The founder and chief executive officer of NALA, Benjamin Fernandes, on Monday evening met with young startup founders at Design Hub Kampala in a closed-door engagement organised in partnership with Innovation Village.
The session, held under Innovation Village’s Growth Unfiltered platform, brought together emerging founders and startup leaders for a candid discussion on entrepreneurship, growth challenges and building sustainable technology-driven businesses in Uganda’s evolving tech ecosystem.
According to Rita Ngenzi, Executive Director of Innovation Village Hub, the Growth Unfiltered series is designed to provide founders with honest, practical insights into what building a startup entails beyond the pitch decks and success narratives.
“Growth Unfiltered is a platform where we really unfilter what being a founder is — the realities, the tough decisions, and the growth pains,” Ngenzi said. “Having Benjamin, the founder of NALA, a well-established African fintech, created an opportunity for founders in the room to learn directly from someone who has built at scale.”
Speaking after the engagement, Fernandes said meeting Ugandan founders and engaging with the local technology ecosystem was both encouraging and instructive. He noted similarities between Uganda’s startup environment and other emerging tech ecosystems across Africa.
“It was inspiring to meet founders and learn about the projects people are working on, how they are thinking about their customers and how they are building,” Fernandes said. “Every ecosystem has challenges and gaps that’s normal but seeing what founders here are creating gives me a lot of hope.”
Fernandes emphasised the importance of cultivating technology ecosystems that prioritise problem-solving and scalable solutions, particularly through software-driven models rather than purely physical operations.
“Building is not easy, and founders often have to make hard choices,” he said. “Technology allows people to build differently, to scale faster, and to solve problems in ways that brick-and-mortar models cannot.”
During the discussion, Fernandes stressed what he described as a critical principle for startup leaders: sustained engagement with customers. He challenged founders to move beyond ideas and focus instead on real demand.
“Talking to customers is the most important thing when building any company,” he said. “Ideas on their own don’t matter. What matters is whether you are solving a real problem and whether customers are willing to pay for that solution.”
He added that without clear answers to those questions, founders risk building products that lack relevance or sustainability.