Hi! I'm Dayo, a hyphenate executive and author based in London. I trained at Yale Law School, Google, Amazon, Meta and the New York Times, and I'm happiest at the frontier of technology and media.
I care natively about storytelling and solidarity. As board chair of Open Television I started the Table Read Club for screenwriters. I put immigrants' rights on 1,600 Link NYC ad kiosks. In college I won a prize for collecting books. In the year after becoming a parent, I hosted 42 dinner parties.
The common denominator, and my why, is challenging defaults. Under this banner, I've made business and creative decisions with global impact, and lent vision and conviction to scaling operators.
Some of my best stories are in my book. The rest, I make with people like you.
What a loaded question! I was born in Chicago, and have lived and worked across the US as well as in France, Kenya, and the UK. I am 100% and proudly Nigerian.
How can we work together?
Right now, I build story and verbal identity systems for businesses where growth is new, or stalled. I found this product category by building a tone of voice AI agent to give myself leverage as a VP of Strategic Communications.
What happened to your newsletter?
I loved writing Two Nouns and a lot of you loved reading it! However, I wasn’t allowed to write it while I was at Amazon, and now I have “two kids.” For now I am channelling my writing energies into a new long form project, which you can follow @bad_clocks.
Should I go to law school?
This is a true FAQ! I applied to law school as a naive next step. Having since attended and passed the bar, I can say that law is a powerful tool that only gets more useful with time. Experienced lawyers are badass and dangerous.
Remember that legal training opens many doors: plenty of business leaders are trained JDs, and representing clients or the state is sometimes noble and sometimes not. Just be ready for the opportunity cost: three years, lots of testing, lots of money, and a system that is intense and sometimes grossly unfair.
Should I go to business school?
Plenty of people succeed in business without an MBA. They push beyond what they know by taking on new responsibilities, changing roles or firms strategically, managing up and down the org chart, and taking the odd class or licensing exam.
Others, like me, need business school to structure that shift. I attended almost by accident, adding an MBA during law school to wield data confidently and speak the language of macroeconomics, marketing, accounting and operations. Let’s be clear: I needed business school to get comfortable with Excel. If business school is a mix of signalling, networking and actual education, my $0.02 is that the education matters least.
