Shola Akinlade
Shola Akinlade is a Nigerian software engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Paystack, a financial technology company acquired by U.S. payments firm Stripe in 2020 in a deal reported to be worth approximately $200 million. In 2022, he was conferred with the national honour of Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) by Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari for his contributions to the advancement of technology in finance and business.
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Quotes
[edit]- Build something remarkable, be resourceful enough to find places where you can articulate what you are doing.
- Solutions to hard work is persistence and resilience.
- Figuring out a market that is growing is some of the things people look out for.
- It is important to think of your co-funders and your partners as people you are going to be on a long journey with.
- All acquisition conversations always require careful thought and consideration, and it was no different in this case. The Paystack team has been interacting with Patrick and the Stripe team over the past couple years and after significant amounts of collaboration and knowledge exchange between both companies, we agreed that this move was a natural evolution of what was and continues to be a great relationship.
- Venture-backed companies are generally destined for one of two outcomes. IPO or acquisition. Five years in, neither of these were on the list of things that we care about as a company. We’ve always been focused on building the best payments and growth tools for African businesses and are in it for the long haul. The option to team up with the world’s most sophisticated payments company to accelerate our ambitions happened to show up, and we believe it was fortuitous.
- Stripe and Paystack are both Y Combinator alumni, so that was the first point of contact. We were introduced to Patrick, who then offered to invest. Stripe would then lead our Series A, and along with Visa, invest $8 million in 2018. Since then, Stripe has been a close partner, and after over two years of knowledge exchange between our teams, we've built up a lot of mutual respect for each other. Eventually, it became obvious that our visions were so aligned that the natural evolution of the relationship would be to join forces in this way.
