Modern Business Apprenticeship

The term “Mafia” has been used to describe groups of former employees from a successful company who go on to start their own ventures. 

The most famous is the PayPal Mafia, which includes:

• Elon Musk – Co-founded Tesla and Space

• Peter Thiel – Founded Palantir and was an early investor in Facebook

• Reid Hoffman – Co-founded LinkedIn

• Max Levchin – Founded Affirm

• Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim – Co-founded YouTube

In Nigeria, a similar phenomenon is occurring with Paystack, a fintech company acquired by Stripe in 2020.

Selar: Founded by Douglas Kendyson, who worked at Paystack before starting Selar. He served as a Customer Success Expert and Software Engineer at Paystack, where he identified the gap that inspired Selar.

Grey: Idorenyin Obong, an ex-Paystack Android engineer, co-founded Grey, a fintech offering digital foreign accounts for Africans to facilitate international payments.

Chowdeck: Femi Aluko and Olumide Ojo, both early Paystack engineers, launched Chowdeck, an on-demand food delivery service now operating in several Nigerian cities.

Other examples outside Paystack 

Moniepoint: Tosin Eniolorunda, the founder, previously worked at Interswitch, another Nigerian fintech giant.

The Nigerian banking sector has also seen its share of entrepreneurial alumni:

Access Bank: Herbert Wigwe, the late co-founder of Access Bank, joined Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank), working there for over a decade and rising to the position of executive director before leaving in 2002 to acquire and transform Access Bank alongside his business partner, Aigboje Aig-Imouk.

Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank): Before founding GTBank, Fola Adeola and Tayo Aderinokun worked together at Continental Merchant Bank in the mid-1980s.

These industry leaders didn’t just work at their jobs; they absorbed their culture, learned how to raise funds, and built networks that propelled their future successes.

One of the best ways to learn how to run a business is by taking a job inside one.

If possible, take a job inside the kind of business you eventually want to launch.

This is the same model the Igbos have mastered for years through the Igba Boy (apprenticeship) system.

The system of learning a trade by working in the trade.

But this will not be a case of just getting a job, showing up, and collecting a salary.

This is going into that job with intentionality, to study how the business works as a whole:

• How the roles and departments complement each other

• How the leadership hierarchy drives the company’s goals

• How the entire industry operates beyond what they teach in books

It also becomes your chance to build key relationships, make a name for yourself, and save some capital on the side for when you’re ready to launch.

Too many people suffer unnecessarily in entrepreneurship because they try to wing it without understanding how the engine of business really works.

For example, if you want to run a marketing agency, don’t just apply as a social media manager at any random company.

Go work at a top agency.

Learn their structure.

Study how they pitch, how they win accounts, how they hire, how they price, how they handle partnerships.

Watch how they lead creative teams.

Understand how they keep the lights on and pay salaries.

Give yourself 3–5 years of this kind of experience, and when you finally step out to build your own, you’re not guessing. 

You’ll be moving with lived knowledge, the kind you can’t fully get from books or business classes.

It’s the Igba Boy system, but this time, you’re getting paid to learn.

When you choose roles within companies/industries that align with your entrepreneurial goals, you can acquire the knowledge, skills, and networks needed to build a successful business.

I’m rooting for you!

— Ebere Lisa