Meet Nigerian-American Timi Dayo-Kayode of Worksense

(Podcast is LIVE on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and SoundCloud.)

Timi Dayo-Kayode is an ambitious student-entrepreneur currently attending Tufts University. His startup Worksense recently won first place at Student Startup Madness at SXSW. Timi is passionate about driving equality in the workplace, and he believes better messaging data mining is critical to enabling better workplace outcomes. He’s developing Worksense into a messaging monitoring software that helps organizations understand how their employees are feeling at the workplace. Timi brings a global worldview to his role at Worksense, having grown up in Nigeria before moving to America when he was 16 years old. With one year left of college, Timi will be juggling school and startup life for another year.

We were lucky to pull Timi away from his busy student-entrepreneur schedule for a BSU podcast recording. You can listen on any of your favorite podcast platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud) and also enjoy the pre-podcast Q&A with him below.

How do you pronounce Timi? “Timmy”

Where did you grow up? I grew up in Nigeria till I was 16 at which point I moved to Maryland in the US where I finished up High School before moving out to Boston for college.

What word would your loved ones use to describe you? Problem Solver

What word sums up your childhood? Intercontinental

What or who most inspired you to pursue entrepreneurship? I was never super aware of this, but very likely my mum. She was definitely the most entrepreneurial person that I grew up around. She had a fashion boutique back in Nigeria and ran a Microfinance bank with her brother concurrently.

You previously told BostInno you were one of only a few black people in a class of over 50 students at Tufts University, and you felt “out of place.” Since cofounding Worksense and sharing the purpose behind it to publicly (and proudly), have you found yourself feeling less of place? Cofounding and sharing the mission of Worksense has definitely allowed me to become more comfortable in spaces where I am the minority.

What’s the biggest barrier to growth facing Worksense? Right now, the biggest barrier is time. As a full time student, I can’t give Worksense the time and dedication it deserves, and I am super excited about the places Worksense will go once I graduate in a year.

Do you feel Tufts is flexible enough in its approach to supporting student entrepreneurs? As far as Tufts’ approach to supporting student entrepreneurs, I think the support it provides is still very much vertical with a focus on competitions and financial support through the 100K competition and Montle Prize among others, but as a student entrepreneur, there is so much more that can be done to support students starting their ventures and I think Tufts is beginning to realize this with the launch of their summer accelerator two summers ago. The approach might very well be to take pages from the entrepreneurial support systems of schools like MIT, Harvard, and Northeastern that have figured these things out. But I do think that given how young the entrepreneurial department at Tufts is compared to those of some other schools in the Boston area, there is a lot of room to grow.

You were the only Boston based company competing in Student Startup Madness at SXSW. How did it feel to win first place? To be frank, I think winning for me speaks to the quality of startups coming out of the boston student entrepreneurial ecosystem. There were startups from all over the country and for anyone monitoring the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems across the country, it should’ve come as no surprise that the winning team hailed from Boston.

Fill in the blank. The future of the workplace is… aggressively data-driven.

How would you describe the mission of Worksense? Worksense is all about one thing; Giving organizations the tools they need to cater to their employees. We are bullish about the quality of experiences that employees deserve to have in the workplace and Worksense is all about raising that standard.

Why is Boston uniquely suited for Worksense to flourish? As an enterprise SaaS company, Boston is the perfect place to launch. There are so many companies that Worksense could sell to in the Boston area, the entrepreneurial community here is super strong and supportive, and there is no dearth of technical talent. In as much as our chances of success are super low as with any other startup, as a startup in Boston, all the odds are stacked in our favor.

What’s your favorite thing about Boston? How connected it is! I am more often than not, at the most only two degrees away from people that I want to connect with which is super helpful as a scrappy first time founder.

What would you change about Boston? The weather 100%

Where in the world would you most like to visit? Hong Kong

What would you change about the world? I.E., What problem facing the world would you most like to see solved? Inequality in access to resources

Get hip with Timi on Twitter: @TDKayode.