After 18 years of climbing the ranks at Meta to head its global luxury division, Morin Oluwole made a surprising choice – she stepped away from corporate success to forge her own path. The Nigerian-born, Stanford-educated executive had helped shape Facebook into the powerhouse it is today, but last year, she realised she wanted to craft a different kind of legacy, one that puts empowerment and intentional living at its centre. 

“I respect people who take an active role in their destiny, who don’t simply let things happen to them,” says Oluwole, speaking from West Africa, where she’s spending the summer with her family, including her five-month-old daughter. This philosophy didn’t emerge overnight – it crystallised through a journey that took her from Lagos to Silicon Valley, then Paris, and now Dubai.

Her career in tech began with yet another dramatic pivot. Initially, she attended medical school in the US, but soon she found herself working midnight shifts in an ER when clarity struck. “I said, you know what, this is not where I want to be,” she recalls. And that moment of honest self-assessment led her to a small start-up at the time known as TheFacebook, where she would go on to spend nearly two decades.

The early days required a different type of resilience to what she’d learned during late nights in the hospital. “When you think of early Silicon Valley, you see men all around you. You see a sprinkle of women,” she says. As one of the few Black women, she quickly realised she would need to “fight forward, prove above and beyond any doubts or questions of my capabilities”. Her breakthrough came when Meta tasked her with building a luxury division in Paris, despite being a non-French-speaking executive in the world’s luxury capital. “I spent my days working nine to six, my evenings learning French from seven to 10,” she says. “You arrive alone in a space where you can barely be understood, where you can barely understand. Then you are expected to be a thriving professional adult and business leader – and all you’re trying to do is figure out the difference between laundry soap and fabric softener at the grocery market because you can’t read the labels.” That bravery and dedication paid off spectacularly, however, as she built a business from scratch worth $2 billion in a decade.

She laughs while telling that story now, as if it almost happened by accident – but there was nothing accidental or incidental about Oluwole’s path to success. “I’m someone who loves to build,” she explains. “My strength is in building something from nothing – building structure and creating something solid.” She’s done that with teams, businesses, her whole career. 

Now she’s doing it again for herself – and her family. She splits her time between Paris and Dubai, working in luxury brand consulting, holding advisory board positions, and hosting a series of intimate leadership salons called Executive Breakfasts. 

“I intentionally focused on my professional life for the first half of my career,” she shares. “Now, without question, the first thought I have in mind if I get an idea or a project, is, ‘Can this align with the time I need to spend with my family?’”

In a world that often mistakes busyness for purpose, Oluwole’s story isn’t just about climbing corporate ladders – it’s about having the courage to step off them when they no longer serve your authentic self.