At his desk in Mountain View, California, Taslim Okunola watches one of his gems pull tasks and flag priorities from his email at around 9:05 AM local time. Gems are user-created or pre-made agents built on Gemini, Google’s main AI product. Okunola built his email gem to survive the intensive half-year planning period that helps Strategy leads produce the go-to-market roadmap for the following year. His current Strategy and Operations role at Google focuses on driving the marketing of subscriptions to consumer AI products, including Google One, Google Photos, and Fi Wireless. His curiosity, fueled by his work environment, has turned him into a serial vibe coder. Anyway, January is here, and to him that means breathing room to zoom out and recalibrate. As we get talking, we realise that Okunola’s curiosity has been a recurring theme of his life that has seen him go from Agriculture to Tech. The course selection problem Neither Taslim nor his father elected for him to study Agricultural Economics at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA). Taslim wanted to study Medicine and Surgery, while his father selected Quantity Surveying. None of that mattered as the Federal school shunted him into a new program designed to fill quotas. His tertiary education story is not unique; it epitomises the typical Nigerian undergraduate story. Parents prescribe courses based on what they think is lucrative due to their exposure, while students attempt to chase their dreams as their first choice of study. The aspiring student’s fate hangs in the balance of what they score in the exam organised by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and other indisputable factors, especially when vying for a slot in a Government-run institution. Every year, 1 million high-school leavers seek admission, but the system can only take a third of them []. So, being a supply market, students are forced to take what the school offers or try again the following year. Okunola wanted none of that waiting period. So, he showed up as a ‘reluctant recruit,’ drifting through student politics and stand-up comedy, but eventually finding his voice in a physical newsletter he’d print and pin to hostel notice boards. Finding digital advertising However, in 2013, something changed. He had a stint with the Google Students Club, which introduced him to digital advertising, but not as an art form, but as a math problem. While most people saw digital ads as mere banners on a screen, Okunola saw a high-stakes engineering puzzle. He became obsessed with the logic of the second-price auction—a system where the winner pays only a cent more than the second-highest bidder, preventing “bid-shading” and ensuring that value dictates the market. “The sheer genius of the auction system and that level of technical transparency was what drew me to it,” he tells Condia. For a student of economics, it was the perfect intersection of math and commerce—a system where results were the only currency and every stage of the funnel was quantifiable. In July 2014, he became a Google student ambassador and over his 18-month tenure, he travelled to three states, introducing digital marketing to about 300 students. His first real-world experience came in October 2015 from Hotels.ng, where he interned as a Digital marketer focused on performance marketing through Google Ads. The same year, he applied for an internship at Google, famous for its high application volume. Fortunately, Google chose Okunola, and for six months, he was on the local sales team of a company whose product he had used and advocated to others. Over time, the gap between those (individuals, businesses and agencies) who could benefit from digital marketing skills and those who could provide that service became very evident. So, Okunola turned to his trusted weapon of teaching and formalised it into an entity called ByteMars. Founding ByteMars Borrowing the early 'Andela model,' he trained talent for free and planned to recoup costs through salary sharing. The engine ran. Students learned, and jobs were found. But the realities of the Nigerian labour market quickly caught up with the idea. 'When I saw what interns were actually being paid, even those with Master’s degrees, my conscience hit a wall,' he said. 'The pay was barely enough for survival. I couldn't bring myself to take a cut of that.' The experiment was short-lived. The model relied on a baseline salary that simply didn't exist for Nigerian juniors. The closure of ByteMars in 2017 highlighted a broader systemic failure. Startups alone cannot compensate for a university system stuck in the pre-mobile era or an economy where offshoring trends favour India over Lagos. To Okunola, solving the talent crisis now feels less like a venture capital opportunity and more like a social imperative, a problem that requires the scale of a nonprofit or a government mandate to move the needle truly. Bridging the 'Lite' gap Following ByteMars, Okunola spent eighteen months in Lagos working in product marketing, focused on user insights and research that helped Google build products that worked better for African users. His work fed into initiatives such as Google Go and the development of Nigerian English voice support across products like Google Maps. It was rewarding work, yet revealing. Each time strong user insights struggled to translate cleanly into shipped products, he felt the distance between evidence and execution. Wanting to understand those constraints from the inside, Okunola moved into Strategy and Operations (S&O), where he spent the next five years working across Google’s largest teams, including Android and Subscriptions. There, he learned to treat business logic the way engineers treat systems—structured, testable, and precise. It’s about building frameworks that serve the goal," he says. "I’m very careful about creating too many systems. You have to make sure you are using the system, rather than letting the system use you." To round out his experience, he took on a Product Management rotation for Chrome, getting closer to the build-and-ship process that first drew him to tech. That mix of strategic design and hands-on product work now shapes how he reads the ecosystem, especially the friction between global scale and local specificity. He’s seen how major platforms try to “lighten” rich products for emerging markets, only for those versions to stall or drift from their originals. “That’s where local companies shine,” he says. “They’re not adapting down; they’re building for where they are.” The long game: Talent and Ambiguity This drive to understand the "underneath" led Okunola to a year-long rotation as a Product Manager on the Chrome browser, where he gained insight into the challenges of shipping features alongside designers and engineers. It was a hands-on lesson in how raw code becomes a global product, fueling his current obsession: the intersection of AI and human potential. Whether he’s coding his own AI agents or studying ‘high-agency’ leaders like Josh Woodward, Google’s VP of Gemini, Okunola is always looking for the machinery that drives impact. By watching Woodward—who scaled NotebookLM from an experimental project into a core AI pillar— he was essentially studying a masterclass in how to move from a nascent idea to global standards. He has also identified a pattern often missed by international teams: younger users in developed markets behave exactly like first-time users in emerging markets. This ‘recency’ of behaviour suggests that lessons from Africa are transferable to the world stage. "Once you see it, you can’t unsee it," he says. "The pie in Africa is increasing as connectivity costs drop, and some companies aren’t onto that yet." This curiosity eventually loops back to the problem that started it all: education. "Not everyone has the guidance I had," Okunola reflects. He knows that 'luck' is not a scalable economic strategy, and his own "Ag-Econs-to-S&O" pivot shouldn't have to happen by accident. When he points to China’s massive investment in vocational skills or America’s academic-to-industry pipeline, he is highlighting a structural deficit. China’s vocational system trains tens of millions each year, with nearly half of secondary enrollments in vocational tracks, a scale that dwarfs Nigeria’s TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) pipeline. For Okunola, high university enrollment cannot mask the lack of industry-specific training. In this context, tech accelerators are just bandages on a massive workforce readiness gap. For Okunola, the hurdles are now systemic rather than just digital. His long-term mission is to revisit the "ByteMars problem" with the institutional weight needed to fix the talent pipeline. "Helping people prepare for the future is a deep passion," he says. "If I have the time and the resources, that is exactly where I’m going back to."
