The builder who moves across industries isn't wandering - they're compounding
Lessons from my conversation with Mike Hudack of Sling Money
“A jack of all trades is a master of none.”
Most people stop there. The full version, widely cited though its precise origins are disputed, continues: “but oftentimes better than a master of one.“
Someone, at some point, decided to drop the second half. I think about that edit a lot. Because the version without it has been used to dismiss some of the most interesting builders I’ve ever encountered, and in African tech, where we are already fighting an uphill battle for credibility, we cannot afford to keep repeating a truncated insult as though it were wisdom.
I sat down with Mike Hudack this week on The Grinders Table Podcast. He co-founded Blip, an internet video platform that Disney acquired. Then Facebook, where he ran ads product through the post-IPO pressure years. Then Deliveroo, as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Then Monzo, as Chief Product Officer. Now Morse, a global payments platform he founded in 2022 which just rebranded from Sling Money, processes transactions across 150 countries and has raised $20 million from Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Slow Ventures.
When I asked him if there was a single mental model connecting all of it, he said something I haven’t been able to shake: “I’ve just taken the same set of skills and interest in building things for people and applied it to whatever the frontier is at the moment.”
That is not a generalist. That is a very specific kind of mastery that our industry consistently fails to recognise.
The frontier-hopper is not someone who couldn’t commit. In his case, he committed deeply to video infrastructure, then to social platforms at scale, then to on-demand logistics, then to regulated banking, then to stablecoin payments. What he didn’t do was confuse the domain for the skill. The skill is the thing. The domain is where the skill gets applied.
I recognise this because I’ve lived a version of it. I started at the Tony Elumelu Foundation, managing a $100 million Pan-African entrepreneurship programme. Then Fund operations/Investments at Ingressive Capital. Now Head of Investment at Launch Africa Ventures , deploying capital across early-stage African startups, even though I trained as an Electrical & Electronics engineer in University, as was also building founder communities in Lagos. If you plot those data points and look for a straight line, you won’t find one. But there is a through-line: I have always been interested in how ecosystems form, how capital flows through them, and how founders survive the gap between the idea and the institution. That interest compounds. The domains change. The compounding doesn’t stop.
When I look back at the founders who have lasted, who built something real rather than something fundable, a disproportionate number of them are frontier-hoppers. They are builders who arrived at their current problem from somewhere unexpected, who carry mental models from a previous domain that the specialists inside the current one don’t have, and who are genuinely unbothered by the question of whether this is their “lane.”
The mistake African tech makes, investors and founders alike, is to evaluate domain experience as a proxy for founder quality. It isn’t. Domain experience tells you someone has spent time in a space. It tells you nothing about whether they can navigate the transition from zero to one, hold a team together through a crisis, or see around the corner that everyone else in the industry is facing in the same direction.
What Mike knew about product design from Facebook was not obvious to his peers at Monzo. What he learned about regulation at Monzo is not obvious to his peers in crypto. He is not a generalist. He is a master of integration, someone who knows enough from multiple disciplines to connect things that specialists, by definition, cannot.
The next time someone pitches you and their background looks like it was assembled at random, payments to policy to product, or from engineering to ecosystem building to early-stage investing, don’t reach for the truncated version of that quote.
Ask them what the through-line is. If they can tell you in one sentence, and if that sentence describes a genuine skill rather than a biography, pay very close attention.
The full version of the quote has always been right. Someone just decided the second half was inconvenient.
Listen to my conversation with Mike Hudack on The Grinders Table Podcast here - Web
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