On Friday, the 24th of June 2022, the world’s largest startup community, Startup Grind hosted founders Khalil Halilu and Sultan Akintunde to a fireside chat. The event took place at Abuja’s famous Mambaah Cafe and had in attendance over 50 guests.
Startup Grind was built to give startups everywhere the education and opportunities they need to build, grow and scale their companies. Through its series of conversations, The Next Big Thing, it curates interviews from founders, entrepreneurs and startups and provides an invaluable repository of information for other startups within the ecosystem to succeed regardless of geographic location or socio-economic circumstances.
Sharing experiences from their journeys as tech entrepreneurs, the founders had an insightful discussion around the topic of technology and how it can be used to solve many of the problems we face in Nigeria. Khalil, founder of Shap Shap, a technology driven logistics company and The CANs, a technology hub, spoke to an eager audience about his motivations and inspirations for founding these companies.
According to him, It doesn’t make sense to leave a place like Africa where there is so much gap between our problems and the resources to fix those problems. It only makes sense to fuse in technology.
The conversations touched on everything technology. From finance to marketing to talent and talent management. The conversations also highlighted various aspects of the tech ecosystem and the very important roles that each sub-niche have to play in the overall success of any innovative business.
Sultan the co-founder of Alt_School and Talent QL championed the conversation on talent in the industry and described himself as an entrepreneur, saying he would rather simply call himself an entrepreneur and not necessarily a successful entrepreneur. To him, success is relative for everyone.
Speaking on the idea behind the hub, Khalil stated that the goal of the hub was to put to use the community of people they had gathered and bring everyone together to share knowledge. He revealed that the plan was to make it small but the idea took on a life of its own and is now what it is today.
Closing out, he gave advice to the young startups citing examples in renowned entrepreneurs “at every point in time, there’s always something to focus on, don’t always try to do everything”. At the end of the day, guests were given an opportunity to ask questions as the event rounded up on a high note.
