Ezra Olubi’s sartorial choices are often eccentric, garish, unconventional, outlandish and non-conformist; with plenty rings on his fingers and lip gloss to top it all up.
He cross-dresses as well. He is not your regular billionaire businessman who fancies smart suits and expensive ties.
Except that President Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t approve; and barely concealed his disapproval this week.
Nigeria’s 79-year-old President looked baffled and uncomfortable as 35-year-old Olubi waltzed past him and into the auditorium, after the latter received his Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) plaque from him, during the National Awards Investiture ceremony which held at the International Conference Centre (ICC) in Abuja, on Tuesday, October 11.
For a few seconds, the Nigerian leader had his mouth hanging open as he watched Olubi disappear into the crowd.
Lazy Nigerian youth, some old school Nigerian parents may have muttered in the rarefied Abuja temperatures. But Olubi is everything but lazy.
Oyo State-born Olubi is one of the many young persons who have put Nigeria’s burgeoning tech ecosystem on the world map.
In October 2020, American e-payment services company, Stripe, acquired Paystack–a Nigerian startup co-founded by Olubi and Shola Akinlade from a Babcock University hostel–for over $200 million (N76 billion).
“I grew up in Lagos. Started writing software around 2002, 2003. That’s when I met Ezra. We went to school together…Babcock university. Sometime in 2015, I figured out I could charge a card from my computer. I thought it was cool,” says Akinlade.
Interestingly, the duo always modelled their startup after Stripe which was founded in 2010.
“We became the first Nigerian company to get into YC in 2016. (Y Combinator is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Stripe).
“Our story was very simple. For us, it’s about the mission. We are driven by the mission to accelerate payments on the continent, and we are convinced that Stripe will help us get there faster. It is a very natural move,” he says.
Akinlade and Olubi hope that their story inspires other young entrepreneurs in Nigeria and across the world; and motivates them to pursue their dreams against all odds.
“If one of the most sophisticated companies in Silicon Valley can acquire a company from our ecosystem, like, that is just going to unlock a lot of opportunities. This is going to tell people that you can make things and…it can work. You can build your dreams and you can get it done,” Akinlade adds.
Akinlade also received a national award from President Buhari on Tuesday.
Nigeria’s Silicon Valley straddles much of Lagos and Abuja these days and is peopled by garishly and unconventionally attired young men and women like Olubi who strut around bus-stops with back-packs laden with laptops and internet modems. Sometimes, law enforcement mistakes them for internet fraudsters and they are profiled, brutalised and even killed.
However, these ‘tech-broses’ and ‘tech-babes’ are daily doing their bit to diversify the nation’s economy in the internet age by kick-starting and sustaining Unicorns (privately held startup companies valued at over US$1 billion).
It is little wonder the nation garlanded them among 447 national awardees this week.
They may not look it, but these young men and women driving Nigeria’s tech ecosystem like Olubi, are worth their collective weights in gold.