What happens when you read the Bitcoin whitepaper to find loopholes and make quick money? For Brenton Naicker, Principal at CV VC Africa, those 8 pages completely changed his life trajectory.

In this episode of The Grinders Table, Brenton shares his journey from aspiring Wall Street banker to one of Africa's most influential blockchain advocates. We dive deep into his philosophy on exceptionalism, his thoughts on work-life balance for truly exceptional people, and his contrarian view that the future will be brand-based rather than firm-based.

Key Topics Covered:

• The moment Bitcoin clicked and changed everything
• Mission-driven vs money-driven entrepreneurship
• Why Africa is ground zero for blockchain innovation
• The philosophy of sacrifice and success
• How trust is fundamentally changing in business
• Building sustainable blockchain ecosystems in emerging markets

Notable Quotes:"If you persistently work harder at something than everybody else over a long arc of time, it's almost impossible to fail."

"The worst advice given to entrepreneurs: Just build it and they will come."

Whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or just curious about the future of technology in Africa, this conversation will challenge how you think about success, sacrifice, and what it takes to be truly exceptional.

In this episode, we sit down with Wale Akanbi, one of the co-founders of Aella. Aella became the first African lending fintech admitted to Y Combinator in 2017 and has since served over 2 million users across Nigeria and the Philippines.

Wale's journey, from teaching himself programming in Nigerian cyber cafes to building AI-powered financial inclusion tools, is a masterclass in persistence, vision, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.

He's currently building solutions at the intersection of AI and blockchain to solve cross-border trust challenges.

What we cover:

• The pressure and lessons from being one of YC's first African lending fintech
• Why every engineer doubled as customer service for their first 500K users
• The evolution from rule-based credit scoring to AI models predicting "willingness to pay"
• Building cross-functional teams in the age of AI
• His current work at the intersection of AI and blockchain for cross-border trust
• Why helping people matters more than power, fame, or money

What do you do when you discover a $281 billion problem that global pharmaceutical companies can't solve? If you're Ayodeji Alaran, you leave your corporate job and build the solution from your house in Lagos.

In this episode, Ayodeji shares the remarkable journey from pharmacy school to founding PBR Life Sciences, now building one of Africa's largest healthcare datasets. This isn't just another startup story - it's a masterclass in strategic thinking, long-term vision, and the power of being an outlier.

What You'll Learn:

• The "precedence principle" he uses to hire only outliers for his team
• How PBR builds products customers actually want (hint: they never build based on their own ideas)
• Why he believes African businesses suffer from "short-sightedness"
• The difference between building AI models from scratch vs. adapting Western algorithms for African markets
• Why "your entrepreneurial life started way before you started entrepreneurship"

Ayodeji's philosophy that "every problem has a solution" isn't just optimism - it's the foundation for building solutions that could reshape how the world thinks about African healthcare.

Connect with Ayodeji on LinkedIn and follow PBR Life Sciences for updates on their expansion across Africa.

Bernard Laurendeau built Ethiopia's first licensed payment system operator, advised the Prime Minister's office on job creation, and now operates from Tokyo helping Japanese billions find their way into African markets. But he has a contrarian message: Africa needs to stop chasing sexy tech and focus on boring infrastructure first.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why he respects unknown Lagos entrepreneurs more than Mark Zuckerberg
• How Ethiopia needs 10,000 new jobs daily to avoid catastrophe

• Why aid has been "market disrupting" for African development
• The difference between being a cultural chameleon and having real cultural intelligence
• His journey from management consultant to fintech CEO and back
• Why African entrepreneurs are the "Indiana Jones and MacGyvers" of business

Bernard shares candid insights about building in hostile environments, the importance of patient capital, and why African leaders need to become more comfortable with power. His unique perspective as someone who's navigated Ethiopian, French, American, and Japanese business cultures offers invaluable lessons for anyone interested in emerging markets.

Dr. Houda Ghozzi, founder of Open Startup (OST), shares her journey from professor to pan-African ecosystem builder. Following Tunisia's revolution, she transformed uncertainty into opportunity, now helping young entrepreneurs across 19 African countries develop through "hope, skills, and exposure."

Houda discusses entrepreneurship as a common language that transcends borders, the evolution of OST into the "Y-Combinator of deep tech," and why Africa's innovation story requires patience rather than just focusing on exits.

Her insights on cross-border collaboration, AI opportunities, and policy frameworks reveal a compelling vision for Africa's entrepreneurial future—one in which young people build solutions to local problems with global relevance.

After a decade as Nigeria's leading financial literacy advocate, Tunji Andrews realized education alone wasn't enough. Inspired by an elderly lottery agent from his childhood who fell into poverty, he founded Awabah to bring pension solutions to Nigeria's informal sector workers.

In this candid conversation, Tunji reveals how his company is using local language and cultural understanding to make retirement planning accessible to everyone from street vendors to market wholesalers. He shares surprising insights about customer behaviour, his contrary bet on focusing on pensions rather than payments or loans, and the personal cost of founder resilience.

Listen for valuable lessons on market segmentation, regulatory relationships, and why sometimes you need to "survive first, then scale."

Yassine Laghzioui, CEO of UM6P Ventures and Director of Entrepreneurship at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, joins The Grinders Table to discuss building Africa's innovation ecosystem through deep tech investment.

When Yassine chose to return to Morocco while his peers stayed abroad, he embarked on a journey to transform how innovation happens in Africa. In this conversation, he shares why Africa doesn't need "savers" but rather builders and executors, how constraints drive innovation more effectively than abundance, and why he believes Africa will become a global leader in deep tech within the next decade.

We explore Yassine's philosophy that "entrepreneurship is not a job, it's a mindset," his approach to identifying promising deep tech founders in environments with limited data, and why he's particularly excited about Africa's potential in agricultural technology and green tech.

This episode offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in the future of innovation in emerging markets.

In this reshared episode, Uwem speaks with Massimiliano 'Massi' Spalazzi, former CEO of Jumia Nigeria and early employee who helped scale the company to become Africa's first tech IPO on the NYSE.

Key highlights:

• The origins of Jumia in Nigeria and early challenges of building an e-commerce pioneer
• How Jumia introduced cash-on-delivery to transform online shopping in a low-trust environment
• Building specialized teams when talent was scarce and the impact on Africa's tech ecosystem
• Balancing scale, growth and profitability across African markets
• Leadership lessons from managing distributed teams across the continent

Whether you're building an e-commerce business, scaling across African markets, or interested in the evolution of tech in Africa, Massi's insights remain essential listening for entrepreneurs and business leaders.