A founder builds a payments app, reads through the regulations, and can’t find a single rule that describes exactly what the app does. So they launch.
Aderonke Alex-Adedipe knows that founder’s reasoning well enough to say it in their voice: “I’ve looked at all the regulations, there’s nothing spot on that affects me.” What comes next is where startup compliance goes wrong. The founder keeps building “without approaching lawyers, without carrying your regulator along.”
Alex-Adedipe is the founding and managing partner of Pavestones, a law firm that works with technology and finance companies. Chambers and Partners ranks her as a leading fintech lawyer in its 2026 guide. Compliance is her daily work: making sure a business follows the rules that already apply to it, from licenses to how it handles customer data.
There was no such thing as “tech law”
“When we started, especially, there was no such thing as technology law,” she said in her TechCity Conversations interview.
Tech law, in her telling, is mostly old law applied to new tools. Take a microfinance bank, a small licensed lender. If it runs its business through an app, the central bank doesn’t hand it a special rulebook for apps. It follows the same rules as a lender with a branch you can walk into. “It doesn’t work that way,” she said.
So the useful question for a founder isn’t “does any law mention my app?” It’s “what does my app actually do?” If it lends money, holds people’s money or collects their personal data, rules already exist for that. Our documentary on loan apps that used borrowers’ contact lists shows what that question looks like from the customer’s side.
She left a job to build the firm she wanted
“When I left employment, it wasn’t a decision to just leave employment, right?” she said. “I more or less just wanted to take a break.” She took time off to think about where she had come from and where she wanted to end up. Pavestones is what came out of it.
Part of the reason was a reputation she wanted gone: “There is this notion that lawyers are troublemakers.” Her fix is to start from the client’s problem, not the law books. “The client doesn’t really care about Section 36 of the Constitution or what was decided in a case in 1920. What the client really wants is, ‘I have a problem. What is my solution?’”
She says the doubt never really came. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had that moment where I felt like, ‘Was this the wrong decision?’ Or, ‘Really, should I just close shop?’” As she put it: “This is just something that I’ve always wanted to do.”
Recognition matters less to her than you might expect from someone with a Chambers ranking. “I’m a relatively private person,” she said. What she cares about is that “clients recognize my hard work, clients appreciate my services, and I keep my clients happy.”
The work is about giving. The bills still come.
She talks about her work, including the time she volunteers, as more than a paycheck. Providing value “is not just about making money. It’s really about being able to give.”
She’s just as clear that goodwill doesn’t pay the rent. With startups, she said, you have to balance “making sacrifices and also earning money.” And then: “Even if you think you don’t like money, like me, you still have to make money, right?”
“Nobody’s looking for us” is how companies disappear
The belief she hears most often from young companies: “because we’re new, we’re small, nobody’s looking for us, compliance should not really be a thing.”
Her answer points to companies that once looked unstoppable. “They’ve vanished. They’ve gone into thin air, mostly because of lack of corporate governance.” Corporate governance is the plumbing of a company: who makes decisions, who checks them, and what gets written down.
Investors look for it too. “If you lack good corporate governance from the onset, investors are not going to look at you.”
Being small is actually the cheapest time to fix this. Ten customers and three contracts are easy to put right. Ten thousand customers are not.
ChatGPT is useful. It isn’t your lawyer.
A lot of founders now check with a chatbot before they talk to a lawyer. Some treat it as the whole answer. “They feel like ChatGPT can tell them everything, which is not necessarily accurate,” she said.
She isn’t against the tool. “ChatGPT is good, right? Even I use it sometimes, but it’s not necessarily the answer to your legal problems.”
A chatbot doesn’t know which license you hold, what your contracts say, or what your regulator asked for last month. And when it’s wrong, you’re the one who answers for it.
A famous name doesn’t buy a pass
Large global companies make their own version of the mistake. Some arrive in a new market assuming that “because they have global reputation, they can do whatever they want. And that’s not necessarily the case.”
A playbook that worked somewhere else doesn’t carry over automatically, she said. Her advice is the same for a two-person startup and a multinational: “It is best that you work with regulators from the onset.”
AI rules will come piece by piece
Don’t wait for one big AI law. “I don’t think that there will just be one single regulation that will be applicable to AI,” she said, “just as there isn’t one single regulation that applies to every other sector.”
She thinks Nigeria’s government is taking AI seriously and is “taking the step in the right direction.” As AI becomes a bigger part of daily life, she expects regulators to find the gaps they didn’t see coming and write rules for those. If you’re building with AI, the sector rules you already fall under apply now.
From a truckload of paper to a laptop
She has been practicing since 2009, when she started during her NYSC year, the national service year every Nigerian graduate completes. Back then, she said, lawyers went to court with “a truckload of paperwork,” often 10 case files for a single matter. Many consultations have already moved online, she said, and she expects firms to lean further on digital tools over the next five years, until the paper era looks the way cassette players look now.
The hard question: will raising money fix it?
“Because tech became a buzzword over the last 10 years,” she said, a lot of people started treating it as “the next best cash machine. And it’s not necessarily the case.”
“Everybody just wants to raise, raise, raise, raise.” Her warning is for founders who treat funding as the finish line: “If you’re not really interested in providing solutions and building and all you’re focusing on is fundraising, you may just be wasting your time.”
She has seen startups bootstrap, meaning they grow on their own revenue instead of investors’ money, and succeed, because “they are accountable to themselves as founders.” Some call that playing it safe. Her view is that it keeps you focused. She doesn’t say never raise. She says weigh both.
Money makes a business move faster. That includes its mistakes.
Three questions to answer before your next launch
Which license does what we do actually require? What personal data do we collect, and where does it go? Who besides us has read our contracts?
If any of the three stops you, that’s the conversation to have with a lawyer this month, not after your first raise.
