Yanmo wanted run Shell, missed the Nvidia boat and doesn't care much about CVs
The Nigerian fintech co-founder wants you to stop fixing your team's mistakes and start cloning your intuition.
Welcome back to Quest. The last edition for the year goes out on Dec 11.
There is a specific, painful bottleneck that every high-growth operator eventually hits. It’s the moment when “working harder” stops yielding results, and your personal attention to detail—the very thing that got you here—becomes the company’s biggest liability.
We often talk about scaling products, scaling servers, and scaling revenue. We rarely talk about scaling judgment.
In our latest sit-down, I spoke with Yanmo Omorogbe, the co-founder and COO of Bamboo. Over the last five years, she has helped steer the investment platform through over $17.5M in fundraising and expansion into Ghana and South Africa. To observers, Yanmo represents the “cool” head of the industry, offering a composed antidote to the usual startup panic.
But as she revealed in this interview, calmness isn’t a personality trait. It’s a result of growth over the years.
Yanmo didn’t start out “chill.”
In the early days, she read every single customer support ticket. She was the buffer between the world and the product, micromanaging emails, grammar, and tone. Today, she leads a company where she can afford to miss the little things because the big things are taken care of.
Here is how Yanmo Omorogbe moved from micromanager to “Corporate Adult,” and how you can apply her framework to your own operations.
Involving people in your thinking
The trap for most smart operators is speed. When you see a team member draft a social media post that misses the mark or write an email that lacks empathy, the fastest solution is to fix it yourself.
Yanmo admits she used to do this constantly. But she realised that every time she fixed a problem silently, she was robbing her team of the context needed to fix it themselves next time. She was scaling her output, but not her brain.
Her solution to this was to “involve people in your thinking.”
“I never, ever give feedback without context,” she says. “Even if I do it myself because there’s no time, I try to say: ‘This is what I’ve been doing’ or explain what I was doing.”
This sounds simple, but it is operationally expensive in the short term. It takes five minutes to rewrite an email; it takes twenty minutes to explain why the tone of the original email was off, how it aligns with the brand voice, and why the new version works better.
However, Yanmo argues this is the only way to “scale capacity.” By relentlessly explaining the why—asking annoying questions in meetings, dissecting the data-driven reasons for a decision—you aren’t just getting tasks done. You are sharing the thinking behind your decision-making with your team members.
The goal isn’t for the team to use the exact words Yanmo would use. The goal is for them to think the way the company needs to think. Once that alignment exists, the micromanagement can vanish.
Corporate Adulting
If you have ever worked in a high-pressure startup, you know the culture can sometimes veer into “performative suffering. Think late nights for the sake of late nights, and urgency that feels manufactured.
Yanmo leans into Corporate Adulting—a culture where high personal responsibility replaces the need for managers to ‘chase’ output— to solve this.
“Nobody is in bondage. Nobody is forcing anybody to be here. So if you don’t do this work, just be going. But seeing as we’ve agreed that we want to do this work, let us buy into the mission.”
This take focuses on accountability, stripping away the parent-child dynamic often found in employer-employee relationships. A reminder that employment is a consensual economic transaction.
This philosophy is crucial for Bamboo because they operate fully remote (with the option to work from the office), and because the work is genuinely stressful. Yanmo shares harrowing stories where customers send vile, abusive messages to the support team, only to instantly become polite and charming when Yanmo (the founder) calls them personally.
To survive that kind of emotional whiplash without a boss hovering over your shoulder requires a team that possesses high personal responsibility.
You cannot police resilience; you have to hire adults who possess it.
Proof of Work > Proof of Degree
So, how do you find these “Corporate Adults” who can absorb your thinking and handle the heat?
Yanmo’s approach is meritocratic: She largely ignores the CV.
“I don’t care if you went to university or not... Everybody can write [on a CV]. But if you show me the evidence... I try to index for: What is the experience I’m looking for?”
In the interview, she explains how Bamboo’s hiring process has evolved. They realised that standard proxies for competence (degrees, cover letters) were failing them. A cover letter in 2025 tells you nothing other than a candidate’s ability to use ChatGPT.
Instead, Bamboo has shifted to practical testing. If the role requires communication, the application process includes a writing task. If it requires analysis, they simulate a research project.
It emphasises that your background is just history, but your ability to deliver is the future.
The Evolution of Ambition
Perhaps the most human moment of the conversation is hearing how Yanmo’s definition of success has shifted.
Growing up, her ambition was aesthetic. She wanted to “run Shell” because oil meant money. She wanted to own Birkins because she loved Victoria Beckham. It was a desire for “nice things.”
But as the company has grown, the “nice things” have become secondary to the scale of impact. She references Mark Zuckerberg—not for his wealth, but for the fact that Meta reaches 4 billion active users.
“Success to me [now] looks like doing something impactful at scale.”
This shift has manifested quietly in her life. She reveals she has started a private foundation—not a PR stunt, but a small, registered initiative currently supporting just a few students.
She isn’t just paying their fees; she is curating their reading lists (heavy on the fiction, which she credits for her own creativity) and shaping their worldviews.
She is doing for these students exactly what she does for her team: she isn’t just funding them; she is involving them in her thinking.
▶️ Watch full interview here
One Next Step for You
Audit your feedback loop this week.
The next time you have to correct a team member’s work, pause. Do not just make the edit. Take 10 minutes to record a voice note or write a memo explaining the principle behind the edit.
Ask yourself: Am I fixing the task, or am I training the judgment?