Three decisions made me, and none of them looked wise at the time.

The first was Nigeria. I was born in London, raised in Essex, and I studied finance at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Atlanta changed what I thought was possible. I was surrounded by Black professionals, Black wealth and Black institutions, and what struck me most was that my Morehouse brothers could build a life, a career and a family without leaving the city. The ambition and the opportunity were in the same place. When I graduated in 2010 I had never set foot in the country my parents came from, and almost everyone I knew in London and Atlanta thought moving there was a step backwards. I won't pretend it was conviction alone. The financial crisis had closed the American route to an international graduate, London was no better, and it was my father and my uncle who first put Nigeria on the table. What turned a default into a decision was Atlanta: I had seen what it looked like when ambition and opportunity sat in the same place, and I wanted to help build that where my parents came from. I went anyway, in December 2010. Lagos has wealth and talent in abundance; what it has less of is the clear path that lets an able person stay and build without looking abroad, here and in the other cities where Nigeria's economy is made. I couldn't have told you then how. I only knew that nothing would come of waiting for the decision to feel comfortable, so I made it, and I've been here since.

Atlanta had shown me what strong institutions make possible. Leadway taught me what they're made of.

The second decision came there, a year or so into my career, when I was working as a data analyst on the second floor. An executive director called me to her office and gave me a room, a week and about a hundred files on travel agents applying for IATA bonds. No brief, no template, no one to ask. She wanted to see what I would do with it. Each file held a bank statement, management accounts, a company profile and whatever else the agent had submitted, and the job was to read between the lines of all of it. I worked beside a lawyer who was perfecting the collateral, so I was also pulling valuation reports and working out what each property would fetch if it ever had to be sold. With no framework to follow, I built one: a workbook in Excel that held every calculation and every piece of evidence, and a report of two or three pages on top of it that set out the findings in plain writing, so the director could read the conclusions without opening the workings. I handed it in without knowing whether I had understood the assignment at all. A week later she called and told me to pack my things. For a moment I thought that was the end of my career in insurance. I was moving up to the underwriting floor.

What followed was four years of learning how much detail a promise contains. In insurance every clause is read, every document is checked, every risk is priced before anything is signed, and a regulator stands behind the consequences if it isn't. My job was to judge whether a travel agent or a construction contractor could deliver before a guarantee was issued, and I learned how often capital moves on a promise, and what it costs when the promise breaks. I also learned that the work worth doing usually arrives without instructions, and that you become comfortable with that by accepting it, again and again.

By 2018 I had priced other people's risk for five years. The third decision was to take some of my own. During my MBA at Lagos Business School, a conversation with two classmates about lending to small businesses turned into Sycamore. Most of our class was interviewing for well-paid jobs, and the people closest to me, my family included, tried hard to talk me into doing the same. My father, who had paid for my first degree, had the strongest case. I understood why. But I had made a decision, and Leadway had taught me that a decision half-made is worse than either choice. I spent the next seven years helping to build Sycamore into a regulated financial services group, running its operations and finance, and I still sit on its board. Building it taught me the other side of what I'd learned as an underwriter: what it takes to be the counterparty that delivers.

Assetrica began as a fourth decision, and a correction. In early 2025 I went looking for a new place to live and found that, after fifteen years of work, I still couldn't afford what I'd assumed I could. Five years of pricing other people's risk had not, it turned out, done much for my own. That was a wake-up call about my own position, and then a harder one: if it was this difficult for me, how would the average Nigerian ever get onto the property ladder? The common view was that developers were overcharging. When I spoke to them, I found they were stuck too. Banks would lend only slowly and on terms built for a different kind of borrower, so developers sold off plan, and buyers paid in with no way of seeing where their money went. Our first version let people buy into property in smaller amounts, and it rested on an assumption I hadn't examined: that the governance underneath was already in place, and that an investor could rely on it. It wasn't. Each developer was raising money on marketing, renders and personal reputation, and when a project went wrong there was nothing for the investor to hold on to. That took me straight back to the hundred files. At Leadway nothing was issued until the bank statements, the accounts and the valuations had been read, and there was collateral to fall back on if a promise broke. Here there was no shared version of that for anyone to lean on, which is why the fund managers and institutions with the capacity to finance these projects mostly didn't. Within months I understood that the real shortage was trust, and that capital stays away from anything it can't verify. So we rebuilt it as governance infrastructure: an independent record of every mandate, so that money is released against evidence. If you solve that problem once, capital moves twice, first from the institutions that need proof before they deploy, and then from the individuals who reach real assets through them.

I also build for people who haven't come yet, and for the ones thinking of leaving. When I arrived I found a country full of people as sharp and as hard-working as any I'd met in London or Atlanta, most of them wanting what anyone wants, a fair chance to build a life. The ones who leave are not rejecting home; they're betting that the chance is better elsewhere, and for many it is. Having lived on both sides, I'd put it this way. The West offers a settled life, and it's a fair thing to want. The infrastructure is already there: roads, housing, power, schools. If you're willing to work, what you need can simply be bought, and the effort goes straight into the life you want. That comes with strings of its own, which I'll leave for another day. If you want to build something exceptional, an institution that will outlast you, it's easier to do here, where so much still needs building.

But I owe anyone considering it the full price. Many people came back around the time I did, from London and from America, and after a few years of the daily grind most of them went back to security. I don't blame one of them. Staying took a stubbornness I didn't know I had, a thick skin I grew the hard way, and a refusal to treat a decision as reversible once I'd made it. It also took grace. I've watched people work as hard as I did and get a different result, so I don't pretend that effort alone explains where I am. My timing helped too. I was in my mid-twenties, unmarried, with no children and very little that depended on me. If I failed, the only person at risk was me, and not everyone considering the move has that luxury. My faith that God would see me through has held in every uncertain stretch so far, and effort was the part I could control. What I've seen in sixteen years, in Lagos and across Nigeria, and in the time I've spent in Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa and Morocco, is a continent with more talent than it has institutions to employ it. Africa will hold a growing share of the world's people over the coming decades. They will need homes, schools, work, healthcare and capital, and someone has to build the institutions that deliver them. The ones built in the last generation show it can be done within a lifetime.

In the West, almost nobody has to think about who built the systems they rely on every day. The water runs, the pension pays out, the title transfers, and the names behind them are a matter for historians. It's enough that the work was done, and done well enough to be taken for granted. That is the future I want for Nigeria and for Africa: institutions and infrastructure so solid that the generation after next never has to think about who laid them down, only inherits them. We can leave that work to someone else, or we can start it now. There will be more decisions, and I don't expect them to look wise at the time either. But I know which side of that choice I'm on.

Not everyone has to build. Institutions need brilliant managers once they stand, and good professionals at every level, and I've worked with many. But someone has to get them out of the ground first, with no template and no guarantee, and that is the work I was made for. I haven't done any of it alone. My wife, my parents, my brother and sister, and a wide family on two continents have carried me through the hardest stretches of this, including the ones they advised me against. My co-founders at Sycamore were sounding boards through seven demanding years, and I learned a great deal from building alongside them. Anyone who sets out on this road should know that the people around you matter as much as the decision.

My father likes to tell a story from when I was six or seven, about the day I wandered off in a supermarket and the shop had to call over the loudspeaker for my parents to collect me. For years afterwards he'd laugh and call me lost and found. I didn't understand it as a child. I think I do now. In 2010, a move to a country I'd never seen looked like wandering off again, a graduate going backwards. It turned out to be the place where what I'd learned was most needed, and where I learned the most. A generation before mine laid foundations here that still have room to be built on, and sixteen years of working on them gave me the confidence to build in my own right. If I was meant to stay in London or Atlanta, I'd have stayed. Instead, in a place I was at first afraid of, I found what I'd been looking for without knowing it: the chance to build things that create opportunity for people other than me, and to keep creating it long after I've stopped. That is the found half of my father's joke. I know I arrived with advantages, a foreign degree and the exposure that came with it, and I'm not sure how much of that was earned and how much was given. What I am sure of is that it sits under my optimism about this place, and that I've been given more than most. So I try to make the most of it, and I hold myself to that more than to anything else. A child who wanders off isn't waiting for directions. Neither, it turns out, is the man. I've never had the full picture before starting, I've stopped waiting for one, and I count it a privilege every time I get to put something where there was nothing. That is why I build.