Working at Paystack

I’ve finally found the time to write about Paystack. My favorite story that I like to tell people when they ask if I had any doubts about moving to Lagos goes like so:

On the phone with my mother 2 days before my flight to Nigeria:
My mother: “So, just to confirm. You’re SURE that Paystack is a real company?”
Me: “…..ye-…yes?”
Pulls up Paystack’s website on my phone
Me: “I mean, the website looks very legit.”
My mother: “…okayy…”
Me: “and I interviewed with people who were working in an office”
My mother: “uhuh..”
Me: “So yea, I thinkkk it’s a real company….I’m pretty sure it is.”

Rest assured, Paystack was not a hoax, and it has surpassed all of my expectations. 

So what exactly is Paystack?

From the website: “Paystack helps businesses in Africa get paid by anyone, anywhere in the world.”* At this point, Paystack is a 4 year old, >100 person startup. It was the first Nigerian company to participate in Y-Combinator, a prestigious startup incubator in the Bay Area. In 2018, Paystack raised $8 million in a Series A fundraising round led by Stripe which also included Visa and the online Chinese company Tencent. 

In many ways, being at Paystack feels just like being at a US tech company. There’s a soccer field with an inter-company league. Lunch is provided everyday, and the office is super nice (pictures below). But there are a lot of things that make it unique.

What I love about Paystack:

• The people are amazing.
  • On the first day that I “resumed” (started working), my fellow cohort of new-hires included a Turkish engineer with more than 12 years of experience and a former successful Nigerian startup founder. I felt pretty outclassed to say the least.
  • My manager previously worked in Venture Capital at the International Finance Corporation, and out of the hundreds of startups she reviewed, Paystack was the only company she considered (and ultimately ended up) joining
  • When I was reviewing some work with the CEO, Shola, and getting some feedback, I was struck when he asked me: “What can I be doing better?” and “Is there anything that you would do if you were in my position?” It always surprises and impresses me when very senior people ask questions in such a candid manner that shows they truly want to improve and do better.
  • It’s very common for many people to have “side hustles” and run their own businesses. One person runs an entertainment events company, somebody else has a t-shirt business, a teammate constructed an automated palm oil factory from scratch/runs an education program, and my new roommate built a data warehouse in Sweden as CTO for a cryptocurrency company. My mind is blown every time I hear somebody’s backstory.
• It’s mission-driven:
  • At it’s core, Paystack is about enabling digital payments, which is an essential aspect of a country’s financial infrastructure . Without easy and accessible payments, growing Nigeria’s economy and Africa’s economy at large is near impossible.
    • The longer I’ve been in Nigeria, the more examples I see for why this is necessary. Growing up in the US, I’ve always taken successful payment transactions for granted. Here, I once watched a coworker unsuccessfully charge one debit card, and then perform a bank transfer to move money into another account to charge a different card. After 20 minutes of trying, we gave up and paid in cash. Another time, I had to make 5 attempts in order to get 2 successful ATM withdrawals.
• The company and people prioritize culture and values:
  • Every Monday, our 1.5 hour business team meeting kicks off with “highlights and lowlights” which is exactly as it sounds: the best and worst parts of your last week. My first week I thought it might be a once-a-quarter thing, but then realized after the second time that it was every week. I was so surprised since I’d never heard of such a thing in American business culture. However, it might be Paystack specific and I’m not sure if other companies in Nigeria do this.
  • Every Thursday morning, we have an “all-hands meeting” where teams give updates, people make shout-outs (acknowledgements/public thanks), and newcomers are introduced and asked questions by the whole company. My first Thursday, when I was on the hot seat I had to answer questions such as “if you had to live in one place for the rest of your life where would it be?” and “If you could choose anybody to have dinner with who would it be?”
  • The 6 values for Paystack are: Continuous learning,  choose transparency, practice kindness, insist on high standards, take ownership, communicate clearly, and embrace the mission. We covered it pretty extensively during my onboarding. To be honest, I’m surprised that I can generally remember 3-4 values off the top of my head. For any other place I’ve worked at, I wouldn’t be able to tell you a single one.
• Professional Development:
  • Working at Paystack has already felt like a huge boost to my professional development. For my first assignment, I was put on the core payments team which is a cross-functional group that oversees all payments functionality at Paystack. The engineers are some of the most senior in the company and the CEO is acting as the Product Manager.

• My work (getting data, running analysis) has not changed dramatically, but has personally felt more impactful just by virture of Paystack being a smaller company: I’ve been able see/experience the immediate impact of the work I’m doing.
  • Additionally, I am the only “data scientist” at Paystack. While I don’t necessarily think that my skillset is unique, as there are plenty of technical people (especially engineers) who could easily do the work that I’m doing, I’ve made peace with imposter syndrome feelings by telling myself that I incorporate a different ratio of skills (X% technical, Y% business, Z% data science) than what people use in other roles.
• Last, but not least: the Paystsack Offsite
  • My 2nd weekend Paystack coordinated a 2-day (Fri-Sat) stay at a hotel on Victoria Island. This is a quarterly event where the whole company comes together to do team bonding activities, listen to presentations and “fireside” chats about Paystack and where the company is headed for 2020.
  • It was interesting how a lot of time was spent telling and listening to stories about how Paystack was built and early tales from when the company was just starting out. As I think about how companies are built, it probably is a worthwhile investment since the story of how Paytsack came to be is important to better understand what the mission is about.

• There was a really great Q&A session with a Managing Director of one of the banks in Nigeria. I really enjoyed some of his ideas and commentary. For example, his observation on  the term “financial inclusion” was that it feels like a buzzword. His comment was: when people have enough money, they can figure out how to sign up for a bank account themselves.
• The theme of the offsite was the “Paystack Games” (a la Hunger Games) where we were divided into 9 districts. My district (District 4) ended up winning, we also had the best chant: “Hoo Ha, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS” – X3.
• There were game stations which ranged from shooting a toy bow and arrow to completing a wooden jigsaw puzzle with pieces you had to retrieve from the pool
• People got VERY competitive, during the final “Who wants to be a Millionaire” game, all the other districts attempted to block us from winning by debating the technicality of where the first Paystack office was located. Somebody also dislocated their shoulder while swimming.

Other random things:

• Paystack has a very good work remote policy which many people take advantage of. Because Lagos can have extreme traffic, some people find it both less stressful and more productive to forego sitting in 1 hour of traffic each way and work from home.
• There is an exclusive WhatsApp gym group that I just made it into recently. To be added to the group, you must have gone to the gym at least 3 times. If you miss 1 week of exercising, you are put on probation, and if you miss a 2nd week you are removed from the group.
• People are super friendly, and I’ve actually noticed that I am being anti-social in comparison with my coworkers by not going around and greeting people. I’ve made it a habit to work in a different section of the office every week to make sure I’m saying hi to people.
• There is an employee experience team that takes care of all people requests from ordering food to setting up recycling logistics. They arranged for all my transportation (getting me safely from the airport). Also check out some of the Paystack swag they gave me.

Things that are hard(ish):

• Paystack is still a startup, so while I see a slight reduction in my average working hours, it means that I’m not necessarily the last person some days if I’m working past 9PM. The good thing is that I don’t feel pressure to work late, but rather the work itself is engaging.
• Using Slack. This is not even a Paystack specific thing, but I have a difficult time keeping up with conversations on Slack as messages and communication splits into a myriad of threads and sub-discussions. I think I’m slightly old-fashioned, but I feel like I had a much better system to keep track of things when I was using email.

Overall, I have very few complaints (First World Problems?) and am very glad that Paystack turned out to be more real than I could have ever hoped it to be.

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Appendix

*Additional info about Paystack:

• If you’re looking for a bit more detail, Paystack acts as a payments facilitator by building custom payment solutions through a suit of payment APIs
• If you are familiar with Stripe in the US, Paystack has a very similar business model 

If you’re like me and didn’t know what API stands for: 

• API stands for Application Program Interface. From what little I’ve tried to understand, an API acts like a messenger that takes requests to a system and returns the response back to you. Using a real world analogy like a restaurant, an API would act as your waiter that would interface between you and the kitchen to order/bring you your food.
• Said another way, APIs are the building blocks of digital connectivity.

API video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7wmiS2mSXY