This year, we kicked off our Breakfast Chat series with Tayo Oviosu, founder of Paga – a mobile payment company serving over 10 million customers. Prior to Paga, he was Vice-President at Travant Capital Partners, a private equity fund in West Africa. He is an alumnus of both the University of Southern California and Stanford University.

If you missed Tayo’s session, here are a few highlights from the discussion as well as the audio of the entire chat:

Educating your key stakeholders is important

One of the best pieces of advice I got when starting out was you have to actually not just think about your business strategy and what you are trying to accomplish, but also think about how do you educate the regulators and stakeholders…

I don’t think that every business needs to raise financing…

It is important to know the kind of business you are running, and the role financing can help in moving it forward. What financing does for you at the core is bring on other people who can help achieve your vision. If you think your business is one that requires significant capital to scale, then you should be open to taking investment…..if your business doesn’t, there is no need to take financing

Process is important

Outlining the process, making sure people understand it, and training people on it, such that it is repeatable, and not dependent on you is important…. Having that repeatable process for whatever your sales strategy is, is important for your business to grow

The agent network is always going to be important

The core problem we are trying to solve is a key exchange: I have something of value, you have something of value, how do we exchange it?.. Until cash and currency becomes entirely digital, you will always need a place to cash in, and a place to cash out – and that is the agent.