My Andela Journey
Today, June 21st, 2018, marks four years and one month since we founded Andela. It’s been a long yet exciting journey, full of all-nighters, challenges, learnings, laughter, travels, and all around transformative experiences. I wanted to take a moment to share some personal experiences as we’ve grown from a fledgeling startup to a team of 1,000+ spanning four countries.
Where It All Began…
In March 2014, I did the unthinkable and left my job as a Software Engineer with a great company, Pivotal, to become a full-time entrepreneur. After two years of working professionally, I wanted to step away from the monotony of the traditional 9 to 5, and the idea of building a tech startup out of a friend’s garage had always intrigued me. So I decided to join my longtime friends and classmates Ian Carnevale, Nadayar Enegesi, and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, to build Fora, a distance learning platform for African universities. We were working out of the offices of Extreme Startups (now HIGHLINE.VC), an accelerator program in Toronto, Canada. My task was to build the Fora mobile application we were planning to launch to supplement our Web platform.
Soon enough, it became clear that Fora wasn’t working as we had hoped, due to our inability to raise needed capital and overcome regulatory barriers in Africa. Just as we were preparing to wind down Fora, another opportunity emerged.
Over the past few months, Iyinoluwa (E) had been in touch with Jeremy Johnson, a seasoned entrepreneur, for feedback and mentorship. Jeremy had recently returned from a trip to Nairobi with Christina Sass, now one of Andela’s co-founders, to give a talk for the MasterCard Foundation. While there, he started thinking of how one might scale high-quality education without charging tuition.
When it became clear that Fora wasn’t working, E reached out to Jeremy again. They met up and brainstormed a few rough ideas, and Jeremy walked through one which would eventually become Andela. He promised to personally fund the former Fora team and join our board if we were willing to consider it.
When E told us about the idea that day, we were intrigued and inspired. Ultimately, Nad convinced us to take a risk and go for it. The next day, we got on Skype and told Jeremy we were in.
In May 2014, Jeremy flew to Toronto to meet the team. My first impression? This man is crazy! The speed at which he operated was unlike anything I had ever seen in my entire professional career. Jeremy landed in Toronto on a Friday afternoon, and by the end of the weekend, the first iteration of a business model was born; our first call out for developer applications was up on Twitter and we opened an Elance (now Upwork) account actively sourcing for jobs. It didn’t stop there. Nad booked a one-way flight to Nigeria to lead the first cohort of Andela developers, and instead of just funding the idea, Jeremy decided to leave 2U, which had just gone public, to build Andela full-time.
The following week, Jeremy came back to Toronto with Christina Sass, now Co-founder and President of Andela. Christina had tons of experience building education and employment programs in various parts of the world, including Africa. Jeremy convinced her to join us and drop out of her Ph.D. program at Harvard.
The six of us, all from different backgrounds and experiences, embarked on a journey to make Andela a reality.
The Big Apple…
By July 2014, I left Toronto and moved to New York City, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with Ian. Christina was able to get us a shared office space on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, not too shabby! At this point, I was fully focused on sourcing, bidding, and doing jobs on Elance to prove that US-based companies would hire remote, Africa-based engineers who could compete at a global level. Coming from an engineering background, handling sales was by far the hardest role I’d ever done. The process involved writing comprehensive proposals and getting on calls with potential clients to convince them to work with us. I tried everything imaginable, from video proposals where I displayed my lovely personality (who wouldn’t want to work with this guy!), to web scraping job posting sites for raw data, to training a classifier to identify the “ideal” job to apply for.
In three months, I had completed over 15 different software jobs on Elance / oDesk, with the help of our intern Wole Obayomi. We quickly realized, though, that filling freelance roles was not scalable. The supply of jobs from freelance sites was discrete, short-term, and it would be very difficult to maintain a consistent stream of work for our projected number of developers. We needed to refine our business model.
Around the same time, the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), a network Jeremy was a member of, was looking for developers. Their CTO at the time, Robert Calise, was looking for a full-time Node.js developer to accelerate their product roadmap. Of course, Jeremy told him Andela had access to the type of engineering talent he couldn’t find locally. Our first cohort of developers was still onboarding with Nad, so I jumped onto the engagement as the developer to test the new model. While placed with the YEC engineering team as a remote developer (they’re based in Boston), we listened to the company’s needs and documented the type of tasks I was encountering. These learnings informed changes to our onboarding material, customer acquisition strategy, and account management. Soon thereafter, the first iteration of our current business model (placing developers as full-time, distributed members of global engineering teams) was born.
A few months into the engagement with YEC, I onboarded Seun Martins, a developer from our first cohort in Lagos, to replace me. Seun successfully carried on with YEC, and they continued to grow their engineering team with more Andela developers.
Wakanda…
In April 2015, I moved to Lagos, Nigeria. Andela’s CTO at the time, Obie Fernandez, asked me to relocate to Lagos to provide hands-on technical mentorship to our developers as they began to navigate the deep waters of partner engagements. This was my first time living back in Africa, having left my native Cameroon nearly a decade prior to complete my high school diploma in Canada. My parents were not happy with my decision to move to Nigeria. They had always envisioned that after completing my engineering degree in Canada, I’d settle in the epitome of technological advancement, Silicon Valley! In their opinion, moving to Nigeria was a step backwards. As I landed at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, my mind was full of doubt. Am I making a big mistake? I had just left an established tech ecosystem in the West to move to an uncertain technology future in Nigeria.
I moved into a four-bedroom guesthouse that Andela had rented, sharing it with a number of early employees: Ebun Omoni, Chidiebere Nnadi, Temilade Ojuade, Godson Ukpere, Akonam Ivy Ikpelue, Prosper Otemuyiwa, and Nad. All my doubts soon disappeared after just a few days of living with this crew. The amount of energy, passion, and excitement they all displayed for Andela was contagious. But also, they were all genuinely amazing folks whom I learned a lot from. Ebun and I would spend entire nights having fruitful philosophical conversations; Godson became my gym partner and motivation; Chidi inspired me to learn to play the guitar, and Akonam regularly advised me on how to date in Nigeria :D. The Lagos office was located minutes away from the guesthouse, so my daily commute consisted of a 5–10 minutes Okada (motorcycle taxi) ride. If you’ve been to Nigeria you’ll know the way the motorcyclists ride is not for the faint-hearted — I almost got into an accident on multiple occasions.
I met a couple of other folks at Andela Nigeria who deeply inspired me. I observed folks wake up every single day, exuding energy, high motivation towards pursuing their passions, and fearlessly seeking knowledge and experiences that matter to them. I learned from this experience to be unapologetic about pursuing my own passions. This later inspired me to want to explore more of Africa. Even though I spent my early teenage years on the continent, I had only visited two other African countries. I have now visited a total of 10 African countries, experienced different African cultures, and have a deeper appreciation of what the continent has to offer to the rest of the world.
I spent the rest of the year taking a more internal-facing role at Andela, working with developers to deliver critical systems to support Andela’s growth and sharpen their skills. I would spend entire days pair programming with developers, reviewing their code, leading design sessions, and mentoring. It was the beginnings of a scrappy engineering department.
In early 2016, I met Adam Lupu, who had joined Andela as a consultant to revamp our learning programs. Adam strongly believed in the philosophy that working is learning. We discussed the possibilities of Engineering and Learning teams joining forces to formalize a Technology & Learning department. The goal was to apply cognitive apprenticeship methods developed by the Learning team in a real software development environment run by the Engineering team. This way, Andela developers could accelerate their learning velocity by working with more experienced engineers, and the Engineering team could accelerate its product roadmap with extra development resources.
Apprenticeship sessions were a great opportunity for me to pass on my knowledge to young padawans, observing in awe as I executed tasks in a manner they had never witnessed before. Working with the apprentices reminded me of my early days with Pivotal. As a new software engineer on the team, barely a year out of school, I was paired with a veteran engineer who taught me nearly 80% of what I know today about the software development practice. I did not realize it then, but I was an apprentice at the time. A couple of years later, it was very rewarding to be able pass on all I had learned from my master onto others.
One day, as I was debugging code with two apprentices, a Technology Jedi Master of his own kind walked into the room: Mark Zuckerberg himself. The Facebook founder and CEO had made an unannounced stop in Lagos as part of his Sub-Saharan Africa tech tour. His visit to Andela reinforced not only his support for our mission but his belief that indeed the next generation of great technology leaders will come out of cities across Africa. Mom, Dad, moving to Nigeria wasn’t such a step backwards after all.
In 2017, I visited the Andela offices in Nairobi, Kenya for the first time. After nearly 2 years of living in Lagos, with limited travel to other African countries, I had imagined Nairobi to be quite similar to Lagos. To my surprise, Nairobi generally had better infrastructure, felt less chaotic, and was much more international than I expected. Later in the year, I would spend three months in Nairobi to gauge whether I could live there. I also travelled throughout East Africa (Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania) during that time. Ultimately, I fell in love with the African east coast, and decided to relocate, yet again!
I have now been based in Nairobi, Kenya since January 2018. The engineering team has grown from its humble beginnings of one (me) to a mature Technology division of 30+ team members, and stakes are higher than ever. We have been tasked with the important duty to deliver the “Andela Experience”, a suite of seamlessly integrated systems that enable all Andelans to interact in a fully distributed manner. Ultimately, we’ll be responsible for scaling Andela’s operations so we can achieve our mission. The journey to here has been a long one, filled with ups and downs. But I believe we are in the best position to achieve our immense task, and I look forward to the challenges ahead.
