Welcome to Paga’s first set of Nigerian based engineers…
My personal goal is for Paga to be a company that lasts over 200 years. For us to achieve that and be successful, we have to always be building the dream team — A+ people who are great at what they do, then give them the freedom to execute and own their areas.
Building the dream team is an ongoing activity. Our leadership team spends a significant portion of our time thinking about our people and working on building the team. Finding talent in Nigeria isn’t easy especially engineering talent. From the early days of Paga, we partnered with Apposit in Ethiopia for our engineering. Apposit invested in Paga, and we work as one team. Our engineers at Apposit are some of the best I have worked with in my over 18 years of working in technology-related businesses. However, by having the engineering team based in a market where we do not yet operate, we lose some level of empathy that is born of interacting with the product and users. Therefore, we decided it is important we have engineers in Nigeria. In 2017 we made a decision to start hiring engineering talent in Nigeria and to kick that process off in earnest by Q2 2018.
I am excited to announce that Bayo Puddicombe and Zubair Abubakar, co-founders of ChopUp, along with Daniel Micah have joined Paga’s Product Development team as our first Nigerian based engineers (we have other Nigerian engineers on the team but not based in Lagos).
I have had the privilege of getting to know, and work with, Bayo and Zubair over many years — and they are amongst the top tier of engineers I have met in Nigeria. I also personally big fans of theirs as I invested in their startup, ChopUp. They started ChopUp, and along with Daniel, built a catalog of good games which will continue to be available to the public. I am incredibly proud of how they executed ChopUp and put their heart and soul into the business while being very judicious with resources.
Bayo joins Paga as a Senior Software Engineer leading our Digital Financial Services team, and Zubair as a Senior Software Engineer leading our Developer API and Developer Community team. Both are reporting into our Chief Product Officer, Eric Chijioke.
It’s great to see all three have already hit the ground running at Paga with their first projects going live soon…
Welcome to the team Bayo, Zubair, and Daniel! You are key members of our dream team — let’s make life possible for a billion people!
