A month ago, Julian Dumebi Duru, a Principal Software Engineer and one of the pioneering employees at Nigerian fintech unicorn Moniepoint, announced his departure after a ten-year stint, sparking a wave of conversation across social media.

Duru’s journey began in February 2015 when he joined the company in its nascent stage as TeamApt. He was integral to its growth into one of Nigeria’s most disruptive firms, which now serves over 10 million active users. This success culminated in Moniepoint achieving a valuation of over $1 billion after raising $110 million from investors like Google last October, adding to a previous $55 million round.

Reportedly, the immense buzz around his exit was fueled by the revelation that Duru walked away with a substantial amount in vested employee stock options (ESOPs). To discuss this incredible journey, Charles Rapulu Udoh sat down with Julian to recount the untold stories of his decade at one of Africa’s most consequential fintech companies.

Launch Base Africa It’s been a few weeks to a month since you left Moniepoint. What has life been like?

Julian Duru It’s been good. I’m still doing a lot of work, just focused on personal projects and collaborations, so I’m still quite a busy person. There’s a lot I’m doing, just taking it one day at a time. It’s been fun so far, I can’t lie. No complaints.

Launch Base Africa Congratulations on your milestones and the journey so far.

Julian Duru Thank you very much.

Launch Base Africa You’ve been described as an important backbone of Moniepoint’s rise to prominence. Your expertise and dedication helped the company achieve its billion-dollar valuation in record time. Looking back at that teenager glued to his laptop at the University of Lagos, it seems like you designed your own future and everything else fell into place. Can you paint a picture of that time, ten years ago? How did you feel when you were presented with that initial offer?

Julian Duru Early on, even before I joined Moniepoint, I always had an attitude towards excellence. I took whatever I was doing seriously and wanted to excel at it. I excelled in my school days, and when I was introduced to programming and software engineering, I became very passionate. I spent a lot of my time building software and just wanted to be the best at it.

With that attitude of excellence, I built a reputation at UNILAG for my proficiency in computer programming. When the CEO was starting Moniepoint, he was tapping into his network looking for people to join, and someone recommended me. That’s how I got in.

I didn’t really envision the company becoming a billion-dollar entity. I just knew I was coming on board to work with a smart and competent CEO, and we were pursuing a solid mission that I bought into. Over the 10 years, I did the work. There were ups and downs; it wasn’t always rosy. There were times I was very tempted to leave. I even had offers, but I persevered. We had a family vibe at Moniepoint, especially those of us who were there from the very beginning. We went way back — some of us knew each other from our school days. So I persevered, did the work, and was lucky that it all paid off. There was a bit of luck involved, actually.

Launch Base Africa You say luck, but looking back, you were positioned in terms of your skills and training to be recommended. In hindsight, I wouldn’t say it’s mostly a matter of luck. So, what was the company like when you joined? What was the situation on the ground? Did you have any initial doubts about the future, or was there conviction from day one?

Julian Duru There was conviction. I definitely bought into the vision. I could tell the CEO knew what he was doing — he was smart and competent. It’s a pleasure to work with people like that because you can feel they’re leading the company in the right direction. So yes, I had conviction about where the company was headed. We all had to because, in those early days, we were putting in crazy hours. It was intense, with no work-life balance at all. We wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t believe in what we were doing.

Launch Base Africa Of course. And was the company already making money at that time?

Julian Duru We were, but not so much in the early days. We were grinding for quite a while, trying to figure a lot of things out. There were mistakes made and lessons learned. Eventually, we found our footing in the market. We also executed very well in terms of our focus on business banking and corporate banking in general. We targeted underserved portions of the market with very reliable technology. We executed well, and over time it paid off.

Launch Base Africa You mentioned salary; I know it played a part. When you compare it to the market average back then, would you say the pay was competitive, or was it purely a matter of passion?

Julian Duru In the beginning, it wasn’t competitive. We had equity incentives, and that was what some of us were holding on to. We had equity and believed things would get better. It wasn’t competitive at first, but with time it became more and more so. Now, it’s very competitive; Moniepoint pays very well across all its roles.

Launch Base Africa Fantastic. Could you tell us about your career progression? You came in as a teenager with some experience, and then you progressed through the ranks to become an important part of the engineering team. What did that progression look like over the last 10 years?

Julian Duru I played different roles in the company during its growth years. I worked as an engineer, a lead engineer, a product manager, and an architect. At other times, I was leading and mentoring other engineers. I even served as a VP for a short period. I just played whatever role was needed. I was always just looking for how to add value in different ways.

The job title never really meant much to me. I wasn’t someone who chased the corporate ladder, trying to be the next VP or what have you. Even today, I don’t care much for any of that. I just want to do good work, add value, do my best work, and grow in the capacity that I’d like. I’m someone who just pursues my genuine interests. That’s what I did all through my time in the company, and it’s what I’m still doing now — pursuing my interests, researching ideas I’ve been interested in for a long time, and working on projects and collaborations I’m passionate about.

Launch Base Africa So basically, you were a generalist. Is that how you were able to thrive for such a long time at Moniepoint?

Julian Duru Yes, you could say that. While I specialize in engineering, I’m very flexible. I like to learn different things — whatever is needed to get the job done, I’m ready to learn it. So yes, you can use the ‘generalist’ tag.

Launch Base Africa That’s notable. Many of your colleagues left along the way, but what’s particularly interesting is that you were able to find that flexibility and fluidity in your work.

Julian Duru Yes. Some people left, and some people stayed. Not everyone left; some people stayed back and were rewarded for it. Those of us that stayed back had immense career growth. A number of people who joined the company in the very early days are now VPs leading entire divisions. They’ve grown immensely and have a lot of responsibility early in their careers — responsibility they wouldn’t have gotten this far with if they had left. It wouldn’t have been so easy. Moniepoint gave us the opportunity to take responsibility, take ownership, and grow with the company. That’s what a lot of people who stayed back got to enjoy.

Launch Base Africa Looking back, what would you say is your most important legacy at Moniepoint? In terms of product, engineering, or innovation — what will people always remember you for?

Julian Duru I think one of them would be that a number of engineers started to look up to me because I contributed to some of the core systems. I had solid contributions in terms of work quality that inspired other engineers to be better. They valued the work I did and learned from it, just as I learned from other people’s work. We all learned from each other. Everyone who worked with me would say that I always did my best to inspire the team. I mentored the engineers I worked with because many just needed a bit of mentorship and exposure. I also worked with people across different functions who said they had a pleasant experience working with me and learned a few things, which I appreciate. So, I think those are the things.

Launch Base Africa Moniepoint started as a consulting company and then progressed to being a POS payment infrastructure company. Would you say you were the brain or the architect behind the famous Moniepoint POS system?

Julian Duru There’s no single brain behind it; it’s always a team effort. Different teams worked on different projects at different points in time, so I can’t take sole responsibility for the work that other people did. It was always a shared effort. For example, the CEO was always very active in the product direction. Virtual accounts was his idea, and while I did a lot on the execution, the concept was his. It’s a company made up of a lot of smart people, and everyone chips in at different times to contribute to the system that exists today. I can’t take full responsibility for it.

Launch Base Africa So it was basically like a classic ‘startup in a garage’ where you’re just knocking ideas around. You mentioned the passion and commitment that made you stay for so long. In the Nigerian startup scene, the average employee turnover is around four to five years. Beyond flexibility, what specific factors made staying at Moniepoint an easy decision? If it were a toxic place, you wouldn’t have stayed. Factually speaking, what was different about Moniepoint?

Julian Duru My experience was good. I had a good relationship with the top leaders, from the CEO to all the VPs — we went way back. There was also the element of feeling personally invested in the company’s outcome. This wasn’t just me; those of us who joined early, started the company from the ground up, and had equity felt this way. I was invested and wanted to see the company succeed.

Even though I had passions and interests outside the company, I always prioritized my work with Moniepoint and gave it my all. There were times I was tempted to leave — maybe I got bored with the work or felt I could be earning way more elsewhere. On those occasions, it was sometimes the CEO who convinced me to stay. He would talk about the vision, remind me that we were doing good work, and that those of us who stuck it out would be rewarded. And he delivered on that promise.

So, even though I was tempted to leave a couple of times, I always found a way to enjoy my work again. Finding something new to be passionate about at the workplace, like moving around and contributing to different projects, helped prevent boredom. It was a combination of different things that ultimately allowed me to stay.

Launch Base Africa Many potential employees are undecided about joining startups; some have been ruined by closures or burnt out by layoffs. You’ve been in the ecosystem and have learned what works and what doesn’t — you’ve seen the patterns. From your experience, what are the signs that a company is on a path to success, versus one that’s just a cruising ship with no compass?

Julian Duru I’d say it’s a combination of two things.

First, it’s the CEO — the founder, the leader at the very head. You need to be able to gauge the quality of the person that leader is made of because it reflects on the entire essence of the company. It starts with the founder who dictates the energy and the direction. The founder also lives and imbibes the culture, and that culture is what starts to take shape in every other person within the organization.

So, my second point is the culture. I look at how the culture shapes up in the workplace among the different people. How do they approach work? What is their commitment to excellence, attention to detail, and ownership? How focused are they on delivering quality to the end user?

If you combine these factors, you get a fair picture of whether you’re in the right place and if the company is bound to succeed. That said, it’s also coupled with a bit of luck. There’s always luck involved in some of these things. Sometimes you just happen to be solving the right problem in the right place at the right time, a few things come together, and you execute well. But the founder and the culture are very important.

Those are the two major points. It’s about the CEO and the culture. That’s what will give you the indication of whether the company is going to be successful in the long term.

Launch Base Africa Not going to ask how much equity you received, but I want to talk about how employee stock options (ESOPs) operate in African startups, especially at a company with a billion-dollar valuation. What have you learned? For instance, what percentage of the ESOP pool do you think is ideal for core talent? And what about the type of shares — ordinary shares with the risk of dilution? Were there times you were worried about the dilution of your shares, and if so, how was that situation handled?

Julian Duru I don’t know if I can speak generally, as different companies have their specific approaches. However, one thing that goes a very long way is the integrity of the company, the founder, and the management. If you make certain promises to employees — especially those who invested their time, resources, and sweat into building the company — it goes a long way if you show goodwill and make a genuine effort to deliver on those promises. People don’t want to feel like they wasted their lives and their ESOPs yielded no fruit.

So, showing goodwill, delivering on promises as much as possible, and having empathy for people sacrificing their time and their lives to build the company go a very long way. I can’t speak on how much should be given or how much talent is worth; it varies from one company to the next.

Those of us that joined Moniepoint on the ground floor were given decent equity. The CEO did well to maintain his integrity and kept the promises he made. Those of us that sacrificed for the company in terms of time, sweat, and energy were rewarded for everything that we did. So, for companies creating these plans, there needs to be integrity and goodwill.

Launch Base Africa From what you’ve observed in the ecosystem, at what point should an employee become suspicious that a founder might not be showing goodwill when it comes to equity?

Julian Duru I mean, you can’t always tell, but you can get a sense of someone’s character by working with them. If you can evaluate the character of the CEO or whoever is making those promises from day-to-day work activities — how they carry people along, how they address conflict, how they lead by example — you can get a good picture.

People that lead by example are more likely to be great leaders and show compassion towards employees. These are little things, but if you take them into account, you can start to get a fair picture of the character of the person you’re dealing with. And it’s character that ultimately determines how well they will treat you in the long run. So, it comes down to gauging their character from the day-to-day interactions and the general vibe.

Launch Base Africa And seeing how they treat other people as well.

Julian Duru Exactly. All those things come into play. It’s really about character; character goes a long way.

Launch Base Africa Since most ESOPs are contractual, has the changing valuation of the company ever affected the value of your shares? For instance, when new investors come in with preference shares, leading to the dilution of ordinary shares held by employees. Did this affect you?

Julian Duru I think occasionally there were those times. Valuations will always go up and down. But generally speaking, all the processes were always transparent. We were always carried along whenever these things would happen. There were always explanations for why things were happening. There was just a lot of transparency involved, and when there’s transparency, it also shows goodwill. You’re more likely to trust that the process is being handled well. So that’s just it, really. There were ups and downs, but we were carried along every time with transparency.

Launch Base Africa Looking ahead, how do you see Moniepoint’s future? Do you see it becoming a legacy company or a traditional bank in the next five to ten years?

Julian Duru I envision something very ambitious. The CEO is very ambitious; I don’t think he would settle for just being a mid-tier bank. They are going to drive the company, its growth, and its valuation aggressively. Moniepoint is going to be rubbing shoulders with the top-tier banks — Zenith, UBA, and the rest. I envision they will take it to that point and make it a standard, top-tier bank. I believe that’s the ambition of the CEO. But not just within Nigeria, because now they are pursuing a global presence and going after diaspora banking, especially in countries where Nigerians are concentrated. They will keep building out different products and tools, eventually creating an ecosystem of financial products that allows people to transition between them and remain Moniepoint customers — whether for business banking, personal banking, or banking from the UK. I believe they are heading in the direction of being a full-service financial provider to Africans anywhere in the world.

Launch Base Africa: Now, let’s talk about your future. You mentioned you’re doing groundwork and research in the AI space. How far have you come with that, and when do you plan to go live?

Julian Duru It’s still in research mode. There’s a lot of figuring out that needs to happen. The thing is, in the space I’m coming into, I’m not the first to envision the idea or the possibilities. There are tons of other people across the world working on the same problem; in fact, they’ve been at it for years. I’m bringing my own ideas. So, it will take some time and considerable effort. Perhaps the solutions will come out in phases, but one thing that is clear is that we need a version of the internet that is a lot more equitable and has more opportunities open to people.

Launch Base Africa What do you mean by that?

Julian Duru Look at how in the last year, millions of websites have had their traffic drop drastically with the advent of generative AI. Most people just go to ChatGPT or an LLM these days, talk to it, and get answers immediately. People don’t follow the traditional Google search of clicking on ten blue links, which used to drive traffic to websites that could then sell advertisements. All of that is changing now. So, we need new economic models on the internet that can incentivize the contribution of intellectual property in a way that people’s IP is protected and they can be fairly rewarded when their content is used, either by other people or by AI systems. There will be different solutions to this problem from different angles, but the end goal is to make the internet a more equitable economy for everyone.

Launch Base Africa So, is it safe to say you’re building an alternative to ChatGPT?

Julian Duru I wouldn’t say it’s an alternative. In fact, the systems I’m building could also be used by ChatGPT. Think about it: there are tons of private, proprietary data scattered across the world among individuals and organizations. This data is private and not on the public internet. Big tech companies do not have any legal claim to this data; they legally can’t access it. But imagine we could build a kind of collaborative intelligence that incentivizes people to contribute this private data in a way that they can be rewarded for its use while their intellectual property remains protected.

This collaborative intelligence we’re building is meant to be interoperable with existing systems, not compete with them. So, when ChatGPT reaches the limit of its knowledge from what it has scraped from public data, it might need some private data. It could then interoperate with these systems that protect private intellectual property. I hope that makes sense.

Launch Base Africa It makes sense. Now, we are already seeing something similar. For example, there’s an African company based in the US, Rwazi, that raised about $12 million. And there’s another company launched by a former Copia Kenya executive that has a reward system for users who donate their private data. Does this sound like what you are building? I know you’re still in stealth mode. 

Julian Duru It’s not the kind of idea that one person is going to build alone. The solution I’m building is a highly collaborative project. It’s not something that one person or one team builds, because there are just so many different parts to the problem. So, there will probably be multiple solutions in the market, but the people who are building the right solutions will build for composability and interoperability. This means they are not trying to create more data silos; instead, they’re trying to build systems that can interoperate with other systems doing similar things. That way, we can unlock network effects across systems that are working together.

Launch Base Africa So, you are focused on B2B partnerships rather than scraping data from scratch?

Julian Duru No, consumers and individuals could also contribute. There are just going to be different ways of aggregating and indexing this content, making it available in marketplaces. Marketplaces where the data people contribute could be consumed by other people or by AI systems. It’s about creating that marketplace where buying and selling can happen, and where even when people expose their content, we can use technology like cryptography to protect their intellectual property and ensure their access control rules are respected on the network. These are just a few of the things, but there are several parts to the problem. We’ll just take it one at a time.

Launch Base Africa I get it. I’ll be looking forward to the launch. How soon do you think that might be? Do you have a team or a co-founder yet?

Julian Duru We’re not rushing this. Like I said, there’s a lot we are learning, but I envision sometime next year. It’s not something that will come out quickly, but we are trying to shoot for a proof-of-concept this year and keep refining the technology. As for the team, yes, we have a community of people working on it. We trade ideas, and we have weekly meetings. It’s mostly volunteers who are interested in the project. The project is meant to be open source, so it’s largely driven by community efforts. With time, as the technology takes shape, we envision that the economy emerging on top of the network will start to reward the participants.

Launch Base Africa You mentioned open source. Are you looking at getting venture capital funding in the future?

Julian Duru At some point, we may need to raise. We’re not there yet, but at some point, we may need to. Whatever we do, we’ll make sure we do it the right way and seek the right counsel. Open-source projects also need funding, and if investors are coming in, they need the right incentives, possibly future rewards for their contributions. So we also need to design things around that to make sure that if people are bringing money into the system, there are ways to reward them for their investments down the line.

Launch Base Africa A few final questions. First, what did you learn from Moniepoint about building a sustainable business model? And second, what is your advice for an employee who is currently frustrated about the future of the company they are in?

Julian Duru For founders, and I’m sure any founder worth their salt knows this, you have to take hiring very seriously. That’s probably the most important thing: the quality of your hiring process. Then, when you have talented people, you need to create the right structure and environment for them to thrive and do their best work. Talented people don’t want to be micromanaged. You need to give them space to bring their own ideas.

It goes a long way if you can create a dynamic in the workplace that isn’t strictly hierarchical, where you aren’t just a boss commanding people. You want a place where different ideas can thrive, even if they come from the bottom up. There should be avenues for the lowest-ranking members of the organization to share their ideas. You want more leaders and fewer bosses. If you do that, you raise more leaders within the workplace because people are incentivized to take responsibility and ownership. At Moniepoint, we used to have weekly town halls where everyone could aggregate on a call, receive messages from leadership, and also ask questions and voice opinions. These things foster togetherness.

For the employee, the advice is always contextual. I can’t just tell someone to remain at their workplace for 10 years the same way I did. We all have different lives and career contexts. What makes the most sense is to always do what is best for you. And what’s in your best interest is to always be sure that you are learning and you are earning.

Learning means you grow in capacity, depth, and experience. This is crucial, especially in the early stages of your career. Earning is also important. If you’re not learning and you are not earning, you are probably in the wrong place. If you are just starting out and learning a lot, it’s okay to deprioritize high earnings for a while, because that experience is incredibly valuable. Further down the line, you can switch jobs to earn more, and you will have carried a lot of experience with you. So my advice is to just make sure you’re always learning and earning.

Launch Base Africa One last thing just came up. Moniepoint is incorporated in Delaware, the UK, and Nigeria. How was the ESOP structured jurisdictionally?

Julian Duru From what I know — and I may not have the full details — when we first started as a Nigerian company, we all had shares in the Nigerian entity, and everything was well-documented. Then, when the holding company was incorporated in Delaware, our shares were moved to that top-level holding company. That’s as best as I know the structure.

Launch Base Africa I was just asking about the jurisdiction because for many founders, structuring in more stable foreign jurisdictions with stable currencies is often more enticing. It’s understandable that you moved from Nigeria to Delaware.

Julian Duru Yes, yes.

Launch Base Africa Thanks a lot for your time, Julian. Here’s wishing you the very best for the future.

Julian Duru Thank you so much, Charles.