Origin Story
Who am I?
I’ve spent the last 5.5 years living in emerging markets and doing some neat things.
I’ve:
- Led the data and analytics team at Evidence Action
- Co-founded LakeHub, a thriving tech hub in Western Kenya
- Led international expansion and talent strategy at Andela
How did I get here?
Why, as an Economics major from the United States, am I passionate about gender equality, meritocracy, and leadership amongst software developers in sub-Saharan Africa?
Why, having grown-up in the suburbs of Miami, Florida am I in love with the entrepreneurship scene in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala, and Accra?
I don’t know.
I’ve asked myself this question many times. All I know is the path I’ve taken to get to where I am today. This is my origin story.
The Beginning: “I like animals.”
From the age of 6 to 16 I wanted to be a veterinarian. My reasoning was simple: I really liked animals.
At the age of 16 I was sitting in a high school international relations class and started daydreaming. Obsessed with numbers from an early age, my day dreaming often led me to scribble down calculations. This time, I started doing some back of the envelope math about the impact I could have as a veterinarian.
I asked myself: If I became a veterinarian, hired three other veterinarians and we all worked 50 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 50 years each, what percent of the world’s pets would my team be responsible for improving the health of?
I put together a model that probably looked something like the one below. (Yes, I was that much of a #geek when I was 16). Anyway, it turns out the answer is something to the effect of 0.0067%. While this probably wasn’t the *exact* equation I put together 12 years ago, I think it was incredibly close.
1st Realization: “I want to make an impact.”
I decided that impacting 0.0067% of my target industry wasn’t the purpose of my life and promptly set about finding a new purpose.
During that same 60 minute class, I started asking myself what knowledge I thought would enable me to make the maximum positive impact. The answers I came up with were that I needed to understand “The world” and (even though I didn’t like this answer) “Money”.
This line of thinking drove me to select International Relations and Economics as my undergraduate majors. My first year at university, I decided that Mandarin would be the language spoken by the greatest number of people moving from the low-income to the middle-income bracket. I moved to China, spending 3 months in Hangzhou, 6 months in Shanghai, working and taking language-intensive courses.
About 4 years later as I finished undergrad, I found J-PAL, a Lab at MIT with top scholars from around the world researching the most interesting questions in development economics. I summarized dozens and dozens of academic papers, reducing the technical equations and complex appendices into 2-page summaries for bureaucrats making policy decisions in Ministries of Finance, Education, and Health in emerging markets around the world.
After finishing a Master’s degree at Yale University in International and Development Economics I had an opportunities to work with many of the Professors whose academic work I’d summarized the year before.
Putting together another model that calculated the expected value of the number of Disability Adjusted Life Years I thought I could prevent, I opted to manage research on a higher-yielding varieties of rice for farmers across West Africa.
The research was valuable and enlightening, but only worked with ~1,300 farmers. I wanted bigger numbers.
I moved to Kenya, and led a team of data analysts supporting the governments of Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi in improving research-backed national programs in de-worming, clean water, nutrition and education. As a team we handled hundreds of thousands of surveys, and hundreds of millions of data points. Our work was able to help governments improve their impact at scale:
- We built a model that improved targeting and reached >150,000 additional children in need of drugs for Schistosomiasis at no additional cost.
- We analyzed the supply chain and hardware malfunctions of chlorine dispensers that enable improved drinking water quality driving an over 40% increase in adoption rates for more than 3,000,000 individuals with access to the program.
- We designed the carbon asset and monitoring program to earn over 1.3 million carbon credits to fund additional improvements in drinking water quality.
2nd Realization: “I want to create things.”
Running research programs and leading data teams was empowering, but I always worried that if I wasn’t doing it, that someone else would have done almost as good of a job.
In 2013, this feeling became powerful enough for me to do something about it. After attending a TEDx Talk in Kisumu, Kenya where a speaker asked why the entirety of Kenya’s thriving tech scene was based in Nairobi, I reached out to the speaker and asked him if he wanted to build a tech community in Western Kenya.
We visited Maseno University and Masinde Muliro, and met with young professionals in Kisumu and Kakamega. We put up fliers advertising an Intro to Android event, reserved a meeting room at a hotel and managed to draw 30 attendees to our first event.
At the close of our first meeting my co-founder James Odede and I looked at our audience and said “This is your community, what do you want it to look like?”
We started small. The next weekend we were 4 rusty coders and a rusty laptop. The week after we’d grown to 5 developers and the week after that to 6. With an average of over 20% week-on-week growth we probably should have applied to YCombinator then and there!☺
We pushed on, we kept listening to the community and running events and LakeHub has done alright:
- We got $10,000 from Google to run a Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) program. We served over 150 students, in predominantly all-girls secondary schools.
- We set up a full-time office in Central Business District Kisumu to give a home to the techies of Western Kenya
- We helped lead a conversation around tech hubs in “Second cities” across the continent.
After 3 years in Kisumu and 2 years of growing LakeHub with James, I had the itch to create again. In late 2014 I heard about the seed-funded, unorthodox start-up Andela.
Having worked with so many technologists, entrepreneurs, and hubs across the continent, I knew that Andela’s model of empowering aspiring world-class developers across the continent was viable in plenty of other markets across the continent — Kenya foremost among them.
I dug through LinkedIn, I leveraged my personal networks, I sent a ton of e-mails and nothing came through. I found a 1–800 number vaguely associated with Andela, reached CEO Jeremy Johnson’s remote virtual assistant, told her my life story and was rewarded with COO Christina Sass’ e-mail address.
Six persistent e-mails later, and with one honest reference to the fact that if Andela didn’t get back to me I’d move forward with an offer to set up Uber in Kenya — I was invited to meet the team in Lagos.
Things went well and I quit my job, moved to Lagos, absorbed the culture, documented the systems, learned from the team and set about exporting Andela to Country #2.
After running digital marketing campaigns in Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya and getting a resounding response from Kenya, I moved back to Nairobi.
In May of 2015, Andela Kenya was whatever coffee shop I happened to be sitting at. I prioritized three things — People, Space, and Awareness and its gone alright. A year and a half later Andela Kenya:
- Is led by Country Director Joshua Mwaniki who was one of the first and most impressive people I met and who started running the whole ship within 3 months of our first meeting
- Has over 80 developers — 30% of whom are female and all of whom are raising the bar for the quality of software developers in the country
- Has had over 15,000 applicants demonstrating a growing body of aspiring technologists from across the country
3rd Realization: “I want to surround myself with the most worthwhile people.”
I’m pretty damn happy at Andela. As of today, I’m working on the strategy for providing an empowering learning environment for the remaining 1.1 billion people in Africa.
Over the last several years I have been fortunate and grateful to feel that the caliber of my peers has been constantly rising.
The more time I spent with high-quality individuals the more I feel able to create things that are worthwhile and have the impact I am seeking.
So that’s where I am for now. That’s the only story and explanation I have. Here’s to the future.
