01 · About
Where is the real problem, and what would actually help? That thread runs through chemical engineering, product, AI, private capital, and the regulated systems I ship today.
Onaolapo Michael (Lapo) Odunjo. Lapo is short for Onaolapo
I go by Lapo. Eight cities, one thread: arrive somewhere unfamiliar, learn how the system actually works versus how it is supposed to, find your footing, move again.
Today I build AI systems for regulated industries, environments where trust matters and the cost of a wrong answer is real. My work sits at the intersection of product, AI, financial infrastructure, and practical judgment about when to automate and when not to.
I graduated from Wharton with my MBA in May 2026, while shipping Kinage (forward-deployed production AI for regulated healthcare and fintech clients) in production. The path from chemical engineering to product to AI to private capital looks random from the outside. It is not. Each step chased a harder version of the same problem: systems that fail quietly in production.
Where everything started. Reading systems before I had words for it.
Chemical engineering degree. First time being the only one in the room who looked like me.
Pro-bono consulting, 2018–2019. First time doing the work without the title.
Big Nerd Ranch. Where I stopped being an engineer who could code and started being someone who built things.
COVID. Remote work. Learning how to build when the city around you has stopped.
First time. The city that does not wait for you to be ready.
Wharton MBA, graduated May 2026. Shipped Kinage in production while writing papers. Did not sleep enough.
Back. Building now. This is where the work is.
Most of how I think about product started in Lagos, reading systems when the official story does not match what is happening on the ground. That lens still shows up in the AI work I ship for banks, regulated enterprises, and markets most products never reach.
Lagos taught me to distrust the first explanation. When an AI pipeline or an investment thesis keeps failing, something upstream is usually wrong, something the room is reluctant to say out loud. I have made a habit of asking that question before anything else.
That skepticism deepened when I looked closely at how credit actually works in West Africa. Ajo groups and market lending look messy on a spreadsheet but they are often more adaptive than the products built to replace them. Understanding what already works before touching it is not just a courtesy. It is how you avoid breaking the thing you came to fix.
The same lesson shows up inside regulated institutions. The constraint is almost never the model. It is whether a compliance officer, a fraud investigator, or an analyst will act on what the system says. Designing for adoption under scrutiny is a harder problem than improving benchmark numbers, and it is the one that actually matters.
Working from the continent inside Western institutions means carrying global rigor and local reality at the same time. The products that last do not ask people to choose between them, and neither do I.
I read across systems, economics, and stories about people building things in the wrong order.
A novel about arriving somewhere unfamiliar and figuring out who you are in rooms that do not quite fit yet. I keep returning to books about that particular feeling.
Quiet and restorative. A reminder that healing is usually slower and smaller than you expect, and that it happens anyway.
Poetry that notices things sideways. I am reading it in transit, which turns out to be the right context.
Pure imagination and craft. I read fiction to remember what it feels like to build a world from scratch, which is closer to product work than most people admit.
On how complex organizations adapt when hierarchy stops working fast enough. The most useful management book I have read for thinking about AI systems that need human judgment in the loop.