Dunsin Bankole did not set out to build a media empire. He set out to make a flyer. Design was the door he walked through, accidentally, after a friend sent him a tutorial video and curiosity took over.
He started playing around with Photoshop, found he could not stop, and quietly built a skill set that would become the foundation of something far larger than a graphic design career. “I got into design out of curiosity,” he says. “And curiosity has led everything for me.”
Today, Bankole is co-founder and head of operations at WeTalkSound, one of Nigeria’s most consequential creative companies. What began as a WhatsApp group, the founder pulling together a small circle of music-obsessed friends, has grown into a five-pronged operation spanning media, a brand agency, events, visual and documentary production, and music distribution. Bankole came in as a designer. He never left.
“I just became a really active member of the community,” he says matter-of-factly. “And they added me to the company.”
Co-founder Dolapo Amusat recalls it clearly. “Early on, I thought Dunsin would be a great addition because he has multiple skills: design, photography, video editing. He exceeded my expectations when I realised he also had knowledge on the business side.”
The path from designer to co-founder did not announce itself in advance. It accumulated through layers of responsibility, absorbed quietly over years. As he learned design, he also absorbed the logic of business, project management, campaign structure, how things get built and sustained. At one point, he ran a restaurant in Rwanda for two years. It sounds like a detour until you understand how he thinks. Nothing is filed away and forgotten. Everything eventually becomes useful.
His time in East Africa gave him a ground-level education in house music culture, the kind absorbed from being inside a scene rather than observing it. That experience found its way directly into two of WeTalkSound’s most distinctive live concepts: Café Riddim, a coffee-themed day rave, and House of Assembly, an event built around DJs playing solely Nigerian house music. Neither would exist in the same form without it.
What WeTalkSound is now and what Bankole is steering it toward is something the Nigerian creative industry has few models for. The company’s five arms are not parallel operations running alongside each other. They are what Bankole calls a flywheel. “Each part of the business supports the other,” he explained. “The media supports the agency, the agency supports the events, the events support the visuals. It keeps building itself.” Revenue from one feeds the growth of another. The audience the media arm builds gives the agency something to offer brands. The access built through events gives the documentary arm something to capture.
The documentary work is perhaps the most visible expression of where his ambitions point. The Mara Mania documentary, produced in partnership with the French Embassy, traces a music genre that started in a single room in Lagos and has since spread well beyond the city. It is currently being positioned for European screenings. A separate Detty December documentary is also in production, capturing the annual diaspora homecoming with what Bankole describes as uncommon honesty. “We are not giving you a kumbaya version,” he says. “We are giving you something very nuanced and very real. It covers everything, from the wealthy side to the market traders to the Bolt drivers.”
The company reaches between 400,000 and 500,000 followers across its platforms and has operated entirely on bootstrapped revenue since its founding. That is beginning to shift. Bankole says WeTalkSound is now actively exploring investment from VCs with a track record in the creative industry and partners whose values align with the company’s mission. “We are at the stage where we need to scale,” he says. “Things are looking good.”
What he is most protective of, as scale becomes the central project, is the thing that makes WeTalkSound worth scaling. “Our goals cannot be compromised by whatever we sign,” he says. “Any partner we bring in has to understand that.” He reaches for a sharp analogy: “Think about Starbucks. Whether you are in South Africa or Tokyo, it still has the same quality and authenticity. That is what we are building.”
Amusat counts on exactly that continuity. “It is very important that as we grow, we pay attention to how we come across, our aesthetics and quality across all the verticals. That is the role Dunsin is already playing and will continue to play.”
For young creatives watching from the outside, Bankole’s advice is consistent with how he has actually lived. “Authenticity is one hundred percent,” he says. “Anyone can have my skills. No one can have my story. If I put my lived experience into my work, I will create something remarkable.”
His own story, accidental designer, restaurateur, cultural architect, WhatsApp group member turned company co-founder does not fit neatly into a template. That, he would probably say, is exactly the point.
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