On the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes was stopped for a quick interview and asked one simple question about the highest amount of money she has made in a year. Her answer is why Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes’ interview has gone viral across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa this past week.
She didn’t exaggerate and she didn’t try to hide the numbers, either. She simply said what it took to get here.
The interview between Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes and James Dumoulin
On June 28, James Dumoulin, the creator of School of Hard Knocks, caught Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes on a Lagos street corner. He asked what she did for a living. Private equity, she said. He asked how long she’d been in the business. Twelve years. Then he asked the question that changed everything: how much does the business make? Her firm, she said, now manages around $80 million.
That’s the moment the interview stopped being a nice clip and became a story. A young Black woman, on a Lagos street, casually naming a figure most people don’t associate with women in African finance and doing it without flinching. Within 48 hours, Aruwa Capital’s own account reported its follower count had moved from under 20,000 to over 100,000 and the video itself had gained over 27 million views. People weren’t just watching. They were sending it to each other with captions like “listen to this.”
But it was one line that kept the clip alive. She said 99% of the time, success comes down to refusing to take No for an answer, this single sentence was what kept the clip alive. It wasn’t the usual motivational speech people give, she talked about persistence and how normal it is for rejection to happen because she faced her own fair share of it for 8 years but she didn’t give up. She pushed before she was able to raise her first fund. She was told, in various ways, that she wouldn’t make it, because of her age, her race, her gender but the response became the line everyone quoted: “If you aren’t given a seat at the table, build one for yourself.”
The Force Behind Aruwa Capital Management
Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes is the founder and managing partner of Aruwa Capital Management, a Lagos-based private equity firm she launched in 2019 at age 29. Before that, she spent over a decade in investment banking and private equity at Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan and Syntaxis Capital Africa, where she worked on transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Aruwa Capital Management is proof that businesses led by or involving women can generate both social impact and a strong financial performance. Before founding the firm, Rhodes identified this as more than a Nigerian issue; she saw it as a global blind spot. She wants to use her organization as a case study for why others should take women seriously in finance.
Rhodes has said publicly that she is the only woman in Nigeria to have raised more than $10 million for a debut institutional fund, a distinction that says as much about the industry’s gatekeeping as it does about her.
What 8 Years of Rejection Can Teach You
You’ve read the story. Maybe you’ve already picked out a lesson from it. But here’s where this stops being about someone else’s success and starts being useful to yours.
Most women don’t need rejection defined for them because it’s not a definition kept in your distant memory, it’s something that happens in everyday life. It’s the interviews that never get calls back, the promotions that go to someone else, the pitch that never gets accepted, the proposal that disappears into an inbox.
In most cases it isn’t about raising institutional capital like Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes did but the emotional weight of being told no, not once or twice.
Here are a few ways Rhodes stood out during those eight years, based on what she’s said in this interview and in earlier ones:
She built credibility before she needed it. Long before Aruwa existed, Rhodes was already building a track record, working on major investment deals at Syntaxis worth over $200 million. By the time she was ready to start her own fund, she wasn’t a stranger pitching an idea but a woman empowered with the necessary experience.
She kept the thesis and changed the delivery. Rhodes has been talking about gender-lens investing since long before it was a term institutional investors recognized. What changed over eight years wasn’t the conviction; it was how she pitched it, learning to make the commercial case as forcefully as the social one, so investors heard returns first and impact second, not the other way around.
Adesuwa Rhodes valued relationships and treated them like an actual currency, and this can be shown in her response to a question asked during the interview, whether a degree matters for getting into private equity, but her response was all that is required is human connection. This sentence is not a dismissal of education because she has a formal education but it’s a reminder that trust and referrals matter in industries as much as your CV does
She acknowledged the rejections she faced without letting ur define her. She names the reason plainly—her age, race, and gender. She didn’t let it define her; instead, she persevered.
What this signals for the women coming up behind her
None of this erases the fact that private equity in Africa is still overwhelmingly male-dominated. An $80 million story doesn’t undo that. What it does is prove the pattern can break and that’s not nothing.
Rhodes has also used her platform to point at a bigger blind spot. Africa’s informal economy, which she called a $1 trillion opportunity. Market traders, roadside sellers, and street vendors—she argues investors are leaving real money on the table simply by not looking there.
Rhode’s interview went viral because it demonstrated something most inspirational content doesn’t bother to show: what resilience actually costs. For Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, it took eight years of real rejection and the discipline to get to where she is.
Staff writer at Women Digest covering beauty, fashion, wellness and life.