8 Podcasts Every African Startup Founder Should Follow
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Building in Africa is lonely work.
You are often the first person in your family, your street, sometimes your whole town, to try the thing you are trying. The playbooks written in San Francisco assume roads, rails, and credit cards that simply are not there. So you learn in the open, in the gaps, from people who have already walked the road.
I put this list together the way I put most things together at Hackhouse: by asking founders what they actually press play on during the matatu ride home. These are the shows that change how a builder thinks on a Monday morning.
Here are eight podcasts, all currently publishing, all worth your headphone time.
1. The Flip, hosted by Justin Norman
The Flip earns the top spot because it does the hard work most African tech media skips: it goes deep on why things work the way they do here. Norman builds whole seasons around single questions (why is logistics so hard, why do payments fragment by border) and brings operators and investors on to argue it out. If you want to understand the structural reasons your unit economics look different from a Lagos peer, start here.
2. Afrobility, hosted by Olumide Ogunsanwo and Bankole Makanju
Afrobility is the MBA you can afford. Each episode picks one company or sector (Jumia, M-Pesa, the cement business, edtech) and breaks down the business model brick by brick, with numbers. The hosts are an investor and an operator, so you get both the spreadsheet view and the on-the-ground view in the same hour. For founders who freeze when an investor asks about margins, this is essential listening.
3. African Tech Roundup, hosted by Andile Masuku
Running since 2015, this is the long memory of the ecosystem. Masuku has interviewed founders before they were famous and after they crashed, which gives the show a sober, pan-African honesty you rarely find. Listen when you need perspective beyond your own city, because the conversation moves easily between Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra, and Cairo.
4. Building The Future, hosted by Dotun Olowoporoku
Olowoporoku is a venture partner, so his interviews come from the chair across the table from you in a pitch meeting. He asks the questions investors actually care about and lets founders answer at length, which makes this a quiet masterclass in how funders think. If raising capital is on your roadmap, treat each episode as free coaching on the exact muscle you need.
5. Founders Connect, hosted by Peace Itimi
Itimi has built one of the largest libraries of African founder stories anywhere, with a community of tens of thousands behind it. The conversations are warm and practical, heavy on the early scrappy decisions that rarely make the headlines. This is the show for the days you need proof that someone with your exact constraints made it work.
6. The African Pre-Seed Podcast, hosted by Lorraine Achar
Most fundraising advice is written for companies further along than yours. Achar, who works in early-stage investing at 54Collective, fixes that by speaking directly to the zero-to-one founder: bootstrapping, grants, angel checks, and how to get an investor to reply at all. Listen before you write your first cold email, then again before you negotiate your first term sheet.
7. Decode Fintech, hosted by Khadija Abu
Payments are the bloodstream of African tech, and most founders understand them only at the surface. Abu, who works inside the sector, translates the plumbing (settlement, KYC, switching, mobile money rails) into language a non-engineer can act on. Even if you never build a fintech, you will integrate one, and this show makes you a smarter customer of the whole stack.
8. Open Africa, hosted by Nosa, Laolu, and Furo
Sometimes you need analysis with a pulse and a laugh. Open Africa covers the week in tech, banking, and regulation with three sharp voices who disagree out loud, which is exactly how you learn to hold a strong opinion loosely. Keep it in rotation to stay current without drowning in newsletters.
A closing thought. Africa adds an estimated 10 to 12 million young people to its labour force every year (AfDB), and Brookings puts the jobs the continent needs to absorb them at 12 to 15 million annually. The founders building those jobs are mostly self-taught, mobile-first, and stitching their education together from sources like these. Mobile already drives roughly 77% of web traffic on the continent while only about 17% of users own a computer (Opensignal, 2023), so a podcast in your pocket is genuinely how a lot of this learning happens.
Pick two from this list. Subscribe today. Let the others learn the slow way.
