Paystack's founding designer quits company after 9 years
Opemipo Aikomo, Paystack’s founding designer, has announced his exit from the company after “9 years of designing and leading what has become one of the most important companies of our generation."
This week, Opemipo Aikomo, Paystack’s founding designer, announced on LinkedIn that he has left the company after “9 years of designing and leading what has become one of the most important companies of our generation.”
Opemipo, who is one of the three founding team members alongside Shola and Ezra, shared that he quit Paystack in August [2024]. In his announcement post, he wrote, “Starting as part of the founding team, I scaled our design organization from just me handling all design and frontend development to a 20-person team working across Product Design, Brand Design, Editorial Design, Design Systems, and Design Operations. We built and scaled financial products and systems that now serve merchants across six countries.”
“I was solely responsible for all the design and frontend work in the early days,” he noted in a post about the early days of Paystack.
In a 2023 Medium post where he shared about his role as the head of design at Paystack—which was acquired by Stripe in 2020—Opemipo noted that his responsibilities fell into four broad categories: Design Operations, Design Direction, Branding and Comms, and User Experience Design.
“Paystack feels just as much my baby as I imagine it feels for anyone else who has had such a significant role to play. I still struggle to accept the magnitude of what we've achieved, preferring to operate in my convenient story of being ‘just a maker,’” he wrote in his announcement post.
According to Opemipo, since leaving Paystack last August, he has spent time figuring out what he wants out of life. “I've spent the last six months figuring out what I want out of life, and being in the shadows won't get me there,” he wrote. “My life's goal is enablement: I want to build a creative practice that incubates global enterprise, especially from West Africa.”
He added, “To get there, I have more to learn about:
Distribution: how to get products to people globally.
Intelligence: how to build context-efficient teams
Agency: how to enable both software and human actors to do their best”
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“This phase of my life is about building global roots.”
According to Opemipo, the best articulation of why he left Paystack are: to reclaim his time, challenge himself, work differently, and expand.
“I’ve been working since my first year of uni. A lot of my adult life has been designed around quarterly goals, monthly targets and weekly plans. I wanted to reclaim all of my time and see what I do with it. Rest, health, family, friends,” he notes on reclaiming his time.
On challenging himself, he wrote, “I spent nine years at Paystack and it got too comfortable. Work was challenging but not in the ways I’m interested in. My studio experiments were also within my comfort zone. I want to find out how well I do outside an environment of my own making.”
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On working differently, he noted, “When I started at Paystack, I was a visionary product designer and engineer. When I left, I was a reliable producer and decent manager. I put a lot into my job and loved the people I worked with, but being a manager doesn’t fulfil me.”
He concluded, “This phase of my life is about building global roots. I’m starting from London and moving outwards from here. Leaving Paystack was step one.”
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What Next
On his next challenge after leaving, he wrote, “I'm looking for my next challenge: a product design role in a global organization. I want to focus on driving business outcomes rather than people management, with the flexibility to work from Lagos or New York. 3-5 years of intense learning.”
He added, “I've set a really high bar for my next role. If you know someone I should be talking to, I'd deeply appreciate an introduction.”
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Following his departure in 2024, Opemipo says he’s co-founded Moonlight—a venture studio that designs and operates sustainable internet companies—with Princess Ebi. Moonlight is home to Main Squeeze, GRVL, Hello World, and Independent Arts—a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Nigerian artists.
(Independent Arts launched Album Cover Bank, a digital archive of 5300+ Nigerian album covers from 1950 to date, and other projects like E Dey Happen, Feel Good, LUDO, and Hanky Panky.)
