The “Just Start” lie
Temitope Ekundayo on surviving Erb Palsy, the death of a friend, and why resilience requires abandoning hope.
Welcome back to Quest. This is the final edition of the year and likely the end of the podcast’s pilot phase. Next year, I’m looking forward to interviewing more great people — and sharing those conversations in a written format.
There is an advice that circulates in every co-working space, Twitter thread, and startup mixer in Lagos. It sounds like this:
“Don’t overthink it. Just start. Build the plane on the way down.”
It is a seductive advice. It frames recklessness as bravery. But on this week’s episode of Quest, Temitope Ekundayo (Co-founder, GetEquity) sat down to tell us why that advice is not just wrong but can be dangerous.
Temitope is not your typical tech bro. He is an operator who grew up selling sweets in primary school, reading chemical engineering textbooks for fun, and navigating life with a disability that required corrective surgeries and leg braces.
He doesn’t view business as a fun experiment. He views it as a series of Hard Problems that require surgical precision, not blind optimism.
To better understand how he arrived at this point of view, let’s go back.
Temitope did not stumble into business; he was born into it. His upbringing provided a dual education in commerce and science. His mother was a nurse who also ran a trading business and a full-scale poultry/agric farm. Temitope was deeply involved, handling purchases at local markets and working on the farm. This taught him the basics of supply, demand, and hard work.
His father was a chemical engineer in oil and gas consulting. Temitope grew up reading his father’s encyclopedias and engineering books, sparking a deep curiosity about how things work.
His first independent venture was selling a candy called “Amaria” in primary school. He bought in bulk and sold to classmates, becoming the “go-to guy” for sweets. While studying Geology (a course he chose because it was the closest thing to his childhood dream of being an astronaut), he remained restless. He dabbled in music (recording a rap song he hopes no one finds) and organised parties and events.
The turning point in his mindset came when he joined AIESEC, a global youth leadership organisation. AIESEC exposed him to international peers and global standards of leadership. It shifted his worldview from local hustles to solving larger societal problems.
Empowered by this new network, he started “consulting” for friends and small business owners. He would write business plans and help them strategise, often learning on the job. This was his first taste of structured business strategy.
Before striking out on his own major ventures, Temitope paid his dues working in varied sectors. These vast experiences influenced his thinking and birthed his ideologies around how people should approach doing business.
Gut feeling is a trap
We love the myth of the intuitive founder. The genius who wakes up with a billion-dollar idea and executes on “vibes.”
But Temitope doesn’t buy into this. “Today, most people start businesses because of a gut feeling,” he says. “But gut feeling doesn’t tell you if a supermarket will succeed on Street A vs. Street B. Research does.”
He brings up the example of Walmart. Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton didn’t dominate the world because they “trusted their gut.” They dominated because they were obsessed with data. They visited competitors. They counted foot traffic. They analysed pricing down to the cent.
Temitope’s argument is simple: Passion creates the spark, but research builds the fire.
If you are launching a product today and haven’t conducted a Strategic Audit, you are essentially taking a gamble.
He encourages people to pressure-test their ideas with structured frameworks like:
VRIO Analysis: Is your resource Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Organised?
Porter’s Five Forces: Do you actually have power in your market, or are your suppliers and competitors the ones dictating the terms?
The Fish Paradox and the Fintech bubble
“We are solving the wrong problems.”
If you take one thing away from this interview, let it be this section. Temitope expresses a frustration that many of us feel but rarely articulate: Why is everyone building a Neobank when we don’t have food security?
He dropped a statistic that felt like a punch in the gut:
“We import fish. Almost 1.8 million tons. Yet, we export fish to places like Switzerland. We have the ocean. We have aquatic nature. So what is going on?”
This is what Temitope calls a Hard Problem.
Fintech is “easy” (relatively speaking). It’s software. It’s clean. Agriculture, logistics, and hardware? That’s hard. That’s messy. That involves supply chains, roads, and sweat.
But that is exactly where the opportunity is.
Temitope argues that the next wave of African unicorns won’t be the ones helping us move money; they will be the ones helping us move things. They will be the ones fixing the broken infrastructure that forces a country with an ocean to import frozen fish.
He wants people to stop looking at what is trending on tech news sites and look at what is broken on your street.
His drive
Where does the drive to fix this come from?
For Temitope, it started with a pair of leg braces.
Born with Erb Palsy (a birth injury causing weakness or paralysis in an infant’s arm and shoulder due to damage to the nerves), he spent his childhood in and out of hospitals. In school, kids called his braces funny names.
It would have been easy to retreat. To look for a safe, quiet life. Instead, he leaned in. He accepted the nickname. He adopted a philosophy that borders on aggressive stoicism:
“I was born this way. It’s not my fault. But if I’m going to make anything of this life, it’s on me.”
From Printivo to GetEquity, his career has been about removing friction and creating access. Now, his eyes are set on the bigger picture: conglomerates that tackle agriculture, housing, and infrastructure.
▶️Watch the full interview here: