600 mph! How Andela Kenya is Preparing for Hyper-Growth
They say most commercial jumbo jet planes will, at cruising speed, hit 600 mph. (That’s about 975 km/h). Sounds really fast! Well, growing a company from 0 to 600 staff in just over 3 years will make you feel like life is really flying by at that speed. That’s been our story at Andela…and especially so at Andela Kenya, since we launched in 2015. From squeezing into a little office in 2015, to a campus housing hundreds today. And because we don’t like to be boring at Andela, we are in the news again this week.
Today, Andela announced a landmark series deal of $100 million from the fund Generation, a fund co-founded by former US Vice-President, and Presidential candidate, Al Gore. While the news has sparked a lot of interest, the underlying story, is amazingly one of the best emerging start-up stories to come out of the continent, in a long while. But let’s go back to how this all started. Because, this story indeed began in Nairobi.
5 years ago, a group of storied individuals, all successful within their own right, met for only their 3rd meeting, as part of a group they dubbed ‘Collaboration for Impact’ to visit one of their member’s businesses, one James Mwangi, as he showcased ‘Equity Bank’. During this trip, a talk by one of their guests, Jeremy Johnson, who was invited to speak by one of the organizers, Christina Sass, inspired their belief in Africa’s ability to help bridge the world’s growing tech talent shortage. This is where the story gets interesting though. Because Jeremy and Christina didn’t just stop there. So inspired were these two about what they felt this potential could do, that they kept in-touch, and then collaborated with a group of young African entrepreneurs, to form what it is we call Andela, later that year in 2014.
That company today employs over 1600 employees in 7 countries. This includes hundreds of elite developers who work with close to 200 client-partners around the world. I recognize that most of us are not used to reading this kind of story where the company in question is based on the continent. But Africa has become the fastest growing economy on the planet. Kenya has also seen a maturing in growth over the last 4 years. Take 2015, when the total amount of money raised by companies in the country was $47.5 million (split by over 30 companies). In 2018, that was the exact total raised by a single tech company in Nairobi.
Another reason 2015 was significant, that was the year that the Andela story in Kenya began. Mid 2015, four of us showed up to an office in Kilimani, Nairobi, to launch the second city location of this largely unproven company. One that had a great idea of using Africa’s untapped elite talent, to tackle one of the largest problems of a world that was going digital — Software Engineering Talent. But what really attracted us to come and be part of this mission and vision, was because the founders and staff had this deep belief, that we were coming together to ‘Change the world’. And they believed it. And we really wanted to be part of the African generation that did change the world.
Fast forward 3 years, and it is startling to most of us who began back then, the impact that the company has gone on to make. Today, we are the proud home to over 600 staff in Kenya, with close to 450 of those being elitely talented software engineers, working with over 170 companies around the world. From a community perspective, we’ve launched programs like the Andela Learning Community (ALC), a program which has seen us take over 5,000 local participants, and train them in software development skills with partners like Google. Many have since gone on to find employability using their newly found skills. Or programs like ‘TeenCode’, which sees dozens of our developers spend their weekends in various high schools teaching young teenagers how to code, so they have a strong advantage in a few years time. It might not sound like much, but these are the building blocks of things that are already changing our tech scene here in Kenya, as more and more young people opt for careers in tech.
Yet, it hasn’t been an easy journey. We’ve had to develop operations teams that are able to deal with the problems of a staff population that’s doubling to tripling every single year. Or the talent acquisition teams that have to review and assess, what has grown to become thousands of applications every single month, in order to select the best of the best to join Andela. Or the partner facing teams that help match our engineers with the best companies around the world, and help manage the engagements on an ongoing basis, or the talent teams that constantly work to ensure our developers have the best learning tools and curriculums in order to keep themselves at the top of their profession at any given time. Andela has become a business of a myriad of moving parts, with each part using the best people in their striving for excellence. Still, the one question that keeps us up at night, is ‘How are we preparing ourselves for our next stage of growth?’
What is clear, is that our next great challenge, is finding a way to scale effectively. Why? Because our dream isn’t to impact the lives of a few thousand. If we impacted a few thousand every year, we will change the world, but we would be a lot happier if we can find ways to impact millions. We need to move from being a fast growing company, to being a hyper-growth company. That makes us keep asking questions like ‘‘How do we assess more candidates faster? How do we ensure that we keep consistency of output as we grow? How do we enable companies working with large groups of developers feel sure they are getting the best quality out of them? How do we help our developers know how they can produce the best output at scale? How do I get the Andela Kenya story replicated in other African countries in 6 months instead of 3.5 years?” All these are pertinent questions. And the answer is clear. We need to increasingly leverage technology in doing this.
Since we launched a little over 3 years ago, the world has seen major advancements in technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain amongst others. These technologies are fundamentally changing the way companies operate and how they think about scaling. For Andela, the technology advancements represent opportunities. For us, we see it as an opportunity to achieve what we are achieving today, in a tithe of the effort and time. It means we have opportunities to introduce new ways of thinking and new practices around how engineers contribute, are managed, and self manage. It means it gives us opportunities of growing from a company that impacts thousands to a company that impacts millions and tens of millions. It means that we can increasingly rely on technology to help us achieve more consistently and reliably, tasks that would today, require hundreds of man hours to achieve.
Today, we are already deploying technology that is helping us become a lot more scientific in the way we think through things that have been hitherto been applied inconsistently across the tech world. We have introduced technology to allow our developers better track their code outputs, areas of improvement, quality of code, team performance ratings just but to name a few. And this is but the tip of the iceberg. Continuing to find more ways in which we can continue to build and deploy solutions that support human engineering become more predictable and reliable, is a big part of what we are excited about. This is indeed the bridge that transforms us from being a great company, to one that is globally exceptional.
So this is why we are excited about our future. This is why we are excited about the announcement like today’s. Because Series rounds are indeed the jet-fuel we need to take us to that new level. To work on making our technology our biggest enabler for growth. Both in how we find and grow talent, and how we deploy talent. This is what makes us confident about saying that we can change our impact curve from one that seeks to change thousands, to one that seeks to impact millions. And this is what makes us confident that we are really changing the world.
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