The Grinders Table

Zahra Baitie-Boateng built her career at the intersection of Africa and China - from Yale to founding Beijing's first Africa Week, to seven years building Africa's Business Heroes into a pan-African entrepreneurship institution. In this conversation, she talks candidly about the data behind the Africa-China trade relationship, why she believes implementation capacity matters more than good ideas, and the belief about strategy execution it took her seven years to unlearn.

A failing startup. A tweet he almost scrolled past. A cold email offering to work for free. Now Partner at Microtraction, one of Africa's earliest and most active pre-seed investment firms, he has been consequential in the growth of the startup ecosystem in Nigeria/Africa.In this episode, we talk about the following : The tweet and the cold email that got him into Microtraction in three weeksWhy he treats desperation as fuel, not something to hide from investorsHis contrarian take on friendship: “it should be transactional”The mother's mantra that got him through years of fundraising rejectionFollow The Grinders Table for new episodes with African tech's investors, founders, and ecosystem builders - out biweekly.

Oluseun Onigbinde co-founded BudgIT at a Lagos hackathon in 2011 with one conviction: that the gap between what Nigeria's budget data showed and what citizens could understand was itself a governance failure. Fifteen years later, he runs Africa's most recognised fiscal transparency organisation across six countries — and he'll tell you the theory he built it on may need rewriting.In this episode, we get into the founding frustration that made him walk away from First Bank, why factivism won't cure misinformation, whether the transmission line between citizen anger and institutional change is broken, what civic tech in Africa consistently gets wrong, and what he would do differently if he were starting BudgIT today.A rare conversation with a builder who has been at it long enough to question his own assumptions.

Yvonne Johnson left investment banking in New York to join the transformation team at First Bank of Nigeria. She spent eight years there, rising to Head of Strategy and Corporate Development - restructuring the operating model and building the bank's first digital finance strategy. When she left in 2018, she didn't start a lender. She co-founded Indicina, the API-driven credit infrastructure company that banks, digital lenders, and fintechs across Nigeria and Kenya now use to make faster, smarter credit decisions. This episode is a masterclass in building at the infrastructure layer - the rails, not the balance sheet.Key Topics Covered:Why she left Merrill Lynch to join First Bank - the deliberate career bet on institutional transformationWhat eight years inside Nigeria's largest retail bank taught her about stakeholder management and systemic changeThe founding decision: why Indicina was never going to be a lenderThe cost of capital argument: why banks will always win if you try to compete on balance sheetHow to sell to institutional clients with long procurement cycles and multiple sign-offsThe real friction in Africa's credit gap - it is not just a data problem, it is an accessibility problemThe opportunity cost problem: why banks choose government bonds over consumer loansWhat the next ten years looks like for African credit infrastructureWhat she would do differently - customer sequencing and the balance sheet question revisited

Eunice Ajim graduated high school at 15, moved to the US from Cameroon with almost no financial support, and built a hairstyling business to pay for college. She quit Apple inside eighteen months, got wiped out building her first company, and slept in her car before she ever raised a dollar. Then she co-founded OpenTeams, exited it, and launched Ajim Capital, a pre-seed and seed fund backing African tech founders, with no institutional backing, no famous university network, and LPs she found on the internet. In this conversation, we go from Austin to Cameroon to Africa's next category leaders.