Ridwan’s Story
Every week, we will curate career stories from professionals in tech. We will discuss their #OriginStories and how they got into the industry. Our focus will center around people with non-traditional tech backgrounds.
This week, we spoke with Ridwan Rasheed. Ridwan has been building people, teams and products for the past five years. As a tech entrepreneur, Ridwan’s goal is to drive positive economic and social change. He is currently the Co-founder and COO of IderaOS. IderaOS helps African Entrepreneurs sell to anyone, anywhere.
Did your background influence your getting into tech?
I have a very colourful background. I was born into a family that fell on hard times. We didn’t start off being poor. We were comfortable at the beginning, but by the time I got to secondary school, things had taken a turn for the worst. We couldn’t afford to pay our school fees so naturally, half of the school year I'd be forced to sit at home. So the short answer would be No, my background did not influence my getting into tech.
What happened when you left secondary school?
I wasn’t able to immediately register for WAEC that same year I left school, which meant that I was unable to take the JAMB exams. So I was left, home, idle, until the next year when I could take the exams, thankfully… or so I thought . I didn’t have my OLevel yet so I decided to do my GCE also. Bizarrely, to add to these series of unfortunate events, I and everyone else who took exams in that centre’s results was cancelled. Here I was again, faced with another year of idle waiting. In a change of pace, I took the JAMB and GCE and passed the following year. With that, I began trying to get admission into a university.
My dad had always wanted me to be an engineer. He went as far as getting someone who was an electrical engineer at the time to talk to me. Automobiles always fascinated me, to be able to build a car was my ultimate goal.. I originally wanted to get into mechanical engineering but my dad persuaded me that electrical engineering was more beneficial.
My journey began at LAUTECH , I got into the pre-degree programme and moved on from there. During my first year, I had to drop out. There was a huge financial crisis at home that made things particularly difficult. I had two options: one was to have my parents take a loan to pay school fees for that year and the other option was to go home. I picked the second option because I felt they wouldn’t be able to repay the loan. It was a particularly harrowing time for me but what helped was the support structure I had.
You waited three years to get into the university and then you had to drop out. What was the plan?
Subconsciously, computers had replaced my earlier fascination with automobiles. I would spend hours with my small Java phone surfing the internet and reading up on a lot of random things. At that time, I had created email addresses. I had started doing anything that came my way at the time. But I didn’t understand the import of what I was doing.
What were you doing on your phone?
There were some groups on Facebook that I found that were into building wapka websites. They were small domain websites that you could build by yourself. You cobble together a little code to create a web page for yourself with a subdomain. My friends showed me how to hack mobile applications for those Java phones. Some of them created their own browsers. One had to get those interfaces, change the code structure of some of the apps and figure a way to just hack it. Those were the days of ‘2go’ and some other mobile games.
Shortly after, I started my Diploma programme at PolyIbadan. The diploma was also pretty rough for me. One of the things that helped was that I had learnt desktop publishing beforehand. So I helped people write their projects. Of course, I had no computer so people who offered me projects would also give me their computers to work with. My friends also had computers. We played games, watched movies, and downloaded course materials to study. Those were the experiences that made me love computers.
What did you do after your diploma?
After my diploma, I wanted to intern for a company in the electrical engineering and electronics sector. I felt that there was a confluence between electrical engineering and computers. I wanted to find an opportunity to do both. I sent out CVs, did interviews, but I was unable to secure a role. I was beginning to get frustrated. I was back to working on wapka sites in the meantime, until one day, I stumbled on a Facebook group where a man was teaching people how to build websites using HTML and CSS, before then I was using Markup. So it got me thinking about how the web works and I started taking the training. I still did not have a PC so I was writing out the code on a piece of paper and comparing it with the model code he gave. There were sites that I could go to see the output of my code so I did that on my phone.
Three months into the IT period, I still hadn’t found a placement so I took on a teaching job. The pay was 10 thousand naira. I picked up a few extra bucks from private lessons, SSCE prep and others. That increased my net earnings to just under 30 thousand naira.
How exactly did you move from teaching to tech?
Roughly a month after I started teaching, I got an offer from an IT firm I had applied to. The company was taking on interns from all backgrounds to learn skills for various fields in tech that they were specifically interested in. However, the company was only offering a transport stipend of N5000. Transport for the whole month would cost me N9600. I had not even factored in food and other necessities. It was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. It was even harder to convince my parents that it was the best decision. Ultimately, I knew that I wanted more out of life. I didn’t want to end up being a broke teacher even though I loved teaching. I had to get people from the neighbourhood to beg my parents before they caved.
I started my internship at the company. I had a personal computer assigned to me. I knew this was a turning point in my life, but I could barely take care of myself.
I started sleeping over at the office since the transport stipend was not enough. Some days, I had only dinner, other days, I ate only biscuit. But I was learning at a rapid pace. I was learning HTML, CSS, Content Management Systems such as Drupal. Staying overnight at the office meant that I could even take courses on social media management, digital marketing and others. I also picked up soft skills. In total I spent about 18 months there. That was where my career really took off.
