Offscript with Molly Jensen
Afripods’ CEO on her journey to building Africa’s premier podcasting platform.
“I said, ‘I’m never doing this again.’ And then they told me, no, you have to, because most people’s natural reaction is to run out of the way and yours is to block it.”
Molly Jensen gets really passionate when she talks about football, or as Americans like to call it, soccer. When you eventually probe deeper, you discover she was a former semi-professional goalkeeper, and then the dots start to connect. The painful encounter she’s recounting was her 14-year-old self blocking a ball at a goalkeeping tryout. She had started playing because she felt left out when her siblings played sports while she wasn’t doing anything. They put her in goal because she was tall, awkward, and couldn’t play well as an outfield player.
But her coaches saw something special in that instinctive reaction to stand her ground rather than flee. Her parents encouraged her, hired a coach, and Jensen rose through the ranks to become a semi-professional goalkeeper. Even though she no longer plays competitively, she credits that athleticism as a core part of her identity and the work she’s doing now as CEO of Africa’s premier and largest podcasting platform, Afripods.
“I was an athlete—that’s not something I tell everyone, but it’s really important and special to me,” Jensen explains. “It makes me who I am. It helps me get through really hard challenges, whether personal or otherwise.”
Born to an American father and a Ghanaian mother, Jensen spent much of her childhood between New York and Ghana, with holidays often spent in Accra visiting her maternal grandparents. These experiences immersed her in West African culture, its expectations, and its nuances. Coupled with her parents’ entrepreneurial spirit, this upbringing shaped her career vision early on. “My mom runs her own business. My dad worked in corporate publishing. When I thought of jobs, I thought of business.” That perspective guided her decision to apply straight to business school from high school, where she eventually studied Business Administration with a focus in marketing at George Washington University.
From her first business school class, Jensen knew she had chosen the right path. She supplemented her studies with internships at advertising agencies, sales roles, and volunteer work with Techstars New York, where she was exposed to the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship. That experience sparked her interest in the startup ecosystem. Eventually, it led her to Lean Startup Machine, a global workshop series that taught entrepreneurs how to rapidly test and validate business ideas.
Fresh out of college, she joined the company and was tasked with organising hackathons and events around the world, including their Munich program, which went on to become the best-attended event in the company’s history. “It was really like my first foray into the tech space,” she recalls. Building on that experience, Jensen went on to take on marketing roles at a real estate and fintech company, growing her expertise at the intersection of tech, startups, and media.
Jensen began to pay closer attention to Africa’s growing tech and innovation scene and felt a strong pull to be part of it. Having spent much of her life between the US and West Africa, regularly visiting Ghana and making trips to Nigeria, she wanted her next chapter on the continent to feel different. She began visiting Kenya in 2018, building relationships and understanding the ecosystem. She eventually moved to Kenya in December 2019.
She moved at a fortuitous time. Not long after her arrival, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and with people stuck at home, the consumption of digital content, such as podcasts, soared. A podcast enthusiast herself, Jensen leaned into the moment and began consulting for Afripods, a platform building the infrastructure for podcasting in Africa.
Contrary to popular belief, Jensen is not the founder of Afripods. Instead, she was appointed to the role of CEO in 2021 through what she describes as an organic progression. “I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I was consulting with the company. Then there was a change in leadership, and I stepped in. I met someone, we started having conversations, I started consulting and doing research, and then I stepped in as CEO.”
At the time, Afripods wasn’t the structured company it is today. It was still very much a passion project, driven by the idea of building a podcasting infrastructure native to Africa that mirrored what already existed globally. Jensen is considered the de facto founder because it was under her leadership that the platform truly took flight. The numbers tell the story: “We went from 292 podcasts to over 3,000. We have over 1,600 podcasts hosted on the platform. We can categorise content in over 50 languages from over 50 countries. We have some of the largest networks in Ghana and Nigeria on our platform.”
Jensen is fascinated with people. Long before she stepped into the C-suite, she immersed herself in the study of emotional intelligence, attending seminars and training with organisations like Six Seconds. “I was really interested in emotional intelligence—about just how to be a better person, how to be a better friend, how to be a better colleague, how to be a better partner, how to be just good to people and understanding them,” she recalls. “It helped me articulate my feelings, manage other people’s feelings, and ultimately connect with people in a meaningful way.”
That instinct to prioritise connection became central to Afripods’ growth strategy. Rather than just building a distribution platform, Jensen and her team invested in building a community. They hosted regular meetups with podcasters across the continent; gatherings in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and beyond, where creators could share challenges, exchange ideas, and shape the platform’s direction. “When people feel seen and heard, they’re more invested,” Jensen says.
This approach also drove product innovation. The platform’s Broadcast to Podcast (B2P) feature, for instance, emerged from testing a hypothesis that radio stations could repurpose their content as podcasts for digital audiences. By reaching out directly to radio stations, Afripods convinced over 110 stations across nine markets to use the platform. Radio stations now make up a significant portion of streams on the platform.
Jensen’s competitive soccer career ended in 2019, but she remains philosophical about the transition. “Goalkeeping is not like just being a football player on the field where you’re running. I’m literally diving, somersaulting, going for breakaways. You’re the last line of defence. You’ve got to give it your all.”
That goalkeeper instinct still surfaces in unexpected moments. “Sometimes if there’s a ball flying somewhere, or someone throws car keys, my reflexes are really fast. People are always surprised, especially kids, because they don’t know,” Jensen humorously recounts during our conversation. It’s a fitting metaphor for her current role at Afripods because today, she continues to block, not footballs, but obstacles that limit African podcasts from growing.