Peace Itimi: Startup Catalyst (H₂SO₄)
Founders Connect: The Tech Museum That Fits in Your Pocket.
The Archive is a Woman
Documentation is what happens when storytelling stops performing and starts keeping receipts. In a world where people say “disrupt” when they mean “copy with UI,” and where startup founders appear fully formed with no visible backstory, like tech-based Paul, someone has to do the actual work of remembering. That’s where documentation comes in: not the boring, dusty kind hidden in filing cabinets, but the living kind that captures how ideas are born, scaled, almost died, and got pivoted into something completely different. Peace Itimi has taken this concept and run with it onto YouTube, into interviews, across timelines, and even into in-person events, archiving the African tech ecosystem with the warmth of storytelling. She’s not just recording history; she’s cataloguing the founders and operators shaping African tech, so that the continent’s entrepreneurial story isn’t written one day by someone who’s never even been to Yaba.
H₂SO₄
In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that speeds up reactions without being consumed. In life, it’s someone like Peace Itimi, starting with a degree in medical biochemistry at Delta State University, but deciding test tubes were too small to hold her ambitions. Instead of triggering chemical reactions, she triggered business growth. As the school’s first Google Student Ambassador, she trained hundreds in digital marketing, an early indication that she preferred sparking ideas over mixing chemicals. After graduation, she became a human catalyst for startups, running campaigns at Webcoupers and Wild Fusion, delivering digital programs with Google, Facebook, and the British Council, and driving growth strategies at Korapay, Seedstars, and Smile ID that helped companies react faster than ionic compounds. In 2021, she launched Founders Connect, a YouTube series featuring more than 70 interviews with African founders. In 2023, she self-funded a two-year documentary, Innovating Africa: The Rise of Tech in Nigeria, which maps 15 years of the country’s tech history, much like an archaeologist. Her ultimate ambition is to inspire authentic growth and equip those around her with the skills and knowledge necessary to craft the lives of their dreams, forge a remarkable career, or build a thriving business.
Founders Connect
In 2021, Peace launched Founders Connect, a YouTube series where she sits down with African founders and coaxes real stories out of them, stories that go beyond buzzwords like “disruption” and “scalability,” into the grit of building a business on the continent. More than 70 interviews later, with names like Odun Eweniyi, Ezra Olubi, Nadayar Enegesi, and Onyeka Akumah, the series has become an unofficial encyclopedia of African startups (except with better lighting and fewer anonymous editors). In 2023, she hosted Founders Connect Live, drawing over 1,000 operators, investors, and builders for a day of networking, games, and candid conversations. Her feature-length documentary, Innovating Africa: The Rise of Tech in Nigeria, took two years to produce and charts Nigeria’s tech journey over 15 years, a painstaking effort she self-funded. Add in the “How I” series (focused on individual career paths), podcast episodes, marketing tutorials, and mentorship circles. She blends storytelling with structure, empathy with evidence, and founders’ personal histories with big-picture ecosystem clarity.
Final Clever Thoughts
In the grand experiment of African tech, Peace Itimi has managed to play both lab assistant and historian, mixing chemicals, speeding up reactions, and then calmly writing the report while everyone else is still panicking about funding. Founders Connect is her way of bottling ambition: documenting the failures, flexes, and occasional miracles of founders who would otherwise be remembered only through half-finished Medium posts. As a catalyst, she’s accelerated growth and visibility for builders; as a documentarian, she’s archived their egos for future scholars of LinkedIn anthropology. She’s given them something rarer than capital: proof they actually existed, proof polished with a video, good questions, and the occasional awkward founder laugh.