How Opeyemi Awoyemi Became The Shaman
NOT as much as you would expect has been written about this dude. And that’s a shame. For someone who has been in optimal performance on Nigeria’s increasingly storied tech and start- up stage for close to 15 years, that Opeyemi Awoyemi’s google search doesn’t cough up a mighty ton of media links is just… weird.
But let’s see what I can do.
I met Opeyemi Awoyemi once. At the time I had an implacable tussle going on between a popular humorous newsletter and my day job as an ad agency creative director. He said, “I like what you were doing. How much do you think it’s worth?”
By that question, he was enthusiastically asking me for the valuation. But sorry, I had no idea. The query had caught me unawares. In response, I must have rambled out something unintelligible.
Which was why, of course, nothing came of that conversation. So, kids, if you have any side gig that’s gaining traction, at least find a way to get it valued. You never know who would come knocking, especially with Lagos now having its day in the sun— the most desired creative ecosystem on the African continent for venture capitalists.
For the city to attain these towering heights of notoriety, however, adventurous businesspeople like Opeyemi, known by most as Opeawo ( a musical contraction of his first and last names), had to first hit the streets.
These days, Opeyemi may be spending some of his waking hours working as cofounder of Talentql, which helps to “hire, develop, and manage remote talent for global companies”; and as a senior product manager with Indeed, a US- based employment site but, before these current roles, he had, as the saying goes, been there done that.
You would immediately remember his starmaking start- up, Jobberman. Opeyemi had cofounded the job search and recruitment site in 2009 while he was studying computer engineering at the Obafemi Awolowo University. The other founders, Olalekan
Olude and Ayodeji Adewunmi, were his mates. In just six years, a record at the time, the business was acquired by Ringier One Africa Media.
Jobberman, of course, wasn’t the first in its field but it carried with it a certain attitude that gelled with the Silicon Valley mindset that was beginning to blossom in the mid 2010s, thanks largely to Co- Creation Hub, the first incubator in Lagos and Nigeria. Jobberman ran, not like a subsistence hustle for three young college graduates, but as a serious company that might someday go global.
“The goal at the time my partners and I started the business was to create a service that could impact on Nigerians; a business that was viable and could be used by millions of people,” Opeyemi told Ventures Africa in 2013. This was two years before it was bought by African One Media ( which would later merge with Rigier). Jobberman had recently become the fifth most visited site in the country partly because of aggressive marketing and sales strategy. This programme included exclusive partnerships with over 7,000 employers and a CV polishing service it offered to job hunters.
The other reason Jobberman exploded was that it was just time for an idea of its kind. As Opeyemi said, before Jobberman, “If you needed a job, you had to go around physically to offices dropping your CVS, or buy a physical newspaper to see the jobs available in town.”