When we first heard about Andela, our interest was sparked. It happened in such a great way.
They reached out to Greg, my Co-Founder and CEO directly and invited him to meet with their Co-Founder and CEO, Jeremy Johnson, at his apartment in New York — which just happened to be a few blocks from our office.
Jeremy’s passion for his business and what Andela does was infectious. Looking back now, and having worked with and talked with many people at Andela, we can see that it runs throughout the organization. To say that we were touched and share his passion is an understatement.
Andela is a company with headquarters in New York, San Francisco, Lagos and Nairobi that selects the top tech talent from Africa, they then integrate the developers into a company’s team and continue to work with you to help further integration and growth. Dubbed ‘the startup that’s harder to get into than Harvard’ by CNN, they really do hand pick the best of the best. (But that’s enough from me, if you want to find out more about them, head on over to their website, www.andela.com, to find out more information.)
Andela received a good deal of fame when the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, led the company’s recent $24 million Series B round, alongside GV and others.
Speaking about the investment, Mark Zuckerberg said;
“We live in a world where talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not… Andela’s mission is to close that gap.”
Loyyal is a blockchain-based loyalty and rewards infrastructure startup at the cutting edge of our industry, just starting our rapid growth stage. So it really is a challenge when recruiting new talent, educating new employees, and integrating them into the team. Finding the right person who understands and can adapt and work at the edge is rare. We often work long hours and have members of the team around the world. There is always someone working or needing something at any given time. Nothing new there I know, but it still requires a certain type of person, as most startups know!
In August this year, we added an Andela developer, Chris Ganga, to our team. Ganga came to us with just basic familiarity of blockchain. I don’t know where he found the time to learn about and understand it so quickly, whilst being thrown in at the deep end with the rest of the work at Loyyal, but he did. He became a part of the team, and most importantly, was accepted by the rest of the team as a valued member and someone who pulls their weight. (This in my opinion has been the most important factor in small teams like ours where there is high pressure, camaraderie and a target-driven agile environment.)
Let me take a step back here for a moment.
Loyyal was recently selected by the Dubai Government to join 31 other companies in the Dubai Future Accelerator to help “bring the future forward,” as they say, for Dubai. Areas of focus are in machine learning, blockchain, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, agriculture-tech, energy-tech, education-tech and transport etc. Notable attendees (aside from Loyyal of course) are Hyperloop-One, Honeywell, Consensys, Next Technologies, Construction Robotics, and the former CEO of Rosetta Stone’s startup Pedago, among others.
Loyyal is working with Dubai Holding, a global investment conglomerate operating in 24 countries and employing over 22,000 people and the holding company for Jumeirah Group (famous for the world’s only 7* Hotel, the Burj Al Arab).
Various members of Loyyal’s team have spent a good amount of time in Dubai in the dedicated Dubai Future Accelerator office space (an incredible dedicated space filled with related companies that provides a launch-pad for potential partnerships and exposure to new technologies). Loyyal is also in the process of setting up a permanent office in Dubai to solidify our strong presence in the region going forward.
We decided that it would be a fantastic opportunity for us, and for Ganga, to meet in person in Dubai, and work together for a period of time in the Dubai Future Accelerator. What better location in the world, to come and meet in person with Loyyal and the other companies in the initiative, than somewhere like Dubai, the city of the future?
When we spoke to Andela about the possibility, they were as excited about it as we were. Andela offered to take care of Ganga’s accommodation which was (above and beyond) generous of them, and we would handle everything on the ground.
Ganga touched down at the airport in the evening, and got straight into it! He met with my co-founder, Greg Simon and our Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Partnerships, Matthew Hamilton, and he was 100% from the get-go!
We had spoken with the Dubai Future Accelerator team about Ganga coming and we continue to promote the Andela business model here in the region, so there was a good amount of interest in meeting with him and hearing our continued progress with Andela. The recent article in the Wall Street Journal on ‘Tech talent in Africa’ which featured Andela and Loyyal sparked a good deal of interest.
Ganga celebrated his 25th birthday out in Dubai as well while with the Loyyal team, which was a really happy moment (too much cake was consumed, as is appropriate on such an occasion!) and his trip was even extended by a week as it was so useful to have him with us on the ground.
Long story short, we couldn’t have been happier and we hope Ganga felt the same.
Working with Andela and Ganga has been incredible, and we fully intend to continue partnering with them as we grow Loyyal to where it needs to be. We love what they are doing to bring opportunity to Africa. I grew up in the Middle East and various developing countries, and have spent a good amount of my adult life in Central America, so bringing opportunity to people not living in the developed world is close to my heart.
We live in an increasingly global economy, but the concentration of skilled job availability is still within a few developed markets or accepted outsourcing markets. Africa is yet to have been tapped by the tech world, and Andela is at the forefront of this movement.
Thanks for reading,
Sean Dennis
Co-Founder & Chief Happiness Officer, Loyyal
sean@loyyal.com
