a thought. She terrified everyone, but Mummy Tunde’s desperation eclipsed Mrs. Esan’s wrath; she showed up every day until the principal asked her to return with her son. 

“What is a noun?” the principal asked Tunde when he showed up with his mum. 

“A noun is…”

Tunde hadn’t been in a classroom for most of 2003 and 2004; if he hadn’t stopped school, he’d have been in his second year in secondary school. But here he was, unable to remember what a noun was. 

“He’ll start in primary five,” the principal said. His mum would resume as a cleaner. 

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When he eventually made it through primary school and into his first year in secondary school, he could take one of the school’s extra-curricular subjects: chess. 

By the end of his third term, he received his first actual chess board – a small plastic set. Even though he did well at school and chess, his father still worried. Studies or nothing. 

Tunde’s dad was stern. It was a blend of his upbringing and his job. Every day, he had to fight traffic enforcers, officers and thugs alike, road accidents, and the endless battle with a bus trudging through Lagos on a weary engine.  Still, he always brought money home no matter what the day dealt him – nothing seemed to matter more. 

But nothing mattered more to Tunde than chess. He played every time he could sneak a game at home and school. The owner of the school Tunde went to, Femi Badejo, was a one-time UN ambassador who enjoyed writing children’s books. He had an undying obsession with chess. He’d set up a chess tournament with schools across Lagos, hosted from his school. Tunde remembers multiple schools attending – but none stood out for him like the boys from St. Finbarr’s, with their blue blazers and white pants. One carried a laptop with him; Tunde had come near one for the first time. 

Tunde’s world was the neighbourhood he was born in, Ketu; the one he was shaped in, Ikorodu, Bros B’s shop, his family and school. By the end of that day, his world had become larger, with all the other players from other schools with their blazers and laptops. 

The boys in blazers won that day, while Tunde and his schoolmates lost in every round. Mr Femi was livid, but he had a plan.  

Not long after that loss, the school got a new chess coach, Mr. Collins, and he was now coming to be a teacher on the same grounds he’d coached St. Finbarr’s to victory. 

At Mr. Collins’ first class, he didn’t teach any chess. Instead, he threw a challenge to the class right after introducing himself. 

“Bring any maths question,” he said, “and I will solve it on this board. Go and bring your seniors’ textbooks, too.”

The class mostly emptied, and when the kids returned, they all had maths textbooks. As they threw math problems at Mr. Collins, he threw them at the board and turned them into chalk dust – the class grew more excited by the problem.  

By the time the class was over, it was at its most charged. Tunde was spellbound. 

Mr. Collins didn’t even touch a chess piece. 

When Tunde was a child in the early 2000s, his father often left ₦200 at home for him and his brother to buy food before heading to work.

Then, one day, the money stopped. Tunde later learned that his father’s bus had plunged into the Majidun River. Somehow, he survived. He’d always provided for the home the best he could, but that day, he stopped trying.  It was the last time he ever left ₦200 for food. 

In 2018, Tunde returned to Majidun — over a decade after his father lost his bus — under entirely different circumstances. 

Tunde had gotten a lot of help to prepare for his first chess class. First, there was a thug from the smoking shed – you’d know him by his dreadlocks and the scar across his face – everyone called him Smile. 

“Kini chess?” Smile asked the first time Tunde told him he wanted to teach the kids chess and needed his help mobilising the kids. 

By the time the conversation was over, Smile was down.

Some of his bandmates were also down; even Michael, the pastor’s son, volunteered and showed up with his camera. They brought biscuits for five kids, but the rustle of biscuit wrappers drew almost thirty kids. 

After the kids had gathered and Smile managed to keep them quiet, Tunde stood before them.  

“See that uncle there,” he said, pointing to one of his friends volunteering. “I’m going to play against him, and I’m not going to look at the board.” 

And so he wore a blindfold and started to play. He couldn’t see the kids under his blindfold, but from their breaths behind his neck and the occasional “How did he do that,” he knew he had their full attention. 

By the day's end, the kids had learned the chess pieces and how each moved. Tunde’s friend, Michael, had also taken a lot of photos. 

In one of the photos, a little girl smiled as she held the queen. He remembered her: Basirat, 5. When he’d asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d said she wanted to become a nurse, probably because of the neighbourhood nurse to whom they went for medicine. 

Basirat herself had never been in a classroom. She lived with her parents and siblings in a single room, and school, her mum had said earlier that day, was beyond reach until she was old enough for free public school the following year. 

That night, he wrote about her on his Facebook and went to bed. 

When he woke up the following morning, his phone was blowing up. Everyone wanted to hear more about Basirat and the other kids.

There’s a lot of research to show that chess is great for kids: it helps them develop problem-solving skills and improves critical thinking and concentration. For his classmates, chess was all of these and perhaps a hobby – but chess was everything for JSS2 Tunde in Mr. Collins’ class. 

In chess, his dad wasn’t pouring his frustration from the day or avoiding his mother as she worked in school. In chess, he wasn’t ashamed of the quality of his uniform, and he could be the best at something. 

Tunde entered his first chess tournament that year. He played and lost all six games. After losing to a girl in one match, he ran to the bathroom to cry.

Mr Collins was waiting when he returned. 

“She can’t even play like that,” Tunde said. 

“But she beat you,” Mr. Collins said, “In this chess, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a boy or girl; you’re either a fish or not. And you’re still fresh fish.”

“Cry well-well, and get used to it. Even the greatest players still lose.”

Then Mr. Collins asked Tunde for his recording sheet from the game; they analysed it together and noted the mistakes that cost him the games.

At the end of the school year, the tournament returned to their school again, and Mr. Collins’ former students at St. Finbarr’s came first again. But as Tunde walked home that evening, he had a brand new chessboard, a certificate, a trophy and an envelope with money. 

He’d finished third overall in the tournament and was now the best player in school. He was only 12. 

Neighbours stepped outside their homes to congratulate him as he marched home, shy but beaming with pride. 

His dad saw him first. His body trembled as he burst into tears – it was the first time Tunde had seen his father cry. 

The neighbours poured out of their rooms as Tunde’s mum’s praises grew louder. From that day, chess stopped being a distraction. It became a badge of distinction. It also helped that he finished top of his class that same year. 

The years rolled by for Tunde in secondary school, and as he progressed, things regressed at home, with the one predictable but little income from his mother selling snacks to kids at school. And so, he dug further into his studies and chess, and the world around him shifted out of focus. 

Until it was time to go to University. 

Every year, over 1.5 million students write JAMB, Nigeria’s matriculation exam for secondary school students trying to get into tertiary schools. They’ll be vying for tens of thousands of slots across Nigerian schools. Most will stay home for various reasons, from low scores and limited slots to high cut-off marks and unaffordable fees. Tunde was at risk of being one of the latter. For his first choice, the University of Lagos, he didn’t make the cut. 

For his second, the Lagos State University, he’d made the cut on the scores side, but there was one problem. In 2012, the Lagos State Government increased the school fees by tenfold to ₦250,000, more than most parents could afford. It was also the year Tunde was supposed to get into university. 

And so, whenever he had some change, he’d go to a cyber cafe, stare at his admission in the university portal, and then return home. As schools across Nigeria and the world filled up with new students, all hope left Tunde, and the emptiness filled with sadness, then anger. 

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He was angry at everything: his parents for not offering much for options, chess and all the hours he wasted moving the stupid pieces, God for not rewarding his faith, and life for offering such a tumultuous fate. 

When his friends returned after their first semester, Tunde was a teacher at a neighbourhood nursery school. He rocked a fat tie, pants, and chubby shoes. He’d even gotten a small promotion to teach primary school kids Computer Basics and Music by the time his university friends returned to school. 

A year later, in 2013, he tried to get into university again – he missed the cutoff mark by three points. 

His mother’s sadness slowly crept from her heart to her face and skin. The last time she’d been a student was in primary school. Her husband had also dropped out in his third year of secondary school. And now that his baby brother had also paused secondary school with less than two years left to graduate, she worried about her children’s fate. 

Sometimes, she told Tunde, she wondered how her life would have turned out differently if she’d gotten more education, especially seeing women drop off their kids at school in their cars. She talked about mums in their cars a lot. 

This time, Tunde accepted his fate and wrote the entrance exams to a polytechnic outside Lagos; he passed, but the only thing he hated more than feeling trapped was going to that school. 

The night before he left for school, as they gathered whatever provisions they could for him, his mum paused, standing across from Tunde in the silent kitchen. Then she asked:

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

A few days later, she returned home with the Yaba College of Technology application form. By December 2012, almost a year and a half after graduating from secondary school, he was admitted to study Computer Science. 

He never returned home; there wasn’t a home to return to, not in the true sense of it. His dad moved to Ibadan to work at his sister’s bakery. His mum moved to another part of Lagos, where she worked as a cleaner. His brother moved out of Lagos with some friends. 

One day, while walking around school, he stumbled on some people playing chess. It’d been months since he played anyone, so he stopped to stare at them from a distance. 

“Do you play?” a man watching the players asked. 

“Yes, sir,” Tunde said with some hesitation. 

“Come, come!”

The man was Coach Johnson, who coached the Chess Team of Yabatech. He paired Tunde with a young lady, and she beat him silly. He played her again, more excited than in the last game. She beat him again; Tunde was good, but she was so much better. Around him were all kinds of players, chess pieces clacking against boards – plastic, wood, rubber. 

Tunde ran into an old player from one of his secondary school tournaments who told the Coach all about him. And so he was placed in the school’s reserve Chess Team. That had great perks: free tuition and free accommodation.

Yabatech has a chess reputation for having one of the strongest chess communities in Nigeria. Students played, but even more competitive chess players came there to play. Daniel Anwuli, Nigeria’s youngest chess champion, used to play there. 

And so, to be back at the board again, with some of the best chess peers his world had to offer, Tunde felt electric. 

By 2015, Tunde’s three-year diploma was over, and his family hadn’t lived as one unit for three years. Leaving school didn’t change his family’s fortunes, but it now changed his living situation. First, he squatted with a friend, but only for long enough not to begin to feel like a burden. 

With nowhere else to go, he went to his aunty’s. They weren’t delighted to see him – they weren’t delighted to have any extended family living with them. So, they turned him back. 

When the family woke up the following day, they found him sleeping by the door. He lived with them for the next few years. From then on, he rolled from one stint to the other. 

The first thing he tried was a business he’d started with his friend. They called their idea Chess in Schools. They had a clear plan: go from school to school, make compelling pitches to the management to make chess a subject, and charge ₦5,000 per student. 

For a school of 200 kids, that meant ₦1 million. At ten schools? They’d be swimming in money! But there wasn’t much swimming to do  – they landed a few schools, but not enough to change their battered suits and shoes. 

By 2016, he’d gotten disillusioned and started daydreaming about japa-ing with another friend. But that friend had a passport and parents who had the means to remove all the blockers between Lagos and America. 

His friend was gone; Tunde was alone. 

And so he continued teaching, chess board in his backpack, squeezing in and out of his Keke NAPEPs and worn-out clothes. One time, while teaching students at a girls-only school, one of the girls said, “This chess you’re teaching us, is it so that we can become a chess teacher like you?”

He didn’t teach chess again for a long time after that. 

But it was between rolling from stint to stint he found the gig playing the piano at church for stipends and holy spirit, which led to Majidun, which led him to Basirat. 

A few weeks after that first visit to Majidun, two kids they were training in chess, including Basirat, had gotten lifetime scholarships from strangers on the Internet. 

In those weeks, Tunde's new sense of purpose came into focus. He’d shown up at Majidun and met the kids. He’d met Basirat and her family, and nothing stayed the same. And while it might be said that Tunde showed up and their lives changed forever, it’s also true that they, too, changed Tunde’s life forever. 

Tunde named his new idea Chess In Slums. With it, he would sustain their work at Majidun and replicate it everywhere. And so, they took it to other places over the next few years – in four years, their work has blitzed to reach up to ten thousand kids. The donors have come from everywhere, too, to push the work forward.

Everywhere they went, they taught the kids that the world of chess had 64 squares. Every piece had a role. They taught the kids that when a pawn moved to the opposite end of the chess board, it would be promoted to a more powerful piece, like a rook, bishop, knight, or the most powerful piece, the queen.

In Germany, they describe zugzwang as a situation in chess where a player is at a peculiar disadvantage: they must make a move, but every move they make will worsen their condition. And so, Tunde and his friends weren’t just showing the kids how to make moves; they were hoping that by expanding their world, they could help them break out of the zugzwang life had thrust upon them.

They taught kids in Makoko, a low-income riverine community in Lagos. They taught kids in Oshodi, Lagos’ busiest and most infamous bus stop. Everywhere they went, they turned urchins into boys and girls in blazers. They turned the willing thugs into planners and organisers.

Then they brought the world to witness – from diplomats to global stars and media – that it is possible to do great things from a small place. 

As for Tunde, the kids taught him that they could learn chess fast, compete, and have a good time. By watching the kids, they learned it was beyond chess; it was a gateway to a world expanding before them, far removed from their circumstances. 

They reminded Tunde of himself. 

Perhaps it’s why he starts by observing the most curious every time they teach new kids. One day, one of them will see a chess piece as he pulls it out of a bag. They’ll ask him, “What’s that?” 

“What does it look like?” Tunde will respond. 

“A horse.”

And Tunde Onakoya will smile as he sets the knight piece on the board. 

Author’s Notes

It took a village to put this together:

• It began with lunch that lasted for seven hours; I just knew I had to write about it.

• I wanted to enter a writing prize, primarily because one of the judges – Gay Talese – is one of the most influential writers alive to me. I couldn’t stand the version of the draft by the time the deadline reached, so I pulled it. But if Gay Talese wasn’t on that panel, the story wouldn’t even exist on Vistanium. I guess he deserves some credit too.

I was very unsure about the quality of this piece until:

• Ruka did some work on the early draft with Ope.

• But whatever is great about this version, Ope’s brutal but ultimately benign editing made it readable.

• We led with Mariam’s art direction, represented in the cover image. Then, Yinka expanded the art direction with the story's illustrations.

• Jolomi did a lot of the research this needed. Eruke caught a hectic paragraph or two. Nana gave it the final read.

But all of this is possible because of Vistanium’s members – they’re the reason you’re reading this. Their money keeps the stories coming and the publication going.

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It was the last Friday evening of March 2020, and the federal government had just declared a lockdown in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The news said people would be home for only two weeks, but no one knew how long the curfew would last.

At Flutterwave’s office in Lagos, where Dikachim worked in product marketing, an email came from HR informing everyone they’d be working from home until the lockdown ended, whenever that was. For Dikachim, living alone meant he’d barely have any other human interaction for the next few weeks. So he tried one final attempt at banter.

“I wonder what would happen to small businesses that don’t sell online,” Dikachim said to a colleague that had just reached her car. 

Nigeria has over forty million small businesses, and eight in every ten will fail in the first eighteen months, mainly because of cashflow problems. These businesses wouldn’t last a month in the middle of a pandemic.

“But it won’t just be about trying to get them to sell online,” Dikachim explained, noting that they’d also “need to figure out the logistics of getting a thing delivered, especially with COVID and all.”

Dikachim has always been one with ideas and an urgency to execute them. Before joining Flutterwave, he worked at Anakle. He ambushed a designer, Mukhtar, who was just leaving the office way past closing hours. It was because he had an idea. Over the next few hours, that idea ended up on Sterling Bank’s social media; and became The Bank Wars on Twitter. 

“This store thing sounds like a good idea,” his colleague said. “You should talk to Ted.”

The next afternoon, Dikachim was on a call with Ted, whose job title read Design-Something-Something. It was morning in San Francisco, where Ted was already one week into a lockdown while on a work trip. Dikachim didn’t need to make too much of a case about the idea he had because Ted was asking those questions himself. 

Ted’s mum owned a neighbourhood shop in Lagos where she sold frozen foods like turkey, chicken, and fish. With the lockdown announcement, her problems were many-fold. She couldn’t sell her stock because of movement restrictions, but managing a perishable foods business meant she had to keep generators running for her freezers.

“We should do this,” Ted said. “Let’s hear what GB thinks.”

That evening, Flutterwave’s CEO – GB – had specific instructions: “Tell Ted to start working on it.”

It wasn’t an entirely new idea within the company. In 2018, Flutterwave experimented with a product – Rave Social – that’d make it easy for businesses on Instagram to receive payments.

They imported their Instagram photos in bulk, labelled stuff available or not, and received payments for orders. Then, shortly after it went live, Instagram pushed major API changes that made it impossible to import Instagram photos into any third-party platform. That was the end of Rave Social, at least in that form. 

For most of its first three years, Flutterwave worked like a lab. They told everyone listening, “We’ll help you process payments.” People need payments for all kinds of things, so they built features for all sorts of needs. Did you want to move money? They made transfers possible. Did you want to make payments online at an international store? Here’s a virtual card for that. At the centre of these experiments was its central dashboard product – it used to be called Rave, just Rave. If the dashboard is a house, every feature they build to help businesses is a door to the dashboard. 

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For this new experiment, Ted revisited his mum’s struggle. She wasn’t thinking about expanding or growing her business then; she just wanted to cut her losses and stay afloat. And she wasn’t the only one with this problem. 

Small businesses make up almost half of Nigeria’s GDP; a quarter of those businesses are in Lagos alone. Navigating an indefinite lockdown, COVID misinformation, and the absence of government stimulus cheques, sellers desperately needed a way to stay in business.

Their solution had to be easy – no technical expertise required to set up but with essential elements necessary for commerce to happen. For example, customers see a product they want on an online store, pay and have the product delivered to them offline.

Ted assembled a small team within the company to build the product, pulling together people from different units across the business: Nosa, Deji and Lara. On this product, he wasn’t just going to be a designer; he was also going to be the product manager. 

When Ted joined Flutterwave in May 2017, he’d been hired as a front-end engineer and the forty-third employee. But he was also an experienced designer; he’d designed and written code at his previous jobs at Hotels.ng and Delivery Science. 

Flutterwave had 42 employees – most of them working in customer support, business development, and engineering – but there were not enough designers. So Ted assumed the role of a product designer. Over the next two years, he focused on design, expanding the design team.

As Ted got deeper into products across the company, he started to take on more responsibility around improving the products. The online store was the first project where he’d fully be responsible for bringing a product vision to life. 

Nosa was the front-end engineer working in the store. Everything Ted designed, Nosa made functional. In 2017, Nosa had made up his mind to start a post-uni life away from the chaos of Lagos as a freelancer working from Ibadan. Then one day, while attending the naming ceremony of an engineer’s new child, he heard about Flutterwave. By the time the day’s ceremony was over, Nosa had changed his mind about leaving Lagos and joined Flutterwave’s engineering team to work alongside the father of the day.

By 2018, Nosa and Ted had moved in together and were later joined by two other colleagues; Hamza, an android engineer, and Nujie working on infrastructure and security. They called their apartment Unit 4; there, a true sense of work-life balance didn’t exist – there was only work getting done. A typical day was Hamza watching a tutorial or experimenting with a new app idea. Ted would be brewing a fresh cup of coffee while waiting for some design feedback. Nuji would be investigating a hacking attempt at two in the morning. And then there’d be Nosa, calling it a night just before daybreak. 

It was a vicious work routine they kept, but things moved fast.

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When Deji left Hotels.ng, his original plan was to take up a job as an instructor teaching people software development. “For the peace of mind,” he said. However, the same engineer who pitched Nosa pitched him too, and he was on his way to Flutterwave to focus on backend engineering.  

Lara’s first role at Flutterwave was as a product tester, coming off the back of a role working in customer support at Hotels.ng. Her new role made her the last line between the quality of whatever the engineers were making and what the customer’s experience was going to be.

They’d spent the past few years working on various projects together, and they made up for what they lacked in physical proximity with incredible chemistry. 

The first version of the Flutterwave Store was ready in about three weeks – a minimum viable store through and through – a seller could set up a store, list items for sale, start receiving payments, and request a dispatch rider to have their goods delivered. But it didn’t have thumbnails for images – that came a week later. 

The store team shared what they’d made on Slack for feedback near the end of April. Potential sellers would need references to create their stores. Dikachim set up a store for COVID protection kits. Ted made one for booze, then a second one for his mum. 

Ted’s mum had been selling her stock over Whatsapp for the first few weeks of the lockdown. First, she’d send a list of the available things to a potential customer; the potential customer would text back what they wanted. Next, she’d send an account number, and the customer would make payment. Then she’d wait for payment confirmation after her customer sent proof of payment. 

But when the store went live, she just sent a link to her store. 

#KeepTheLightsOn; that’s what Dikachim called the go-live campaign for the store. To bring this to life, he worked with Wendy, who leads branding and storytelling at Flutterwave, to pull off a campaign video for it. What would have been a studio was her living room, and her entire crew – sound, lighting, editing – was her filmmaker husband. Ted made how-to videos from his room for the website. 

#KeepTheLightsOn

On the last day of April 2020, Flutterwave’s CEO, GB, tweeted about the store for the first time. 

The users came in trickles – a few dozen at best on the first day. It wasn’t the day one bang Dikachim hoped for, but interesting things started to happen over the next few weeks. 

A woman who made dresses for a living pivoted to making banana bread, because who needs dresses in the middle of a pandemic? A self-published author cancelled her offline book launch plans and sold over two hundred copies in two weeks because she created a store for her book, and her friend spread the link for her. 

The team was also getting some critical product feedback. For example,  merchants didn’t like the offline delivery feature that went live with the store in partnership with a logistics company. The goal was simple: a merchant would receive an order, request a delivery, and a dispatch rider showed up to pick up and deliver. 

Except, merchants didn’t use it. When they did, riders showed up late or didn’t show up at all. So the team tested a feature that allowed sellers to request delivery service or take care of deliveries themselves. Most sellers overwhelmingly chose to do it themselves, and the team got the message; they dropped the feature.

By July 2020, despite a slow start, there were 5,000 live stores on the Flutterwave Store. 

Hello, Big Brother

The team’s next opportunity to put the store in front of more people showed up in the form of Big Brother Naija (BBN) – the biggest reality TV show in Nigeria. In advertising terms, you can call it Nigeria’s Super Bowl.

Flutterwave grabbed just about enough of this cake to help the store reach its widest audience yet. And it worked, not just for the store but all of Flutterwave. For the first time, people, tiny businesses, could see how Flutterwave was a place for them too.

Ted’s store-defining moment, where he felt like they’d “made a wonderful thing”, came in Nigeria close to the end of the year. Then, one weekend in the middle of November 2020, he was at his friend’s birthday photo shoot when he got a call from someone on the customer success team at work. 

“Ted, there’s no way for merchants to download all their orders as a spreadsheet,” she said, immediately following it up with a request to add the feature to the store. 

“Oh, okay,” Ted said. “But not right now. I’m currently at—”

She cut him off, “We have to do it right now.”

“Look,” Ted said, “we’ll start working on it on Monday.”

“No, no. Ted, you don’t understand me—”

For a fickle attempt at work-life balance, he ended the call and returned to help out with the photo shoot. But he got another call from someone else on the team. 

“We have to work on this right now. A customer has a lot of sales and needs to be able to download her orders to make it easy for her to process them.”

When Ted ended the phone call, he headed back to Unit 4, and waiting for him at home was more information about the customer. He stared at the data for a moment, then picked up his phone to Lara and Deji.

“Omo, someone just made over ₦20 million in sales today, and they need to be able to download the orders on a spreadsheet.” 

The business sold wigs and beauty accessories on Instagram. 

He looked at the time. It was only mid-afternoon. 

Ted knew a lot of work needed to be done on the store, but that day, he knew they had to move faster.

Fresh Ginger

Before Jola joined Flutterwave in early 2021, she’d keenly watched the store’s progress from outside the company. Her interest in commerce began almost a decade ago at one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies in Africa: Jumia. 

So when Flutterwave Store came along, she was fascinated by what it meant for retail brands. It wasn’t enough, she believed, for independent stores to just exist across the internet. Instead, aggregation made for a richer experience for everyone; sellers would become easier to discover, and customers could find everything in one place.

Jola’s first move was to make a cold pitch about her marketplace idea. Then, in true LinkedIn fashion, she reached out to one of the 12 mutuals she shared with Flutterwave’s CEO, and an email intro happened. 

That quickly became a thread of a few dozen emails with up to nine people across Flutterwave. In the end, Jola joined the company to become the product manager for the store. 

The idea of a Market of stores wasn’t entirely new inside Flutterwave, but now, it had a new champion with Jola. So many things were happening at Flutterwave then, and making the store a marketplace wasn’t a priority. At the time, Flutterwave had just closed a Series C round of funding at a valuation of over $1 billion. 

So, everyone focused over the next few months on improving existing products. So her store priority was improving the experience for merchants and customers. For merchants, it was figuring out the integration that’d help sellers receive payments in new ways. For customers, it was building trust, like improving the payment protection policy for customers against fraud. 

Still, her sights were set on the Market, and about nineteen months after that first announcement for The Store, The Market went live. And so it was that a pandemic baby went from being a brain fart to a place where anyone could set up a store to having 40,000 stores in over a dozen countries.

As for the original Store team, they’re now scattered across different projects within the company, but when you ask Nosa about those three weeks and the twenty-something projects they’ve worked on together, he’ll say, “we did a madness.”

If you ask Deji – the most philosophical and reclusive of the bunch – how they were able to move fast, he’ll say, “It’s an unspoken agreement that we have.” Regular development cycles tend to put one thing before the other, doing one thing after another. But, perhaps, “because of our relationship since Hotels.ng,” Deji explained, “Nosa and I can work in a way that he doesn’t need to know how I’m building the APIs; he can start because he knows how I think. Nosa can create layouts even before Ted finishes designing because he understands how Ted approaches design.”

“It’s like a relay race,” Deji said, “the next person you’re going to give a baton has already picked up their pace before you get to them. The person ahead is running without looking back, knowing you’ll get the baton to them. I don’t know how to explain it.”

Try this: it’s when the sum of a team’s abilities outperforms the individual capacity of its best member, and everyone on the team trusts in this idea.

“Yes,” Deji said. “It’s synergy.”

Notes:

This one took an entire village, and a lot of over-FIFA, over-food gist:

• It started over a little over a year ago with Ted, while we were reminiscing how we spent the lockdown. “You know, it’d be fun to write about it.“

• And then, I had a draft by August last year. Alex beat it so much, that I dropped it. I especially regarded Alex’s feedback because he used to write a series I really liked called The Backend.

• Then one day, I asked Nosa to tell me about the Store, and he just kept going.

• Then one night, while at someone’s house party in November 2021, I went on a walk with Lara, and it started to take shape a little.

• Another night, while at Dikachim’s house, he stuffed me with food and stories.

• Jola got on the phone with me at short notice, and so did Deji D3.

• And this was when I tested the editing waters. One year after the first draft, it started taking a beating from July. Anita was throwing a lot of the copy uppercuts.

• Hassan came with all the “what is the context?“ and Toheeb came with the “whys“.

• And when I ran out of energy, because I found it quite difficult to get this to the finish line, Ruka, Samson, and Alex carried it to the finish line with the structural feedback. You know, I think I found this difficult to write because of the writers who directly inspired it: Steven Levy and James Somers. Chasing them was exhausting, but we run again next time.

• Penzu made the cover illustration, while Mariam made the COVID infographic.

• The rest of Vistanium’s Little Village watched my headline meltdowns.

  And talking about the headline:

• At first, I called I framed it as “Eighteen Months Of The Flutterwave Store,” I’m considering exploring what 18 months look like in the cycle of things: people, companies, movements. 18 feels like a nice number, and so when I realised at the last minute, that the main event in this story happened in over 18 months, I dropped it.

• Then some final, 11th-hour edits made it much clearer to me that this is not really a story about a product; it’s a story about the team that made it. So, I leaned in on that.

• Anyway, if you read to this point, it’s only right that you share, so thanks.

• Update (Sept. 6: An earlier version of this said that Lara was working as a Technical Account Manager. She was in fact working as a Product Tester on the team, with her role evolving to a much wider Quality Assurance role, which she still holds)

Lately, I’ve been talking about 1973 a lot and every time I do, I talk about it in three stories.

I start in the first week of January; General Gowon is standing in the $20-million National Stadium, giving a speech to 50,000 people from across 36 African nations. There’s a punchline about everyone present being “citizens of a new and free Africa, with a common destiny,” the event is the 2nd All Africa Games. The festival lasts for 12 days.

I jump to the end of January. A Kano-bound plane returning from Makkah is carrying 202 people. As it breaks through the harmattan fog, it crashes and burns, killing up to 180 people on board.

A new casualty record for commercial air disaster is set.

I find my third story in December. It’s Christmas Eve, and mobs across 5 cities in Northern Nigeria have killed 14 people. A rumour that members of a secret society are using magic to render men impotent is why.

What do these stories have in common?

Nigeria. 1973.

The third common factor is a newspaper that most of your google searches will lead you to. It’ll not be Guardian Nigeria – that wasn’t founded until 1983. Not Punch Nigeria, although they started printing the Daily Punch that same year. Not even the Daily Times – despite having been founded in 1926.

You’ll find them all in the New York Times. In fact, you’ll find all kinds of stories about Nigeria there.

You’ll find the story of the quiet Balewa, an epitaph for Biafra, Buhari’s diplomatic cargo. You’ll find the obituaries of every dictator from Lugard to Abacha.

What you won’t find though, are any of these stories on the Nigerian corner of the Internet. It’s not like our media didn’t exist – many of them did their jobs at great risk, sometimes paying with their lives.

There just aren’t any digital archives preserving the work.

At the time a paper leaves the press, encoded in it is a piece of the zeitgeist. As time passes, what was just short pieces of culture, bound in paper, becomes history.

This begs the question; if we suddenly had access every day of news in Nigeria’s history, what are we going to find?

“Is it possible to find old newspapers in Nigeria?”

The typical Nigerian print lives a fantastical life. When it leaves the press, it ends up at a newspaper stand, where people stand over them all day, screaming at the headlines, but never paying for them. The ones that get bought are read and abandoned in a bus or office. Some of the ones at the office end up at home, where they become wrapping paper for textbooks or kitchen cabinets. Another group – mostly the ones that never got bought at the stands – end up as wrapping paper for Suya or Puff Puff.

A small group of newspapers have a different ending, and I first learned about this at the Sokoto Museum. Most of the building has old weapons covered in dust, hanging photos of dead presidents, invincibility charms of dead warriors, ancient city gates of iron.

Another part of this building is for the archives. You’ll find centuries-old manuscripts of Dan Fodio’s children; Muhammad-Bello and Nana Asmau.

You’ll also find the Nigerian Tribune from 2005, The New Nigerian from 1983. National Concord from 1991. This ritual of collecting dailies across multiple publications has happened for decades, not just in Sokoto, but across every branch of the National Archives across Nigeria.

So, my friends and I started a weekend hobby.

From January 1, 1960, to December 31, 2010, there are 18,627 days. How much will we find if we go looking for at least one newspaper from every day within this time period?

In less than 5 weeks of looking, we found 95% of them.

Every page in an old paper feels like you’ve stumbled on a secret. You’ll find groundnut and a lot of blood in the sixties. Oil and Palava sauce recipes in the seventies. The eighties are cocaine and smoking guns. All the discontent boils into the nineties.

Sign up now

Finding them is not enough.

For as long as newspapers have been mainstream, news publishers have loved newsprint. It’s a low-cost type of paper that does the work and keeps the lights on.

But even with the best care, newsprint has a useful lifespan of fewer than 50 years.

If you walk into a National Archive, probably poorly funded, chances are you’ll find these old newspapers covered in dust, with their binds peeling off, and entire periods damaged.

When these newspapers eventually decompose – and they will – we will have lost the largest repository of Nigerian chronicle and perspective. All the features, ads, conflict, agony columns, recipes, letters and speeches – gone.

As humans, we first learned how to make fire before we learned how to forge metal. If there's no base of existing knowledge, there'll be nothing to improve on.

Knowledge is incremental. Content needs context.

“What’s the oldest single newspaper you remember holding?”

“Take a moment.”

“Done?”

”Here, hold another 18,000.”

What happens when you take 18,000 days of print, archive digitally, and make them available at the speed of a web search?

Between this question and the answer is scanning 18,000 newspapers, storing them, extracting the text, cataloguing, and building a repository for them. This requires a lot more resources, energy, and enthusiasm than a small band of people can provide.

That’s where you come in.

You’re welcome. Everyone is welcome: Designers, Archivers, Engineers, Analysts, Organisers, Fund-seeking Missiles, Journalists, Lawyers, Fire Starters, Storytellers, Economists, Students, Writers, Photographers, people with too much money that the problem appears to be how to spend it. If you work in academia, perfect. If I didn’t mention you, that is one new perspective we don’t have. Come along.

I like to think of history as a house. For every piece of history that we find, we’d be opening a window to a time we previously didn’t have any access to. By choosing 18,000 days, one newspaper per day for starters, the goal is to open a big window.

The view we’ll find? Frankly, I have no words.

I want some action

The Band:

Cynthia. Ruby. Ted. Oshomah. Amaka. Notiki. Blessing. Aisha. Fatimah. Farouq. Tosin. An anon or two.

P.S: This is not a substack about old newspapers. In fact, you read this post here, because this happened.

So what is this substack about? Let me send you on another adventure.