I became an engineering manager on purpose. It made me a better CEO.

After Foodr, the obvious move would have been to jump straight into the next company. I did the opposite. I chose, on purpose, to step back and become an engineering leader inside other people's companies for a while. It was a reset. It is also the reason TwelveAI exists in the form it does.

First, I went to learn how money actually moves

I joined Crust MFB as the lead mobile developer. I did not go there for a title. I went there to learn banking at its core, how money really moves, what settlement means, where the risk hides, why a transfer that looks instant to a customer is doing a lot of careful work underneath.

That year rewired how I think. Most people building fintech learn the API surface. I got to learn the plumbing: the ledgers, the reconciliations, the edge cases that only show up when real money is on the line. You cannot fake that knowledge, and you cannot shortcut it. When we later decided TwelveAI would let AI touch money, that grounding is what made me confident we could do it responsibly instead of recklessly.

Then I went to learn how to scale a team

From there I left to lead the engineering team at Cantant, an accounting company. When I say we scaled, I mean it: the platform grew to serve about 50,000 businesses. That is a different kind of pressure from founding. As a founder you carry the vision. As an engineering leader at that scale, you carry people, and you carry uptime for tens of thousands of businesses who are trusting your software with their books.

It forced me to replan how I work, and to grow as a leader rather than just as a builder.

What leading people actually taught me

Two things changed in me, and I did not expect either of them.

Patience. As a founder, especially a young one, you move fast and you assume everyone can move at your pace. Leading a team teaches you that speed without the team is just you running alone. The real work is bringing people with you, and that takes patience you have to choose on purpose.

Leadership is service. This is the one I repeat the most. When you become a leader, you are actually more of a servant to your team, not less. Your job stops being "do the work" and becomes "teach, mentor, and clear the road so they can do the work." The best days I had as a manager were not the days I shipped something myself. They were the days someone on my team shipped something they could not have shipped six months earlier, because I helped them get there.

That is not a soft idea. It is the most practical thing I know. Teams that feel taught and supported ship better software, and they stay. It is also, quietly, how we try to treat our customers at TwelveAI. Meet people where they are, be kind, remove the hassle. I even have a t-shirt that just says "be kind." It is not a slogan for me, it is an operating instruction.

Why the detour made the CEO

When I finally started TwelveAI, I was not the same person who ran Foodr. I had seen how money moves from the inside. I had scaled a team through real load. I had learned that a company is people first and code second.

So TwelveAI was never going to be a solo sprint. It was going to be a system, built by a team that is taught and trusted, on top of banking knowledge that is earned, not assumed. The detour was not a break from becoming a founder. It was the part that made me one worth backing.

If you are a founder wondering whether stepping into a leadership role for a season is a step backwards, it is not. Sometimes the fastest way forward is to go and learn the two things you cannot learn from the founder's chair: how the system really works, and how to lead the people who run it.

Ifeoluwa Alao Ojo

Founder & CEO, TwelveAI

Ifeoluwa is the founder and CEO of TwelveAI. Before this he founded Foodr, led mobile engineering at a microfinance bank, and ran the engineering team at Cantant as it scaled to 50,000 businesses. He is building TwelveAI so any bank or fintech can offer banking your customers can simply talk to.