"It will take a lot of investment to get to that vision. I wouldn’t be surprised if over the lifetime of Paga, we invest over $100 million — we are well on our way to that."

"Our aim as a business is to solve payments and bring financial services to the mass market in Nigeria."

"I think I’d rather own a small part of a big pie than a big part of a small pie."

"I don’t think I would have changed anything about how we raised money."

"They have to be confident in your ability as an entrepreneur to execute the business."

"The investors are typically investing someone else’s money, at least for the institutional guys, so they can’t just put the money anywhere."

"The investors are bringing something on the table and so are entrepreneurs."

"The investor entrepreneur relationship is almost like a marriage."

"If I had to go back to do it, I would not have concentrated on semiconductor chip design. As much as I found it interesting, it was not my strength. Digital design in electrical engineering was my strength. So I went on and focused on digital design."

"I’d say the experience really shaped me because it taught me a few things. First, we tend to place a lot of focus on things that are hard for us. I think that’s wrong. You want to focus on your strengths and get better at the things you’re good at."

"I landed my first job with a small startup of 8 people. We were developing digital imaging chips that could capture images the way the human eyes do. I was way out of my depth so I worked weekends trying to catch up."

"I had to work my way through college, sometimes holding up to 5 jobs at a time. So I was excited when I finally graduated with an electrical engineering degree."

"I just know the country that produced me."

"There are a million Topes in Nigeria...I’m not a diamond in the rough, and I want to get involved in some way to help with that."

"It is important to think about your product and service along with how you gonna acquire customers in a repeatable way from day one."

"Media is not an easy industry. But when it’s done right, its impact is massive."

"But you should never do anything that puts your entire company at risk. You need to contain your risks."

"The story stays the same but how you tell it changes as you progress further and further up."

"At the end of the day the key to a good pitch is to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re talking to at the fund."

"Success is the fire and how big you can make it burn."

"To build a great brand, you have to explain why everything looks the way it does."

"In the fundamentals of robotics, the more freedom of movement you have, the more expressions the character can have."

"Coming up with an idea, presenting it to people and getting them to say “yeah we believe in this” was nothing but entrepreneurship."

"At the end of my first year, myself and another student created a program to take robotics into local schools. Robotics is the perfect combination of the STEM subjects – Science, Technology, English and Maths – which younger students might not think to combine. The program expanded to four schools in Bristol in four years."

"Having spent time researching robotics undergraduate courses up and down the country, I was impressed by a video of the work being done in the labs here in Bristol – especially what was being done here with legged robots. That was what I specialised in while studying the degree course."

"I grew up in Nigeria and moved to the UK with my family when I was 11. I did my GCSEs and A Levels in Kent where I developed a real interest in the sciences. Moving into robotics seemed like the ideal way to combine physics, biology and maths in one subject, so I went on to study robotics at UWE here in Bristol."

"If governance is shaped only by those who already holds power it isn't governance but infringement."

"If the next majority are left out the world misses out on what its young brilliant minds including Africa has to offer."

"AI is moving fast we need outcomes not just dialogue."

"Let's build something that truly works not just for the few but for everyone."

"“The fusion of media and technology is reshaping how we communicate, share stories, and consume information.” Tomiwa Aladekomo at a tech summit speech."

"What is going down in the investing space has not really hit the early-stage investments as hard yet it is still mostly later-stage investors that have slowed down. So, I think everybody should prepare for a tighter market fundraising, people should prepare for fundraising to become more difficult. If you have raised before the slowdown, use your capital well; stretch it as far as it can go to profitability and sustainability. And if you haven’t raised, you need to know that it’s going to be a lot more difficult."

"Global expansion will make African tech companies more resilient, especially since they will be less reliant on the African market and less susceptible to its unreliability."

"Any company that is looking to expand to a new market has to learn to sell in those markets."

"After that, the guys at Big Cabal, the founders, and I started a conversation and they said, you know, you should come join us. And they wanted me to come do biz dev for them. And I was like, you guys can’t afford me. And somewhere along the line, the conversation goes to, do you want to come run it? And I said, that could be interesting because career-wise, I’d always wanted to kind of run my own business. I’d always wanted to build something, and I thought, I really liked TechCabal, I really liked Zikoko. I think the fundamental thesis of the business is interesting. We could do something with this, we could make it big."

"I initially moved back to Nigeria kicking and screaming. I wasn't ready for it, but I decided to make it work and avoided making rash decisions for the first six months to a year."

"Choose a platform where you can be consistent and you think you can build an audience, stick to what you are great at."

"Businesses are bought, not sold. The most important thing is to choose a problem you are excited about solving, and focusing on that every day."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is important to think of your co-funders and your partners as people you are going to be on a long journey with."

"Figuring out a market that is growing is some of the things people look out for."

"Solutions to hard work is persistence and resilience."

"Build something remarkable, be resourceful enough to find places where you can articulate what you are doing."

"It’s important to utilise all skills and knowledge gained from different experiences to create a successful business."

"At TechCabal, we think that technology will be the biggest driver of innovation, of employment growth, and high-quality employment growth, of productivity growth across countries over the next decade and beyond. And what that means is that the media that covers that technology must grow. There must be more of us to tell the stories of what's happening, how technology is affecting people's lives."

"We’ve built a really good data unit within TechCabal called TC Insights. And that’s because we know this matters. This is the future. This is a critical aspect of being the kind of publication that TechCabal wants to be."

"When it comes to being active politically, not everybody who registered is very active politically. So, if you look a the records, not just in Ondo State, but in every other election in other states, that has been happening."