For Nigeria’s New Founders
But, “Jobberman was at the forefront of making jobs info available as well as making job applications as simple as possible.”
And, naturally, the market, bustling with over 50million young people in its labour market, took notice. In December 2009, Chika Nwobi of L5lab reached out to the founders and, a month later, they signed a “strategic equity partnership.” In August 2010, Tiger Global, which had previously invested in Linkedin and Facebook, pitched a million dollars. Soon, Jobberman expanded into Ghana.
In the Nigerian start- up space, it is commonplace to hear of Opeyemi spoken about in reverential tones. It has been said that the man who turns 33 this year, is the oracle of fundraising. They may be right, indeed— the man did attract one million dollars for one of his start- ups within two years of launching it, and he’s been part of many other landmark projects.
Case in point: Whogohost. Founded by Opeyemi two years before Jobberman, it’s also noted for an impressive number of user numbers. As reported by Techloy, in 2014, Whogohost had become the “second largest domain name and web hosting company in Nigeria, with [ more than] 2,600 domain names hosted on its servers.”
Then there’s Fastforward. It’s quite easy to see why someone might think the venture fund needs to exist. With it, Opeyemi hopes to find more entrepreneurs like himself from the universities. Co- created with Passion Incubator’s Olufunbi Falayi, Fastforward is fuelling the fire of behind ideas of undergraduates and recent graduates who may be nursing entrepreneurial dreams of their own.
On its website, the company declares that it has N200 million ( about $ 525,000) to invest, with each selected new business receiving between N250,000 and N2,000,000, for not more than 25 percent equity in the ventures. “A lot has changed and it’s clear today that the way to create jobs is by encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Opeyemi in an interview.
At Talentql, Ope’s tech industry sageness is fully in play. As reported in November 2020 on the trade blog Techpoint, “Akintunde and Yusuf will actively run the new start- up in Nigeria, while Awoyemi, who is in the US, will take charge of matters relating to the startup’s business and partnerships.” Akintunde, being Sultan Akintunde, founder of Devcareer, the not- for- profit tech accelerator. Yusuf, being Adewale Yusuf, who, until Talentql, created and ran Techpoint.
It was Yusuf who’d dreamt up Talentql. For years, he’d studied the migration of software engineers from Africa to Europe where the big companies could easily snag them up. He thought, why go abroad if the jobs could come meet you here?
He said, “In the first place, talent relocated to Lagos for opportunities. But what we’re doing is to take these opportunities back to talent. During a 60- minute drive within the city of IleIfe, you’ll see more than ten higher institutions. And for Talentql to be sustainable, we need to go where talent is currently abundant and promises to remain so.”
Nonetheless, for this new expedition to take off, Yusuf needed a guru, a veteran of the Nigerian tech space whose network also extended to the markets into which Talentql must extend. That’s Opeyemi. Talentql has since raised in $ 300,000 in pre- seed funding round led by funding round is led by Zedcrest Capital, the parent company of the much more famous Zedvance, the consumer finance company.
If you search the Web, even if you do not find a lot of current stories about Opeyemi, the hero to many young Nigerian entrepreneurs, you will find a couple of articles and a podcast episode in which he freely gives his tips to anyone who needs to fund their business on precisely what to do. If you happen to meet him, you may want to ask him this for me: “Making history on two fronts, aren’t we now, Mr Opeawo?”
Like two sides of the same coin, the man, on one side, builds celebrated companies; and on the flipside, he helps more Africans break into global business.