“My biggest skill set is that I know how to identify what is cool. I don’t think I can create the coolest things, but I can spot what is cool. And being able to spot it is as good as creating it.”
From childhood, Jide Ojewunmi has understood a fundamental tenet of life: people want things that make them stand out, and he was good at finding those things. At school, he supplied sweets his classmates could not buy at the tuck shop. At university, he sold T-shirts and organised parties. Each venture brought him closer to a career built around recognising what people wanted and finding a way to provide it. Today, that instinct runs through DefEar’s, the talent management and marketing business he founded. Its work spans musicians, content creators, brands and now film.
Ojewunmi grew up in Gbagada, Lagos, in an upper-middle-class family. His parents were accountants who also ran a business together. He spent summers in the UK, swam, rollerbladed and went to Ikoyi Club, where his father was a member. His parents cared deeply about his education and sent him across Lagos to Corona School, Victoria Island, believing it would offer a better environment than Corona Gbagada, which was closer to home.
Corona was fertile ground for creativity, giving pupils room to explore their interests beyond the classroom. Several would go on to make their names in Nigeria’s creative industries. Burna Boy was Ojewunmi’s junior, while Krowd Kontrolla, whom he would later manage, was his classmate. Visual artist Dennis Osadebe was also among the school’s alumni. School life made space for activities beyond the classroom, and pupils took them seriously. “They didn’t let us play with sports and extracurricular activities,” he says. “We did a lot of those, and it was very competitive.”
Ojewunmi’s skill set, however, was more tuned towards business. In boarding school, pupils used vouchers instead of cash. Parents deposited money, which was converted into booklets of ₦50 slips redeemable at the tuck shop. Ojewunmi found another use for them. He brought in contraband sweets and sold them to classmates, and with the proceeds, he bought his first phone. “I’ve always been a hustler.”
While preparing for his SATs, he found another opening. His tutorial centre sold photocopied textbooks, but he knew where to buy the original and make better copies. He began supplying other students at a cheaper rate. When the tutor discovered the competing business, Ojewunmi was expelled.
Behind the enterprise was a change in his family’s circumstances. He began living with his mother, who could not provide all the creature comforts he had become accustomed to. “When you have so much access to money and all of a sudden it’s taken away from you, the reality of life hits you because your taste is still high. But your pocket cannot keep up.” Earning money from his various business pursuits became a way to sustain some of the life he knew.
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Lagos Island was his business school. His grandmother lived close to the market, and visits to her brought him into contact with the traders there. Sometimes, he waited there for his mother to finish work. Walking through the market, he recognised clothes he had seen people wearing elsewhere, now available at lower prices. He began learning where to buy things and what other people might pay for them.
Ojewunmi came to see two sides of his upbringing as complementary. At home, television and access to international media fed his imagination. On Lagos Island, the market sharpened his eye for value. “I was watching Sky Digital at home, and that was feeding my creativity. Then this other side, the street, was feeding my business acumen.”
For university, his mother wanted him outside Lagos, away from its distractions. He went to the University of Ibadan, initially enrolling in civil engineering. About a month into his studies, the university discovered that he had not taken physics in his entrance examination. He was transferred to food technology. He completed the degree, but he had already lost interest in formal education. Instead, he began to focus on business.
His first business was Metro Inc.; he made custom T-shirts and also brought clothes from Lagos Island to sell on campus, using the market knowledge he had acquired. Another venture, Strictly UI, was an unofficial website for students. Ojewunmi worked on it with two friends and brought what he called its social angle: live polls that pitted students against one another in popularity contests. Some people paid to improve their ratings. The feature made the site popular, but it also made it fraught. As students became upset about their results and people discovered who was behind the platform, the situation became threatening, and the group eventually shut it down.
Entertainment offered a more lasting direction. Before university, Ojewunmi had helped organise parties in Lagos with a group of his friends called Blend. In Ibadan, in partnership with a club, he began throwing parties, charging at the door and learning how to draw a crowd. Parties led to artist bookings. Other organisers began asking him to secure performers for their events, paying him a fee for the service. He brought Burna Boy to Ibadan shortly after the singer released his breakout single, “Like to Party”. He also brought 2Baba and organised a Mayorkun concert, where Davido made an appearance.
But he didn’t want to stop at just organising events in Ibadan. “It always rang in my head that anything I did in Ibadan didn’t have the impact like Lagos had,” he said. “And I didn’t want to be a local champion.”
After university, he returned to Lagos and continued working in entertainment, attending events and building on the relationships he had made. Concert promotion had already introduced him to talent management. He first worked with Blackmagic through merchandise, making T-shirts for the musician’s concert. Later, after Ojewunmi brought him to perform at his university and handled the arrangements, Blackmagic asked him to become his manager. The roster of artists he managed grew to include Krowd Kontrolla and Skiibii. For years, the operation was effectively Ojewunmi himself: the person artists and collaborators called to make things happen. Eventually, he wanted to build something that could handle more talent than one manager could.
A trip to Ethiopia with Skiibii gave that ambition a shape. On the trip, he met Damilola “Dapper” Akinwunmi, who was then managing Ice Prince. As two young managers accompanying their artists, they found plenty to discuss. The friendship continued after they returned to Nigeria and soon became a working relationship. Their skills complemented each other. Akinwunmi handled music distribution, while Ojewunmi worked on promotion. When Akinwunmi had a project that needed publicity, he brought it to Ojewunmi.
During one conversation at Akinwunmi’s house, they began discussing the shortage of good talent managers. They imagined building something like Def Jam. At first, they planned to do it together. But Akinwunmi already had his own business, and Ojewunmi wanted something he could develop independently. DefEar’s formally began in 2020. Ojewunmi developed the name with his late brother, drawing partly on the Def Jam reference and the promise that people would eventually hear them. The company gave a structure to work he had spent years doing as an individual. It also gave him room to take on opportunities that did not fit neatly into artist management.
Successful promotions brought enquiries from people outside music. Someone working at a company would hear a song, ask who had pushed it and approach Ojewunmi with a campaign of their own. Could he help promote a jingle? Could he develop a campaign for a brand? The requests slowly turned DefEar’s into a creative agency. Ojewunmi describes it as a 360-degree business spanning talent management, promotions, marketing and merchandising. “It’s an ecosystem that we’ve built that helps everything in the creative economy,” he said.
The move into creator management followed a similar pattern. While trying to promote Skiibii’s “Baddest Boy” remix with Davido on TikTok, he connected with Teniola Oyewole, who was TikTok’s Nigerian country manager at the time. They developed a campaign together that helped the song trend on TikTok, and then began collaborating on other campaigns.
After several campaigns together, Ojewunmi asked Oyewole to join DefEar’s as a partner. She was already mentoring creators; that work developed into managing them. She brought that to DefEar’s and helped establish a division dedicated to representing creators, including Softmadeit, Purplespeedy, Crispdal and r0dn3y.
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Ojewunmi is particular about how these creators are described. He resists calling them “TikTok influencers”, even when the platform accounts for their largest audiences. They work across other platforms, and the label can narrow how people understand their abilities.
His latest venture, DefEar’s Originals, grew from that frustration. Ojewunmi saw that some of the company’s creators wanted opportunities in film, but being known primarily for short-form video made it harder to be taken seriously by the traditional film industry. Rather than wait for someone else to cast them, DefEar’s has begun developing its own films. “If they’re not going to expose your talent to the world,” Ojewunmi said, “we will do it ourselves.”
He is also working on Hustle, a platform to connect brands and creators directly. At the time of the interview, it was still in development. The plan is for brands to send briefs, negotiate with creators and receive completed videos through Hustle.
It is a larger version of the instinct he first exercised at school: notice what people want, understand what stands in their way, and build a route between the two. Back then, it meant finding things his classmates were willing to pay for. Today, it means helping creative talent secure opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach.
