The Wave Podcast is back, and we’re getting straight into it. For our first episode, we sat down with Odun Eweniyi, Co-founder and COO of PiggyVest, for a masterclass in building a tech novel-giant that changed how one of the largest African countries interacted with money.
Lagos, Nigeria: Host, Timi Anako, got Odun to reveal the strategic mindset that turned her earliest ventures into a fintech powerhouse serving millions of Nigerians. If you think scaling is just about fundraising, Odun is here to deliver the cold, hard truth: the core of the work is less glamorous, and the lessons are often learned on a road littered with numerous startup ideas that couldn’t pass the viability test.
This episode isn’t just about PiggyVest’s success; it’s an unfiltered, authoritative roadmap about Odun’s journey in building high-growth tech companies.
The Strategic Truths: Unpacking the CEO’s Playbook
Odun’s conversation was loaded with honest advice and necessary critiques of the ecosystem. Here are the core insights that will change how you view your startup:
1. The Funding Illusion: When Capital Isn’t Patient
The conversation reached a pivotal point when Odun cut straight to the bone of African fundraising: “We need patient capital, right? And a lot of capital is not patient.” (00:26:00). She speaks with a powerful conviction about the strategic necessity of remaining a predominantly founder-led company, acknowledging that external funding is a preference, not a mandate (00:33:04).
This perspective – learned after their initial attempts to raise and the single announced round in 2018 – is a crucial challenge to founders caught in the hype of the VC-first narrative.
2. The One Million User Wake-Up Call: Infrastructure Will Fail
Odun gave founders the most valuable, uncomfortable truth about scaling: hitting your first major milestone doesn’t mean you’re ready. When PiggyVest hit its first million customers, the reality was stark: the app got “buggy,” and the entire team had to go back and “revamp this entire thing.” (00:17:31).
She credits the engineering team for working between September 2020 and March 2021 to completely rebuild the infrastructure. This is the ultimate lesson: success will expose your flaws faster than failure will.
3. The Multi-Startup Hustle: Why Failure is the Founder’s True Seed Round
Before PiggyVest, Odun and her co-founders didn’t just have one failed venture; they had several. Odun took the audience on a roll call of her experimental projects:
- Pearls: A discount card platform meant to deliver “free stuff” (00:03:51).
- PushCV: A solution born from her own frustrating experience with job application nepotism, designed to get the best candidates in front of decision-makers (00:04:26).
She highlights how these early ventures, including attempts in food, gig work, and Shopify for Nigeria (00:07:46), were essentially market research. They revealed a common thread: the goal was always to serve the consumer and “build for people like us” (00:06:01). This history proves that failure isn’t final; it’s the raw, essential data you need to strike gold.
4. The Volatility Roadmap: Hire Economists, Not Just Coders
Addressing the reality that Nigeria is “volatile,” Odun revealed her strategy for managing market chaos: “We just put together a really smart treasury team.” (00:37:42). Her stability blueprint relies on experts who “do fantastic work actually predicting the director of the economy” (00:38:04). This is the key takeaway for any founder operating in a frontier market: you must build your own core stability by integrating top-tier financial strategy, or you will “run into challenges no matter how far you’ve gone.” (00:23:20).
5. The Founder’s Compass: The Secret to Not Quitting
Circling back to the personal journey, Odun’s advice for any founder is simple but profound: train your self-awareness. She stresses the difficulty of being honest with yourself and advises founders to “train that self-awareness, that self honesty like a muscle, because it’s when you know it’s time to stop is when you know this is just a pause.” (00:35:14). It’s the essential internal work needed to navigate the challenges, failures, and euphoria of building.
Don’t Just Take the Takes, Get the Blueprint.
From her early start, building solutions for her peers, to her current view on why “we run our own little cities” (00:23:45) in Africa due to infrastructural gaps, Odun Eweniyi delivers the definitive reality check for African tech.
If you’re ready to move past the hype and learn the cold, strategic truths that separate long-term builders from flash-in-the-pan ideas, you need to hear this conversation.
Listen to the full episode of The Wave Podcast with Odun Eweniyi now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!
