Hello there,
💸Money 20/20 USA was held this week, with lots of news updates coming from industry leaders on Agentic Payments, Stablecoins, and the same old Banking.
💳 According to Axios, Visa is in talks to acquire Fireblocks. This transaction is a previous Fintech is Easy Prediction, and Fireblocks has since denied it.
Revolut, along with Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and HSBC, had significant downtime this week due to a Google Cloud outage.
Multiple vulnerabilities and breaches on critical internet infrastructure were discovered this week, and we’ve all just lost count and are hoping for the best. We are all going to be security engineers at this point.
Away from all that, the media side had a good week, with Ben Thompson of Stratechery announcing Stripe as the presenting partner to his podcast and newsletter, and Fatu Ogwuche of Big Tech This Week launching her weekly live show to cover tech and business news in Africa on X, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Live shows are the new niche in technology coverage, especially after TBPN, which was launched in October 2024 as SportsCenter for the LinkedIn crowd, secured a significant undisclosed exit to OpenAI via acquisition. This sector validation led to the launch of other shows like the a16z-backed Monitoring the Situation (MTS) and the European Technology Network (ETN).
The technology space is an ever-evolving space, and it is only right that the media that covers it continues to experiment and evolve with different formats and ways to reach the audience and amplify the message.
Ahead of the launch of the show, I had a call with Fatu to discuss and learn more about the motivation behind this live show and the expectations she has for this new chapter.
A long-time tech Twitter Spaces host, she is obsessed with live shows and followed TBPN from the shack to the Ultradome, as well as shows like ETN, MTS, The Young Turks and The McAfee Show.
Lagos is not Los Angeles, or London and her response to my why Africa, and why now " question was: traditional media keeps trying to reinvent itself, citing media house podcasts and social media clips as examples.
With the people in tech maturing from tech figures into public figures with profiles and side activities to match, it is time to go beyond Yaba in covering the space.
According to her, we deserve joy, and the show wants to cover founders who now build for pleasure; the shift from a niche tech blog to a social media live show for everyone may be the reinvention that makes tech news stories public news stories.
She referenced the Dangote refinery IPO here, highlighting the 55+ digital channels powered by local fintechs that are making the distribution of this IPO possible as it drives towards its 10 million subscriber target.
Bosun Tijani and Iyin Aboyeji have evolved into everyday policy shapers, while Odun Eweniyi, Shola Akinlade and Olugbenga “GB” Agboola are contributing to shaping culture with other projects they’re affiliated with, such as the I Said What I Said podcast, Group Therapy, Sporting Lagos and Lagos Life.
Nigerians will stream if you give them a reason to stream, she told me, and she pointed to Peller and Carter Efe’s Twitch numbers. Nathaniel Bassey’s Hallelujah Challenge and the daily NSPPD and NLP prayer livestreams also gather millions of viewers and are among the biggest YouTube channels in Nigeria, so this is the best time to be in media, to push the culture forward and fill in the gap.
She also has proof of work as she has previously hosted Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum and Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon in a Twitter/X space that reached 100,000 listeners, and she held an on-site live stream from Stablecon in Amsterdam this May that drew 15,000 views over two days. This live show is an extension of the formats she already runs.
We built good rails in African Tech, but we have not learnt to properly amplify our messaging beyond funding announcements, product launches, leadership changes, or controversy. Twenty minutes of a founder explaining a pricing or product decision live, while angry customers in the comments are arguing against their point — In 2021, Elon Musk grilled Vlad Tenev of Robinhood over the GameStop fiasco on Clubhouse — this will do more for trust in these companies than a year of press releases.
She sees room for independent creators to plug some of these gaps, as there is so much left to cover, and I agree with her.
Great ambitions and lofty creative dreams for independent media can only be sustained by commercial agreements.
Fatu told TechCabal that the show has secured sponsorships to keep it on air for at least 12 months, with room for some paid segments and product reviews in future. These product reviews and curated topics are expected to drive the show on slow news weeks.
The premiere episode of Tech This Week was streamed live yesterday, Thursday 22 October 2026, to over 8K viewers. It included guests such as Oluwatosin Olaseinde of Money Africa, Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega of Not a Deep Dive, Shalom Rayhamen of Lagos Life, Opeyemi Adeniran of Danfo Run, a segment of the livestream was held inside Lagos Life with Olugbenga “GB” Agboola of Flutterwave and Nathan Nwachuku of Terra Industries; and the show closed off on an in-person interview with Akintunde Sultan of AltSchool Africa.
The show airs live every Thursday at 6 pm WAT on X, LinkedIn and YouTube, built around the week’s news and guests, with live reactions from the comments.
Good luck and Godspeed, Fatu.
We will be watching you as you trailblaze this new format.
Break a leg.