Business ‘Is Not for Chickens’: 5 Lessons From Ogentic AI’s Co-Founder

David Oladeji’s digital twin, an AI assistant he calls Klaus, reads his Slack channels and email and can reach out to businesses interested in his work, sending them software samples, but “when it comes to money, it will always defer to me,” Oladeji says.

Klaus is a small sign of how far the cost of running a business has fallen. Before, you needed money, people, time, and a good deal of patience to turn an idea into something that works. Now, AI is changing that equation, making it possible to build products, automate operations, and run parts of a business for a fraction of the usual cost, even as questions about safety and reliability persist.

If AI can make starting and running a business this cheap, what does it actually take to build a successful one?

Techloy put that question to Oladeji, an entrepreneur who has built businesses across several sectors and now serves as co-founder and CTO of Ogentic AI, a company that helps businesses set how much freedom their AI agents get.

What it takes to build a startup that scales in AfricaNow a partner at Antler Africa, she now backs founders even before they have a product.

How Ogentic AI started

Ogentic AI grew out of a relationship between him and Craig J. Lewis that began in 2016, while promoting LaterPlus, a tool for scheduling Instagram posts, on Facebook. In 2024, that connection eventually led him to Gig Wage, the Dallas-based payments company founded by Lewis.

At the time, the company was trying to recover from the disruption caused by Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Lewis, who had read his 2015 master’s thesis on AI personal assistants, later called to discuss what they could build next. Their collaboration eventually led to Ogentic AI.

Drawing on that journey, Oladeji shared five lessons on building a business at a time when technology is making it easier to start one, beginning with the importance of patience.

1. Don’t expect to make money on day zero