VIDEO: What scaling OLX, Google, Bolt in Nigeria taught Lola Masha about building and backing ventures

In this episode of The Founder Room, I had a conversation with Lola Masha, a partner at Antler in Lagos, and one of the few people who has helped scale a global marketplace, a mobility giant and an agricultural franchise in the same career.

Lola trained as an engineer and took a PhD in chemical engineering at Berkeley before starting out at McKinsey in 2007. She spent four years at Google as one of the earliest employees in its Sub-Saharan Africa business, then joined OLX in 2014, where she ran the Nigerian business as country manager before moving into a global role leading trust and safety across more than 30 markets.

In 2012, alongside that corporate career, she co-founded Babban Gona, the agricultural franchise working with smallholder farmers in northern Nigeria, joining full-time as executive director in 2019. She moved to Bolt in 2023 as regional general manager for North, East and West Africa, and joined Antler as a partner in its Lagos office in mid-2025, which backs founders from day zero, often before there is a product or even a complete idea.

On a lighter note, the episode covers what she wanted to be growing up, her first job, where she lands on build versus buy, whether founders should raise early or bootstrap longer, and the first app she opens in the morning. The answers say as much about how Lola thinks as the long-form ones do, and two of them are worth the watch on their own.

Watch the full episode on the Techloy Community to hear Lola on what operating at scale taught her about African consumers, what she looks for in a founder at the earliest stage, how building here shapes the decisions that matter, and where she thinks the next generation of companies will come from.

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