#67, Yele Bademosi - On people, startups and funding in Africa, pt 1

Building The Future Podcast

My guest today is Yele Bademosi. Yele is the founder of Microtraction, an angel investment platform that funds Africa’s technology entrepreneurs in their early stage. Microtraction is one of the most active pre-seed investment firms in Nigeria. Yele and I have known each other for some time. We’ve worked together closely in the past, when he became the first person to join my previous company, Starta, barely a few weeks after it was founded in late 2015. It is quite fitting that Yele is the first guest on season 4 of this podcast after a long break. We recorded this episode in late 2019, before COVID, so a lot of the things we talked about might be out of kilter with the current post-COVID world realities. This is the first of the two-part interview. In this episode, we talked about how he started his career and why he left medicine to pursue a whole different path. We also talked about leadership, growth and how good relationships often create a funnel of positive serendipity. I hope you’ll enjoy this episode as much as I did.

In this episode we discussed;

• How he left medicine to pursue his Startup dream
• His first idea for the Nigerian market and why it failed
• The hype around blockchain and the possibilities it holds for the African startup ecosystem
• Yele's definition of success and what growth looks like in tech startups
• If regular management hacks can work for the new tech startups
• The role good relationships played in his journey and what it means for upcoming generations
• The two things new tech founders should focus on in their early stage and why