In 2016, Adeoye Ojo ran into a problem that really shouldn’t have been a problem at all. He was running SureGifts, his first startup, operating out of San Francisco, when a simple payment suddenly turned into a cross-border headache.
The company needed to pay a bill in Kenya, but the funds were held in Nigeria. Somewhere between San Francisco, Lagos, and Nairobi, the system fell apart.
So Ojo improvised. “I bought Bitcoin with Naira on Bitpesa, swapped it into shillings, and paid the bill through M-Pesa,” he said. “The whole thing took about an hour, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.”
It took about an hour, and it worked, but what stayed with him wasn’t the speed or the novelty, it was the fact that this kind of improvisation was even necessary.
That moment would sit quietly in the background as Ojo moved through fintech, venture building, and investing. But it never left him. It eventually became the foundation for Yousend, the remittance company he co-founded to simplify how Africans in the diaspora send money home.
