She quit her six figure job at Google to give back to Nigeria
Meet Adesola Sanusi, she recently left her six figure salary job at Google where she worked as a product manager to join a startup. Why leave the security of a well paying job with one of the biggest companies in the world? For Adesola it was a calling, she was ready to put her skills to use for a higher purpose and give back to her home country, Nigeria.
Although there has been a real increase in the number of women evolving in the tech world in the past years, Black women in technology are still a rare occurrence. Companies like Apple and Google have been making efforts to hire more women and minorities only after being criticised for years for the lack of diversity and the still very wide gender gap in the industry.
Adesola discovered her love for computer science in high school which ultimately led her to pursue her passion at Harvard University. “Being a Black girl studying computer science at Harvard was definitely challenging[…]there were very few Black girls in my classes,” she remembers. But she persevered and eventually joined the product management program at Google right after she graduated college.
Adesola worked at Google’s headquarters in New York for the next three years. She continued learning and evolving in her role as a product manager while traveling the world. But in 2020 when the pandemic hit, everything came to a halt.
Like many people during that time, she was at home wondering about the state of the world and was thinking about her life and her goals. During that time of reflection she started asking herself, what do I really want to do? What impact do I want to have in this world?“ Her answers lied in her job: she needed to leave Google and go back to Africa.
“I think ultimately why I chose to leave Google is because I really wanted my work to be a lot more targeted and focused on the African tech scene, and I really wanted to just feel like the work I was doing was helping the most vulnerable, the most in need,” she explained.
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Adesola always had the ambition to do work that impacted the continent but the pandemic accelerated everything. Why wait? She wanted to be part of the booming tech scene in Nigeria now. She wanted to use her skills for a higher purpose now. And mostly she thought about the sacrifices made by her parents for her to be where she is today.
“I learned during the pandemic that you can’t predict what's going to happen tomorrow. You can’t predict what’s going to happen in 5 years. But what you can control is what you do now,” she said with conviction.
So in early 2021, Adesola joined the startup Okra based in Lagos, Nigeria. She left New York and moved to Lagos to pursue her calling. Inspired by the company CEO Fara Ashiru Jituboh, one of few women in the industry in Africa, who co-founded the company in 2020. Okra is a financial technology company that provides tools to allow the secure exchange of real-time financial information between customers, applications, and banks - assisting businesses across Africa to find solutions to better serve their customers.
“It is a risky decision,” Adesola admitted. “Google is a great company with great benefits, leaving that for a very early company can be a very daunting experience. But while it is risky [I feel ] a lot of peace about this decision, because in a lot of ways it doesn't feel like a decision that is self- serving in nature.”
At 24 Adesola has lost both her parents but wants to keep a positive outlook on life. She sees her situation as a privilege and is not afraid to risk it all to pursue what she sees as a calling.
“I think it is a privilege, I think it is a blessing to know the type of impact you want to have in the world,” she said. “I was ready to walk away from a very comfortable job knowing that I had a bigger calling to make sure that my work would help move Africa forward.”
Adesola’s story is part of a video series produced by YouTuber Bukola, a Black woman in tech who uses her channel to inspire, inform and advise others on careers in technology.
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