Chude Jideonwo and Adebola Williams receiving the CNBC Young Business Leader of the Year prize a life time ago!
There are a lot of stories in my past that I need to share. But not yet, I have so many mountains I yet want to climb.
Let me just take a detour to say how incredibly proud I am of what Adebola and I have created. You know you’ve created something truly special when you have FOMO over that something; where you find yourself wanting to brag to a new generation of people ‘Do you know I created that?’ 🥰
We founded TFAA when we were all three of us teenagers. We had two other co-founders abandon us, who didn’t think this would amount to anything.
Here we are, 17 editions later.
17!
17!
17 o.
In Nigeria.
This prize – which has been hosted by the Africa Union, been hosted literally in the Aso Rock Villa and has celebrated young people from about 20 African countries.
Even as we remain the product owners, it’s been about five years since I was involved in any of the planning for this event. Think about that: In Nigeria – one of the biggest youth platforms in the region, and neither of the co founders were involved in any real way. This may sound boastful, but it’s only the depth of my pride – you can’t find any similar platform that has that scale of succession planning around these parts.
I just found out a few days ago that the nominees list had been released! And when I saw the list and then saw the excitement by this generation’s brightest lights – it made me cry. That is exactly what we wanted to do when we created this.
My proudest achievement continues to be fully handing over sparkling brands we created and seeing them still sparkle – YNaija.com, Rubbin’ Minds, Red Media Africa, StateCraft Inc. and this. That’s the only reason I reluctantly became an entrepreneur in the first place – to build, scale and transfer.
This story will be told one day, insha Allah.
Photo: Adebola and I receiving the CNBC Young Business Leader of the Year prize a life time ago.
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Chude Jideonwo and Adebola Williams Emerge Winners of the CNBC Africa Young Business Leader of the Year Award
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