Nikolas Ajagu Left Facebook Two Years Before Reports Claim

Nikolas Ajagu is a former Facebook executive and the husband of Meena Harris, niece of former Vice President Kamala Harris. He briefly became one of the most searched people in the country in January 2021, after wearing a pair of Dior sneakers to Harris’s inauguration. Sneaker collectors online identified the shoes, and him, before most news outlets had his name.

Most of what’s been written about him since repeats one detail that isn’t accurate. The common version says he left his job at Facebook that same month, in January 2021, to become a full-time father. He actually left almost two years earlier, and has never corrected the record himself. Almost everything public about him has come from somebody else’s account: his wife’s Instagram captions, a cofounder’s quotes in a technology publication, a filing with an Australian stock exchange.

Princeton, then Facebook

Ajagu studied social anthropology at Princeton, graduating in 2005. He played football and basketball, served as president of the Ivy Club, one of the school’s eating clubs, and wrote his senior thesis on the economic and cultural impact of interactive media, a subject that ended up shaping most of his career. He joined Facebook in 2007, not long after the company opened up beyond college campuses, and met Meena Harris that same year while both of them worked there. Harris, a Harvard trained lawyer and the daughter of Maya Harris, would later found the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign. Their relationship stayed out of the news for years afterward.

A decade in advertising

Over the next twelve years, Ajagu moved through several roles inside Facebook’s advertising business.

During the Media Solutions years, a Swiss trade publication covering a Zurich technology conference reported on a talk he gave about Facebook’s advertising reach to a room of European marketers. By his final title, he was running the team that sourced and managed partnerships across Facebook’s advertising technology business.

His LinkedIn lists his total time at Facebook as twelve years and one month. That places his actual departure in 2019, two years before the company renamed itself Meta. Most sites still list 2021 as the year he left.

Projects on the side

Facebook wasn’t the only thing Ajagu was building. In 2013, he was one of four founders behind Code and Canvas, a coworking project in San Francisco that leased an entire artist warehouse to keep working artists in place while making room for a handful of startups around them. TechCrunch covered the project the following year, quoting a different cofounder, John Yi, on how the space came together, though not Ajagu himself. He’s also listed as a cofounder of Ecosystem Ventures, an early stage investment firm, and started a small wine label called Barrel and Ink.

Board seats followed. In 2015, the Australian Financial Review reported that Ajagu, described in the piece as a “Facebook veteran,” had joined the board of Whole New Home, an Australian home design company listed on the ASX. Corporate records separately list him as a director at The New School of San Francisco, a public charter school, in a role that began around when his daughters would have started there.

Marriage and family

Their first daughter, Amara, was born in June 2016. Harris confirmed their engagement on Instagram three months later, that September. It still wasn’t clear from reporting at the time whether or when they had actually married, and even now, most of what’s public about the marriage traces back to her own captions rather than any official announcement. Their second daughter, Leela, was born in February 2018.

Ajagu never explained his next move himself. In February 2020, Meena Harris told Marie Claire that their household didn’t run on typical gender roles, and that he had chosen to become their primary caretaker after their second daughter arrived. Around the same period, in an interview with The Times of London, she put it more directly:

“We do not ascribe to the traditional gender role thing in our house.”

That places the real shift in 2018 or 2019, matching when his LinkedIn shows him leaving Facebook.

The sneakers

By the time Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president on January 20, 2021, Ajagu had already been out of his Facebook job for close to two years, though none of that history was public yet. What people saw instead was a pair of Dior x Air Jordan 1 Retros, a raffle only release that resold anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000, worn to the ceremony. Meena Harris confirmed it was him with a two word tweet: “Yes smh.” Their daughters had their own moment that day too, in matching faux fur coats designed to echo an outfit their great aunt had worn earlier on the campaign trail.

For a few days, Ajagu was one of the most searched people connected to the new administration. Then the attention passed.

What he’s doing now

His LinkedIn shows almost no activity for most of the past decade. There are exactly two posts on it. The first, from 2024, congratulates a startup called Etched on an early funding round. The second, posted this year, jokes that he was surprised his login still worked.

Etched builds computer chips for running large AI models. It came out of stealth this summer with more than $800 million raised and customer contracts already signed, and the company thanked Ajagu by name for helping bring the founding team together. It’s roughly the same kind of work that made him notable at Facebook, now inside one of the bigger stories in tech.

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