I am the Founder and CEO of UseABI, where I am building the intelligence layer for M&A.
Before starting UseABI, I was a corporate lawyer focused on private equity M&A and venture capital transactions. At Greenberg Traurig in New York, I worked on more than 45 transactions for firms including Vista Equity Partners, GTCR, Kohlberg, Patient Square Capital, Siris Capital, Blue Wolf Capital, and Riverside. I also advised founders, startups, and investors on venture financings and other corporate matters.
I started my legal career at Babalakin & Co., one of Nigeria's leading law firms, before moving to the United States.
I hold an LL.M. in Law, Science and Technology from Stanford Law School and an earlier master's degree focused on financial technology law. I graduated first in my law class at university and finished second nationally at the Nigerian Law School. I am admitted to practice law in New York, California, and Nigeria.
I grew up in Nigeria in a very academically inclined family. Today, my immediate family includes five Ph.D.s and eight master's degrees, with most of us working in professional careers. The floor was always very high. Because of that, I became interested in finding the ceiling, or figuring out whether there was one at all.
At different points, that meant trying to be the best student I could be, becoming a better lawyer, learning from people who were much smarter than me, and moving across continents to put myself in environments that would challenge me.
Along the way, I have been fortunate to have people believe in me and support me in ways I never expected. Those experiences have left me with a strong sense of responsibility to make the most of the opportunities I have been given.
Outside of work, I spend a lot of time mentoring students and young professionals. Through speaking engagements, mentorship programs, and educational initiatives, I have worked with thousands of people over the years. I also support students through the Ijaodola Educational Foundation. I have served as a Founding Advisor to Acceler8 Africa and as an Executive Member of the Stanford African Entrepreneurship Network.
Today, most of my time is spent building UseABI and thinking about the future of work, artificial intelligence, and human potential.
These days, I spend most of my time building UseABI.
More broadly, I spend a lot of time thinking about two questions.
How far can a person go when ambition, discipline, opportunity, and hard work come together?
And how can technology help more people unlock that same potential?
UseABI is my attempt to answer the second question.
We are building the intelligence layer for M&A so that people can spend less time recreating work and more time applying judgment, creativity, and expertise.
Looking back, every major chapter of my life has started the same way.
I get interested in something and then I find the most difficult, ambitious, or objectively unreasonable goal about that something, and then I try to figure out how to get there. For me, the destination has never been the most interesting part. I am more interested in the journey required to get there.
At the university, I wanted to graduate at the top of my law class. I did.
At the Nigerian Law School, I wanted to graduate as the best student in the country. I finished second nationally.
When I joined Babalakin & Co., I wanted to become one of the firm's strongest associates ever. Within a year, I was named Joint Top Performing Associate. Within two years, the partners were considering me for senior associate.
Before I joined Greenberg Traurig, I told one of my mentors that I wanted to make Big Law partner in five years. I joined as a first-year associate and, less than three years later, I was already performing many of the functions of a senior associate on my team.
Today, I am doing it again.
With UseABI, I am pursuing the biggest goal I have ever set for myself.
I do not know how far I will get.
What I do know is that with UseABI, I am building a solution I would have loved as an M&A associate, and most of the meaningful things in my life started with a goal that felt a little beyond my reach.
At almost every point in my life, people have believed in me before there was enough evidence to justify it. Sometimes more than I believed in myself.
When I got admitted to Stanford and needed funding, Babalakin & Co. supported me. They did it on a no-conditions basis. They told me they did not need me to come back, although my desk would always be there if I wanted it. They told me they believed in my dreams and in what I could become.
Similar things have happened throughout my life.
Mentors have opened doors for me before I felt I had earned them. Partners, colleagues, friends, and former employers have trusted me with opportunities, responsibilities, and support that often exceeded what I thought I deserved. Some have told me they wanted to invest in UseABI before there was a product to show them. Others have backed me simply because they believed in what I was trying to build and who I could become.
For a long time, I wondered whether I really deserved any of it. The only way I knew how to respond was to work hard enough to justify it.
What I eventually realized is that people do not make decisions like these lightly.
If people are willing to place that kind of trust in me, they must have seen something.
And if they saw something, I have a responsibility to make it worthwhile.
A few months after I joined Greenberg, the managing partner and global head of corporate asked me, "Who beat you in Nigeria, when you were second nationally?" I told him about my friend who had finished first. He was in London at the time. We hired him.
On August 5, 2022, my last day at Babalakin & Co., one of my partners, Tola Oshobi, SAN said to me, "Five years from now, I want to hear that you've built a billion-dollar company." That is the goal and there is still time.
When one of my colleagues at Greenberg was leaving for another firm, his goodbye email said this:
I always told you, if I could invest in people like stocks, I'd put all of my money on you. You are gifted in so many ways — your drive, optimism, interpersonal warmth, and a fantastic attorney.
I kept that email.
I have been mentoring people since 2016. Around 3,000 students and young professionals so far.
I also run the Ijaodola Educational Foundation, which provides tuition scholarships to Nigerian students. Education changed my life. I want to help make that possible for more people.
My philosophy on life is probably best captured by Theodore Roosevelt's idea of the man in the arena.
I would rather be the person in the arena than the person watching from the sidelines. I would rather attempt something difficult and fail than spend my life wondering whether I could have done it.
I have always been fascinated by human potential. I think most people are capable of much more than they realize, and I think many of the limits we accept are limits we have never actually tested.
That belief has influenced most of the decisions I have made in my life.
I have generally found myself drawn to difficult environments, ambitious goals, and problems that seem slightly unreasonable because I think the process of pursuing difficult things changes you.
Even when you fall short, you usually end up somewhere far more interesting than where you started.
For me, the goal has always been to see what is possible.
That is how I have tried to live, and it is how I hope to continue living.
I am building UseABI, full-time.
I am paying close attention to how AI is going to change work over the next several years. I think it will be one of the most important shifts of our lifetime, and I want UseABI to be part of how that shift plays out in M&A.
I am also reading a lot about how to manage people and how to run a business as it grows. Building has turned out to be a different discipline from practicing law, and I am learning as fast as I can.
It is just day 1.
