At the launch of EbonyLife Place in London on October 8, 2026, Mo Abudu was joined by an unexpected figure: Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, the founder and CEO of Flutterwave. His presence reflects a wider shift in Nigeria’s cultural scene, where technology entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly visible as patrons of the arts. Paystack co-founder Shola Akinlade’s […]
3 weeks ago
At the launch of EbonyLife Place in London on October 8, 2026, Mo Abudu was joined by an unexpected figure: Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, the founder and CEO of Flutterwave. His presence reflects a wider shift in Nigeria’s cultural scene, where technology entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly visible as patrons of the arts. Paystack co-founder Shola Akinlade’s involvement in football through Sporting Lagos, alongside the financing of Editi Effiong’s The Black Book, illustrates how tech founders are extending their interests into entertainment.
Their money now flows into film production, independent media ventures, sports and cultural institutions. A decade ago, Nigeria’s technology founders had little public recognition beyond their industry. Today, they are increasingly part of the machinery that funds and shapes the country’s cultural life.
Entrepreneur and founder of popular tech media newsletter Big Tech This Week, Fatu Ogwuche has watched this happen from a front-row seat and decided the story deserves a bigger stage. On Thursday, October 22, she launched Tech This Week, a weekly live show billed as Africa’s answer to Silicon Valley’s TBPN and Europe’s ETN. It is the next step for the media company she founded and runs, and the reasoning behind it was straightforward. The people shaping Nigerian culture, business and now policy are more visible than ever, but most of what the public knows about them stops at the funding round or the product launch. Ogwuche wanted to know what they believed, and she wanted them to say it in front of everyone, in real time.
Her route to that desk was not linear, and she is the first to say so. At Meta she led Government Partnerships and covered 48 countries. After two and a half years, the work began to feel monotonous: “the same playbook in Nigeria, the same playbook in Kenya.” But the job taught her something that still shapes her coverage. The gap between governments and platforms came down to communication and presence. Governments needed to learn to use the platforms to talk to citizens, whether through Facebook Live during a campaign or Stories during a crisis, and to hear back from them. Users, many of whom earn their livelihoods on these platforms, needed to feel that someone at the company cared. She likens it to the Central Bank directive requiring banks to keep branches. Customers need to know there is always somewhere close by to go with their issues. Communication and presence were the two things she was trying to build in every market, and they are not far from what she is trying to build now.
Ogwuche started a weekly tech newsletter on Twitter’s Revue platform, where she wrote down her observations about the industry before the live show; it existed as a weekly Twitter Spaces conversation with CEOs and industry insiders that drew over 100,000 listeners cumulatively. Now with her own carved out stable space in tech, she left Meta and moved to Lagos to focus on her newsletter full-time.
What she found was an industry that had grown up. Ogwuche calls Nigeria’s best-known startups “the 10-year-olds”: Flutterwave, Paystack, PiggyVest and their cohort, all founded around 2016, the year Mark Zuckerberg visited Lagos. A generation has grown up on their products, and so these companies have become essential fixtures of Nigerian life, less like ordinary businesses and more like institutions the country relies on. That maturity has produced liquidity and freedom. For instance, Paystack sold to Stripe for $200 million in 2020. Founders no longer need to be in “hustle mode,” and so they can chase their interests. GB Agboola has sports investments. Odun Eweniyi co-founded Group Therapy. Sporting Lagos has a pipeline that trains football talent and sells it to European clubs, so the club is as much a business as a passion. Founders also back films. When she asked Agboola about his reasoning for investing in The Black Book, he told her he was not necessarily expecting a return. He backed it because Effiong was a fantastic filmmaker. The film then did very well, which she sees as proof that it can be a win for the investors as well as the culture.
For her, that was the realization: technology, culture, health and wellness, and every other part of industry and society were beginning to intersect. “What a very beautiful, magical time in tech right now,” she says. “Just imagine the stories and opportunities that can come out of that.” But she also saw a gap: there was no central place for all the interested parties to come together. If founders with money are looking for what to fund, and passionate entrepreneurs with ideas are looking for backing, the two groups should know about each other. This strengthened her resolve to get the live show off the ground. She wants the show to make them aware of each other, so that they embark on projects and take risks because the funding is there.
She sees a disconnect between the public’s appetite for founders’ stories and how little many founders share of themselves. Many have been covered negatively and now guard their words. A lot of them do not trust the press, she says, and when they do speak they stick to their talking points. Companies have grown smarter about telling their own stories, and they have hired teams who are good at it. But what people increasingly want, she says, is to hear from the founders themselves, and the ones who put themselves in front of people do well because people connect with them. Her best example is GB Agboola, who has become far more visible: more interviews, funny tweets, appearances at the UN. She notes how public perception of Flutterwave’s products has warmed as he has become more present. “A lot of these founders understand now that in order to bridge the gap, people need to hear what your company is doing directly from you.”
Her own edge, is relationships. Thanks to her time at Meta, she is on a first-name basis with pretty much any big tech CEO and can just text them directly to ask about a headline. There is plenty of good reporting on Nigerian tech, but much of it is done by observers looking in from the outside. Ogwuche is, in her own words, a media junkie who consumes a great deal and wants to make the kinds of content she enjoys. She loves TBPN and saw, immediately, the glaring absence of anything like it in Nigeria. There are good recorded programmes, and recorded programmes would be easier to make. But she loves the realness and immediacy of live television, where nothing can be hidden. She has studied livestreamers, Twitch streamers among them, and tested formats with her audience, and so far, she says, they have all worked. Then she tried the format in the wild. At a stablecoin conference in Amsterdam, she streamed live from the floor, doing commentary and interviewing speakers. Sponsors had been told to expect one to two thousand live viewers per show. Peak viewership on day one was 10,000. On day two it was 18,000, with audiences from Nigeria, the UK, Ghana and Canada. “I have done my research,” she says. “I’ve experimented. Now let me go in.”
What she wants from Tech This Week is the curation of big ideas and the ambitious people leading them, communicating directly to an audience she is now confident exists. If something happens in the industry on Monday, she wants the CEO or the person who had a hand in it on screen by Thursday, explaining why it matters and what was behind the decision. The show will have different segments to explore every avenue of the business, not only the product: launches with the product manager or the CTO, the hands-on people behind invention and innovation, the new and the nostalgic. Unlike TBPN and ETN, which are two-man shows, this one is just her. “I want the show to be as real and as current and as relevant as it can possibly be for our industry,” she says. She hopes it becomes a staple, a format that exists and works, and that companies begin to plan around it by thinking of a launch as something to talk about on the show that same week. She wants it to be a safe space where founders can admit struggles and “tell the real story,” she is clear that it will not be a gotcha show. “I want to talk only about innovation and process, the great things that happen in the ecosystem.”
It is exciting to her when conversations that usually stay inside the tech community break out and capture everyone. Lagos Life, the viral multiplayer simulation game created by Shalom Rayhamen that dominated online discourse this past month, did exactly that. In her newsletter, she argued that for a decade the story of African tech had been told almost entirely through fintech, and that Lagos Life was the exact breath of fresh air the industry needed. Just eight days after launch, Rayhamen’s company, Vatar, had been valued at $10 million. Between that game and the Danfo game by Eureka, and many others, she sees innovation coming not only from necessity but from play and wonder, which matter just as much. Necessity may be the mother of invention, she says, but Big Tech This Week wants to highlight how playfulness leads to innovation too. Asked whether this signals a move from tech that fixes problems to tech that gives pleasure, she does not hesitate to agree. It is happening in the ecosystem’s tenth year, she says, because the industry is finally looking beyond just problem solving.
Nor does the shift stop at games. It includes the small, everyday problems, and improving things for one particular community. She points to Pewbeam AI, an agent designed to listen to sermons in real time and project relevant verses on screen. It displays hymn lyrics as the pianist plays and pulls up scripture when a pastor cites a verse, keeping slides in sync during live services without the scrambling. Eight months after launch it had more than 5,000 downloads and paying church customers in 30 countries across three continents. “If this was 10 years ago, no one’s thinking about that,” she says. “We’re innovating now not just for big-picture society problems but also just to make life a little easier and faster, and that is so monumental.” Not many people in the tech community know about Pewbeam or how unusual it is. Companies and founders like these are exactly who she wants the live show to bring to the fore.
She also credits AI for the speed of it all. Thanks to AI, Rayhamen and Opeyemi Adeniran, the developer behind Eureka’s Danfo game, coded both products on their own. Rayhamen even started and finished the coding of Lagos Life in a single night. A decade ago, Ogwuche says, this would have taken a big team and several months. Ogwuche is a huge AI enthusiast, and she wants to change the perception of it as a boogeyman. She loves it for how it aids research, refinement and speed. But she is firm that regulation must grow alongside it. “I worked in big tech long enough to know regulators must exist.” She saw first-hand how founders and their teams, focused on maximising profit, scaling and inventing, can fail to think about the societal and ethical implications for privacy, safety and jobs, and about being their neighbour’s keeper. Companies, she argues, do not follow rules on their own. “They need babysitters, and the babysitters are regulators.” The show, she says, will cover how to grow AI in Africa while growing the safeguards simultaneously.
That impulse to take up space is also behind one of her most debated pieces. When she put Jumia on her Mount Rushmore of African tech, alongside M-Pesa, Flutterwave and Andela, it caused a kerfuffle in the Nigerian tech community. Some people felt Jumia had no place there because it had “fallen off,” as the young adult slang goes. It had not sustained its landmark delivery system and had been outpaced by the likes of Chowdeck and Bolt. Some joked that Jumia must have paid her. Her case is simpleJumia, flawed as it was, kicked open a door for every African startup that followed, that deserved to be recognised. The downward trajectory it has had does not erase that. The reaction told her something about the ecosystem. “We demonize failure so much. We’re almost very happy for people to fail.” She notes that Rayhamen has said she plans for Lagos Life to be valued at a billion dollars, and people are laughing at her and calling her overconfident, as though what she has achieved in under a month would not have seemed impossible before she did it.
Ogwuche hopes Nigeria’s and Africa’s tech ecosystem will adopt more of the Silicon Valley mentality, where failing upward is common and accepted. She is aware that a lot of the people given that licence are white men, and that women and people of colour do not usually get the same latitude. But her point remains. Many of the ventures that become successful are the founder’s second, because of the lessons learned from the first, and investors reward that experience instead of punishing it. She wants all things Big Tech This Week to be a safe space with constructive criticism and encouragement, and the live show will push that too, with candid conversations with founders about their challenges, especially in a uniquely tough Nigerian economy. She will continue to cover launches, ambitious builders and the new categories, leaning on Nigeria, which she calls “startup central,” with the rest of the continent in view.
She is also, she says, in an unusual position. For years, she has been the observer, writing about the founders and sitting across from them at tables. Now, she has built a platform that asks them to show up differently, and asking audiences to see them differently, too. If she succeeds, Tech This Week could become more than a place to discuss the industry’s latest moves. It could help shape what gets built next, who gets the backing to build it, and which stories come to define African tech. Week after week, live, she will put the idea to the test.
