Learn · Rise · Create
Michael Olaiya.
Founder · Board Chair
My mission is a simple one: to help people learn, to command their money instead of fearing it, and to reach further than they were told they could — while keeping music and art at the heart of a life well lived.
Profile
Builder and creative both, I’ve never been able to choose between the two, and a long time ago I stopped trying. I’m as at home building a company as filling a canvas — and what ties it all together is one stubborn belief: that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not, and that the tools of enterprise are among the most powerful instruments we have for closing that gap. It isn’t a belief I arrived at in a boardroom. I learned it as a child, at a place that opened doors my circumstances hadn’t — a story I’ve set down here.
But if you really want to know me, it isn’t on any résumé. I’m a godfather — the honor I treasure most, and the thing that keeps everything else in perspective.
Talent is everywhere.
Opportunity is not.
The belief everything else is built on
Convictions
Education
Learning is the closest thing I know to a fair start. I want more people — the young most of all — to reach it early and keep it for life.
Financial literacy
Money is not the point, but understanding it is protection. I care about teaching people how to hold it, grow it, and pass it on with intention.
Opportunity
Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not. What holds people back is rarely ability — it is access, information, and a door no one ever opened for them. I open a few, quietly, for people who were never handed the key.
Mentorship
No one arrives on their own. A word at the right moment, a door held open, someone who simply shows up — these shape a life more than almost anything else. I try to be that person, especially for the young.
Community
Strong communities aren’t built by heroes; they’re built by neighbors who invest in one another. I put my time where I live, and I trust that small, local acts compound into the biggest changes.
Faith
Faith is the quiet foundation under all of it — it keeps me grounded when things are good, steady when they aren’t, and accountable to something larger than myself.
Purpose
I believe, more than almost anything, in giving back. My philanthropy has one center of gravity: underserved communities — the kind that raised me. Everything I give my time and resources to grows from that single root — a child’s education, a family’s financial footing, opportunity where there was little, and the health and promise of young people handed fewer chances than they deserved.
Cancer research holds a particular place among these commitments; I know what a single breakthrough can mean, to a person and to everyone who loves them, and it will always have my support. But it all traces back to one conviction — that a community once decided my future was worth investing in, and I intend to spend my life being that for someone else.
Pursuits
Away from the work, I’m a musician who has been fortunate to share stages with artists I grew up admiring, a collector and maker of art, a writer, and a traveler most alive in a country whose signs he cannot yet read. These aren’t hobbies I keep at the edges — they’re how I stay whole.
Affiliations
A few of the rooms I’m grateful to stand in: I’m a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and Emerging 100 of Atlanta, a Fellow of Sutton Capital and the 2024 cohort of MCEL, founding board chair of PEACE Academy, and treasurer of Peace Through Action.
Writing
Talent Is Everywhere. Opportunity Is Not.
What a folding table, a chess set, and a room full of volunteers taught me about the one thing that actually decides a life.
Read the essay →
Rise
Someone bet on me before I had anything to show for it, and I have never forgotten how that felt. So let me say to you what I wish someone had said to me sooner: you are not behind, and you are not too late. The distance between where you are and where you’re going is almost never talent — it’s a door, and doors can be opened. Find yours. Walk through it. Then turn around and hold it open for the next person. That is the whole of it — and it is how any of us rises.
Contact
I still believe the best things begin with a real conversation. If something here moved you — an idea, a cause, a piece of your own story you caught in mine — I would genuinely love to hear from you. My door, like the ones I’m forever trying to open, is open.