By RARZACK OLAEGBE
Some are making a decision that is going to end badly.
Leaders are not born. Diverse learning, a legion of scars, and the social capital of some ‘’elders’’ have formed them. The social capital is now in short supply. Thus, some fintech startup founders do not get the opportunity to drink from the fountain. Those who got the opportunity did not drink from the fountain; they merely washed their hands and moved on, thinking they were clean. But they are not. The result is evident when these startup founders get into trouble.
On the one hand
Adedeji Olowe sits on the board of Moniepoint, Paystack and other fintech firms. In his weekly blog entitled ‘’boards and investors are failing the founders they’re supposed to equip’’, Olowe shared that somewhere, a founder who had raised a decent round, built a real product, and had people rooting for them, ‘’is in the middle of making a decision that is going to end badly’’.
On the other hand
Olowe had watched this scenario play out enough times. That was when a smart person with good company, real momentum, and then something avoidable blew it up. The question that came to him was, when these founders messed up, where were their minders? When he reflected on his career, as a young person still figuring out how professional environments worked until he sat on boards, he said a pattern stood out. ‘’Many of us who occupy board seats are actively failing the founders we are supposed to be leading,’’ he wrote.
In the long term
Why do fintech and other companies have boards? Olowe explained that aside from fiduciary responsibility, shareholder oversight, and strategic guidance, ‘’a board is also meant to be a room full of people who have already made the expensive mistakes and are in a position to help the people in front of them avoid repeating the same mistakes’’. However, this is where some boards have dropped the ball. Olowe knows what a board can do for a person’s development because it happened to him. He traced almost every meaningful thing he understands about leadership back to specific people and specific rooms.
He reeled out names. Christopher Kolade and Ernest Ndukwe. He met them during his time at SystemSpecs. These men’s names carried weight. Nobody lectured him. Nobody handed him a manual. ‘’But as I sat in that room, my brain reset itself. For him, the presence of these men did the work that no training programme could ever do.”
Also, he mentioned his former boss, Aigboje Aig-Imokhuede, who exposed him to the ‘’real deal’’. What he received during his time was more rigorous than most structured programmes could have delivered. ‘’I was not the only one who benefitted from being in that orbit. The board around Aigboje was its own institution’’.
However, Segun Ogbonlowo was the first person who showed Olowe what it looked like to carry oneself properly in a boardroom. Early on, Ogbonlowo guided him through how a board member was supposed to behave in the room. Bunmi Lawson did something different. Lawson laid the foundation of how to think about ‘’risk and compliance’’ in a practical and grounded way rather than theoretically. That understanding has travelled with Olowe everywhere. Now he is paying it forward.
In the short term
Who are your mentees? As a board member, what do you do when a startup gets into trouble? How many fintech founders have benefitted from your fountain of knowledge?
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