When a business titan like Femi Otedola decides to write a memoir, it isn’t just about storytelling—it’s about signaling. With the release of Making It Big: Lessons from a Life in Business, Otedola has made a deliberate choice to document his entrepreneurial journey at a time when Nigeria’s startup ecosystem is at a crossroads. For me, that decision alone is worth reflecting on.
Too often, African business success stories remain oral—told in interviews, whispered in boardrooms, or mythologized long after the fact. Rarely do the people who’ve walked those paths pause to leave behind a blueprint, a set of lessons, or even just reflections for those coming behind. Otedola’s move to publish Making It Big is significant because it shifts that dynamic. It’s not about whether the book will be perfect or whether every detail will resonate. It’s about creating a tangible resource that aspiring entrepreneurs, students, and innovators can interrogate, critique, and most importantly learn from.
In many ways, the timing feels intentional. Nigeria’s youth are living in an era of contradictions: on one hand, the challenges of inflation, unemployment, and unstable policy environments; on the other, the unstoppable rise of tech startups, fintech unicorns, and young founders daring to compete globally. For this generation, having a reference point from someone who has navigated both failure and reinvention at scale is invaluable.
Of course, Otedola’s world is not the same as that of a 22-year-old building a startup out of Yaba or Ibadan. His access, networks, and capital base are fundamentally different. But that doesn’t mean the principles, risk-taking, resilience, and recalibration are irrelevant. In fact, I would argue that his willingness to put those lessons into a book could spark the kind of intergenerational dialogue we’ve long been missing in Nigerian business culture.
I see Making It Big less as a celebration of an already well-decorated billionaire and more as a challenge to others in his class: to document, to teach, and to leave behind intellectual legacies that match their financial ones. If Africa’s next wave of innovation is to be sustained, it cannot just run on inspiration—it must be anchored in stories, case studies, and lived experiences that young people can draw from.
At the end of the day, Otedola’s decision to publish Making It Big says something bigger than the book itself. It says that Nigerian entrepreneurs—whether seasoned or emerging—deserve a written archive of what it means to build, to stumble, to rebuild, and to dream audaciously within our context. And for young people eyeing the uncertain road of entrepreneurship, that kind of archive might just be the compass they’ve been waiting for.
