BANKING ON

In 1869, Edward Bok emigrated from Denmark to New York, aged 6. Such was his family’s poverty, he took to washing the windows of a local bakery, walking the streets of Brooklyn collecting errant lumps of coal, and selling ice water. Each pail went for a penny but, Bok learnt, with sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice, he could sell each drink for three pennies. This, apocryphally, was the first Lemonade Stand: ever since a symbol of entrepreneurial spirit.

Toni Fola-Alade (Rendalls 20123) was also six when he started a lemonade stand – his first business.

“My parents are pastors and they’re very involved in church,” he remembers. “I just noticed that people would kind of stay around talking, so six-year-old me was like ‘Ok, I’m going to make lemonade and bake muffins from scratch and sell it to them.’ The product probably wasn’t very good, but I was using my cute factor,” he laughed.

“Then I realised that I could do it for less effort if I went to Costco and bought it wholesale.” Suddenly Fola-Alade was making $20 a week. “It was a ton of money – more money than I knew what to do with!” Around the same time, he started reading Richard Branson’s books.

Since then, Fola-Alade has founded a charity bringing sustainable development to Nigeria, previously served as founder-CEO of a bank, and written a book, Study Cheat Codes, about the secrets to academic success, all while studying for his Human, Social and Political Sciences degree at Cambridge, and interviewing Stormzy, as president of the university’s Afro-Caribbean Society. Now he’s growing the book into a community, running a venture capital firm and flying back and forth to Nigeria for the charity.

Despite that, the first words out of his mouth when we talk are self-effacing. “I still feel like I’ve achieved nothing,” he said, from Gail’s café in Essex.

“When I look back,” he said, “I haven’t really changed from that age,” selling chocolate chip muffins to his parents’ congregation in Stratford. “I don’t think I’ve ever been finding myself; I think I’ve been refining myself.”

There’s no clearer example of Fola-Alade’s clarity of purpose, even from an early age, than his journey to Harrow. Aged 12 and studying at a day school in London, Fola-Alade saw Channel 4's documentary Too Poor For Posh School and was captivated. The Common Entrance had long passed and the deadline to apply for a scholarship was three weeks past. So he started working.

“I went on a five-day binge,” he said, “studying every single thing on [Harrow’s] website.” Without telling his parents Fola-Alade wrote to then Head Master, Barnaby Lennon – not just an email but a printed-out portfolio of ambition. “In business, you have to stand out in your market against your competitors,” the 12-year-old wrote, “and I believe the principle applies here, so I decided to make this.”

One year later, Kristian Emmanuel, depicted in the documentary sitting for Harrow’s scholarship tests, was Fola-Alade’s Rendalls roommate. Eventually, Fola-Alade’s younger brother, Tola, would follow in his footsteps.

In some ways, Harrow wasn’t a natural choice. Both of Fola-Alade's parents had negative experiences with boarding schools in Nigeria and England. As a young, Black man navigating ADHD and dysgraphia, whose favourite word to this day is “contrarian”, Fola-Alade didn’t take instinctively to the strictures and structures of the School. “I’ve always had this kind of maverick personality,” he remembers, “always going against the grain. At an institution like Harrow you can get in a lot of trouble for that, and I think I did at times and other House Masters may have written me off.”

But Fola-Alade left Harrow for Cambridge as Rendalls’ Deputy Head of House, vice-captain of the School judo team and founding president of the Perceval Society, which continues to remember and celebrate African and Carribean history, culture and current affairs at the School. His contrarian’s secret to negotiating Harrow? The friends and beaks who gave him the space to be himself: like Ms Natalya Silcott, who helped found the Perceval Society, and his House Master, Simon Taylor.

“We have to big up Mr Simon Taylor. I think he’s the only House Master who could have dealt with me,” Fola-Alade said. “Being a little bit of a contrarian himself, he realised that I wasn’t trying to be a pain. I was just being myself, and he helped create an environment to be my best self.”

Fola-Alade arrived at Cambridge in 2017 with the same “engine” he’s always had, newfound confidence from his time at Harrow, and his sights set high. He was elected president of the university's African-Caribbean Society in his first year, tripling their sponsorship to £30,000, and serving on the inaugural selection panel for Stormzy’s Cambridge scholarship, after interviewing him at The Union earlier that year.

He became part of a movement that raised the profile of underrepresented students across a university eight centuries old. The year after Fola-Alade led the African-Caribbean Society, Cambridge’s admission rate for Black students rose 50%. Suddenly he was being interviewed in the Financial Times and profiled: one of Future Leaders’ top ten Black students in the country.

Then Fola-Alade began to look beyond university. First, he founded DoGood Africa, a non-profit which, in 2021, received almost $100,000 from the Coca-Cola foundation for its work supporting local charities in Nigeria. It was an idea born from his Nigerian heritage, and a vision for enabling the “fragmented” network of organisations struggling to do good work across his cofounders’ home country without support.

“We’re all young Africans who either live on the continent or are first generation immigrants to the West,” he said.

“It’s not a White Saviour situation for us. We have a huge self-awareness that communities should be empowered to solve their own problems. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel; we're just trying to champion people doing the existing work.”

As DoGood Africa continued to grow in Nigeria, creating over 100 jobs and setting up a new school in Lagos’ largest slum, Fola-Alade entered his second year at Cambridge and turned down a job offer from the Vice President of Nigeria to set out on his next project, Nomad Bank.

Looking back now, Nomad is both Fola-Alade's proudest accomplishment and his lowest moment. On the one hand, securing the investment to found a digital bank for Nigeria’s up-and-coming businesses and start-ups made him one of the youngest and most impactful founderowners around the world. On the other, the pressure of running a round of venture-capital fundraising, then serving as CEO – all while studying for finals at Cambridge – drove him to the edge of burning out.

“As a very confident person naturally, maybe too confident, burnout looks like anxiety attacks, panic attacks, especially at critical moments.” He compared the feeling as a CEO to a kind of stage fright he had to confront.

“Like when you’re in the wings, waiting to go on: that’s when it was worst for me.”

“I

Fola-Alade had been placed on academic probation earlier that year, a situation he admits he deserved for giving too much of his attention to endeavours outside Cambridge.

“I saw university as a means to an end: something I needed to do so I could get out in the real world and do the things that were interesting.”

In 2020, as Fola-Alade's finals neared, COVID shut the real world down and he decided to do everything he could both to make Nomad a reality and finish his degree.

“I was like ‘screw it, let’s put everything on the line.’” Fola-Alade lived alone and spent eight hours a day working on Nomad, plus another eight studying for his finals. “It was COVID: I couldn't go anywhere," he remembers. “I didn't do anything. I literally smashed my phone so that I would have no option to talk to anybody.” He kept an old Nokia to call his parents.

Six months later, when lockdown ended, Nomad had secured enough funding to go live, and Fola-Alade had a first-class degree. “I was maniacally focused. I took myself to a mental place which was not healthy.” One year after launching, Fola-Alade would step down as CEO. Despite all he’d accomplished, it was, he said, “the first time I’ve felt failure.”

After catching his breath for a few months, Fola-Alade is now living out his ambition of becoming a “Branson-esque serial entrepreneur" as the chairman of Culture Capital Group, which has invested launched or invested in five creative businesses in the UK and Africa over the last nine months. Meanwhile, DoGood Africa continues to grow, and the book Fola-Alade wrote about his time at Cambridge, Study Cheat Codes, has become a community-driven education technology platform called Cheat Codes for hundreds of young entrepreneurs with the same kind of unrelenting ambition. He recently has been involved with strategy at the Harrow Club, a network of five youth clubs in West London, where 90% of young people are from an ethnic minority background. He’s passionate about getting more young OHs involved with the charity, which provides a safe space and opportunity for some of London’s most vulnerable young people.

From meetings at the House of Lords or G20 summits, to the disruptive world of start-ups, Fola-Alade thinks Harrow taught him to negotiate tradition and innovation. “I think what I took away from School was being able to respect, cherish and value institutions, but also be independent and innovative and take a risk to move forward.

“I couldn't help doing these things, if that makes sense. I didn't really try or plan to do them. These are all just manifestations of a motor or an engine inside me. I haven't quite figured out where it comes from.”