Afolabi Sokeye has lived many lives, and depending on when you catch him, he may be a builder, a product manager, or a serial entrepreneur. He started coding at 14 and is currently navigating the volatile world of AI startups with a mix of passion and pragmatism. But what became undeniably clear during our conversation was the central theme of his story: a deep, intrinsic drive to build and solve problems, with financial reward as a welcome consequence, not the primary goal.
The Spark: A Hustler is Born
Afolabi’s entrepreneurial journey began in the boredom of a secondary school boarding house, and the catalyst was a comic book.
“I brought these Super Strikas to school,” he recalls. “Boarding school is boring. There’s an entertainment deficit.” When a classmate asked to read his comic, he jokingly said, “Yeah, but you have to pay me ₦50 to rent it.” To his surprise, the classmate agreed. “Oh my god, I just hit the jackpot.”
This wasn’t just a one-off transaction. It was his first lesson in supply and demand. He systematised it, creating a distribution chain with friends. “I only bought each Super Striker for ₦100. Imagine making half the money back just for renting it out.” People would read, tell their friends, and the customer base grew organically. The money was good, but the thrill was in the game. Identifying a need and creatively filling it.
The Builder Emerges: Passion Over Profit
This pattern of building for the sake of building continued into his software engineering studies at Babcock University. His first major project was born from a pressing, immediate need: the COVID-19 pandemic.
“March 13th, funny enough, that was my birthday, everybody was sent home,” he says. The problem? “Nobody had bought textbooks…There was no structured provision of digital textbooks.” So, Afolabi and his friends built an e-library. They manually scanned and digitised course books, creating a vital resource for students suddenly forced to learn online.
The project blew up. It was a massive success, solving a real problem. It was also completely illegal. “The lecturers didn’t like the fact that we’re digitising their books,” he laughs. The venture almost got them into serious trouble, a stark lesson that the most impactful solutions can sometimes operate in grey areas. Crucially, it wasn’t driven by money. “It was just driven by getting people books to read for their exam. That was it.”
This ethos carried into subsequent ventures: a cloud storage platform for students and an ambitious payments solution for restaurant franchises designed to solve the problem of cashless payments long before it became mainstream. A tie to all of these ventures is identifying friction and building a solution, often learning more from the failures than the successes.
The Professional and The Pragmatist
A key pillar of Afolabi’s story is his pragmatic approach to risk. While passionate about his startups, he never considered quitting school. “I’m not going to compromise my life just because I want to do a startup,” he states. “I have my parents… after years of how hard [they worked] to get me there.” This safety net allowed him to experiment without existential fear.
He later made a conscious decision to specialise, moving from a startup generalist to a professional Product Manager, a role he found at Trakka, an expense-tracking app. This was his first formal role where skill met salary, a modest but meaningful student income that was separate from the high-risk, high-reward world of startups.
The Present Bet: Riding the AI Wave
Afolabi’s current focus is Wetrocloud, an AI infrastructure company born from frustration. While building an AI research tool, his team hit a wall. “They faced a problem using AI with their resources… it wasn’t giving good results.” They discovered the complex world of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines and found no easy-to-use solutions. So, they built their own.
Wetrocloud’s mission is to provide the tools for other builders to create powerful AI applications without grappling with the underlying complexity. It represents a significant evolution: from solving local, immediate problems (like textbook access) to building a global product for a digital audience.
This shift has profoundly changed his relationship with revenue. “We’ve found a way to build something that a global audience wants,” he explains. The proof? Subscribers from the US, UK, and Dubai paying in dollars. “Last week someone paid $79 for one of our subscription plans.” The struggle is no longer Nigerian infrastructure, but the fascinating, black-box challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) and serving an international market.
A Values-Driven Relationship with Money
Throughout his journey, Afolabi’s relationship with money has been consistent: it is a tool that enables building, not the reason for it.
“The financial reward is more… you have it because you need it,” he clarifies. “You need to pay your bills. But the reason why you work is more for the passion of it.” He draws a clear line between his career (applying a skill for direct payment) and his startups (taking a bet for a future payoff).
He loves the process—the adrenaline of failing, learning, and iterating. “I absolutely love building stuff that helps people, that solves a problem… I don’t think you can ever get the adrenaline of that process anywhere else.”
He and his long-term co-founders are focused on solving one painful problem over the next decade. “We’re probably going to end up having an AI research lab eventually,” he says, his focus on the future clear and determined.
For Afolabi, the ultimate money move isn’t a high salary or a massive exit. It’s the freedom to continue building. And in truth, that’s the foundation of everything.
I’ve lived many lives, but one lesson ties them all together: money is only as powerful as its utility. Through my work, I share stories about money and create guides for Africans who want to get the best out of theirs.