Ross: Pivot! Pivot!! Pivot!!!

Chandler: Shut up! Shut up!! Shut up!!!

You got me. I’m a huge Friends fan. Friends is that show that keeps on giving.

So this article is really about Ope Adeoye and the evolution of OnePipe but Ross’s couch situation in Friends is such a great way to illustrate the learnings from my #founderswhodared conversation with Ope.
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Let’s do a quick overview

PROBLEM – his apartment wasn’t comfortable and welcoming

• Ross wanted a comfortable couch in his apartment (WHAT) so that kids and dates felt welcome (WHY).

SOLUTION – the beige couch from the store down the street

• He identified a couch he liked and from WHERE he could purchase it.

EXECUTION – he needed to convert the idea and plan to executed outcome i.e. buying the couch and getting it into his apartment

• He needed to transport the couch from the store to his apartment. Getting the couch from point A to point B seemed straightforward. He could ditch the delivery option seeing as it cost a lot more than he expected especially since he only lived 3 blocks away. However, he clearly didn’t think through the requirements for execution.

FAILURE POINT 1 – carrying the couch up the stairs.

• WHY DID THEY FAIL? They didn’t recognise the need for a different strategy to carry the couch up the flights of stairs.

FAILURE POINT 2 – carrying the couch up the stairs with a bigger team.

• WHY DID THEY FAIL? This time Ross tried to visualise the process, map out a plan, and brought in reinforcement (Chandler), but they were still doing the same things.
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Lessons learned

1. Pennywise pound foolish ends up costing a lot more in the long run. They ended up breaking the couch.
2. What got you to from point A to point B will not get you from point B to point C.
3. Got more lessons? Please share in the comments or email me @ yewande@produqtedge.com

“Friends” The One with the Cop (TV Episode 1999) - IMDb

The One with the Cop: Directed by Andrew Tsao. With Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc. Joey has a dream about Monica and becomes convinced he is in love with her. Meanwhile, Phoebe finds a police badge in Central Perk, and Ross tries to get his new sofa into his apartment.

IMDb

PS: The Episode is Friends: Season 5, Episode 16 in case you’re not familiar with this story.

Ok! Back to Ope Adeoye, the father of Quickteller who is currently doing great things as the Founder and Chief Plumber of OnePipe. OnePipe is a fintech that aggregates payments services and provides them as embedded financial services across industries. They have successfully created standard APIs for tailored financial services such as payments, credit and other value-added services.  OnePipe helps you launch products that have financial services layers e.g. dynamic payment gateways, credit and extended virtual accounts in days. Visit https://onepipe.com to learn more about their services.

Ope started off wanting to be an engineer; you know; the kind that works in oil companies. His first career pivot happened in university when he decided to explore computers. This was a decision borne out of necessity as he felt stuck and needed something different. He pulled himself up and ventured into hardware after which he pivoted to software. In software programming, he found his love and stuck with it. The early years of his career tell a story of sheer determination and perseverance.
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Watch the #founderswhodared chat with Ope here as we discuss his journey from being an engineering student, to founding his first startup shortly after uni, to joining Africa's pioneer fintech unicorn and now building OnePipe.

Fast forward to 2017 when he left Interswitch to start his entrepreneurial journey. He started out with 2iLabs, a company that positioned to incubate ideas and spin them off as projects or standalone companies. 2iLabs ran for a couple of years and a few things were apparent – he learned very quickly that it was difficult to product/project manage so many ideas at the same time. Yes, each project/idea had its own team but of course he was fully involved in all the experiments. It was his name and reputation at stake after all. Acknowledging this limitation, he took a step back with his team and chose one of the projects in their pipeline that leverages their core competencies and OnePipe was born. Since its launch, OnePipe has successfully created several partnerships with banks and other fintech providers. They continue to improve on their bouquet of services one of which is Grassroots Banking; their embedded finance offering. (I’ll be doing a deep dive on this next week. Subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss it).

In Ope’s words; "things need focus and commitment for them to work".

This is absolutely true. As the saying goes – you become an expert on what do all the time. From my experience and interactions though, there’s a FOMO that goes with focus – how do you know you’re focusing on the right thing(s)? There are so many what ifs and maybes involved. I really like Paul Graham’s perspective on focus though – "The most important thing for startups to do is to focus. Because there are so many things you could be doing, one of them is the most important. You should be doing that, and not ANY of the others.”

It’s really simple; at every time, there’s one most important thing for every startup. Focus on that one thing. Enter beast mode for that one thing. Give it your all and do right by it. That way, even if it fails, you can beat your chest and say you gave it your all. It's important to note however, that failure is relative. Pivoting in the face of realities such as new market information, funding realities, resource constraints is not failure; it is growth.

Ope vs Ross

1. They both had clear goals and had ideas on how to achieve their goals.
2. Where Ope was in tune with reality and quickly pivoted when he realised the need for change in strategy, Ross kept putting in more effort and resources using the same strategy.
3. Ross failed and threw in the towel. Every time it seemed like Ope was failing to achieve his goal, he went back to the drawing board, pivoted, changed strategies and did whatever else was required to succeed while staying true to his goal.

My key learnings from my #founderswhodared chat with Ope Adeoye

1. He always had a clear goal and stayed true to it – he wanted to build a company that solved real problems. Staying true to the goal helps to clarify the journey.
2. Identifying and deciding on the true goal helps to build focus on what truly matters – his goal was to solve problems. The problem wasn’t defined in the original goal which means the problem could change.
3. Being clear on the mission makes it easier to define the objectives, strategies and expected outcomes.
4. Being present and aware enough to understand and acknowledge the reality of situations – he didn’t have the resources to build a company that was incubating several ideas at the same time, so he decided to focus on one idea.
5. Pivoting in the face of reality – he realigned his goals in uni when he came to terms with the reality of his situation – will he fail out or find alternatives? The goal here was success.

Watch out for the next episode of #founderswhodared chat with Ope Adeoye tomorrow on our YouTube channel. It's packed! Subscribe to get notified.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUREl8_Fvp7W9uBu7GBngyQ

PS: Thanks to Gloria, Sesan and Jolaade for playing Editors-in-Chief.