the interview: Christina Sass

Christina Sass is the Co-Founder and former President of Andela, a company that recruits the most talented software engineers on the African continent and pairs them with global tech companies as full-time, distributed team members. Since its founding in 2014, Andela has grown to more than 1,000 employees and has raised more than $180M in venture capital funding.

Prior to co-founding Andela, Christina directed the Program Department of the Clinton Global Initiative and advised the President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a $20B global foundation working to advance education and financial inclusion for youth in Africa.

Christina serves on the Advisory Council of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and on the board of the non-profit Global Give Back Circle. She is also a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

What inspired you to start Andela?

I would say it’s two-fold. The first source of inspiration was my father’s experience.

My father immigrated to the states when he was 22. He didn’t speak much English and had almost no money, but he got a job picking up trash in a park. His second job was at IBM working in one of their warehouses moving parts and boxes. He was always hustling and asking for more and more responsibility, and he ended up retiring after 32 years including decades of management and top performance at the company.

IBM allowed him time to go to school on nights and weekends and get his degree and eventually take masters courses which helped him tremendously. My father was incredibly dogged with my brother and I about focusing on our education, and through his experience, we understood what it meant to have a long-term relationship with one’s employer. At Andela, we’ve had the mentality that there should be an implicit contract between employee and employer to invest in each other and build that type of lifelong relationship. Even now that I’ve left the company, I’m still chairman of all of the Andela alumni, following them, connecting them and helping move them up and move them forward. My dad had only his grit and persistence and IBM allowed him many opportunities to educate himself and move up in his career. His life experience is a constant inspiration for me.

My second source of inspiration was seeing so many young people who were incredibly hard workers who just didn’t have the ability to connect with employers, because every employer requires two to three years of experience. That leaves entry-level workers with no way to make the first leap, and that gap in the labor markets is a huge failure of society. Your first job should be based on merit, not on who your uncle knows at whatever oil company. And so I spoke with person after person to figure out a way to bring meritocracy to training and hiring these workers at the earliest stages of their careers. That focus on bridging the gap between education and employment is what eventually led me to start Andela.

Since you co-founded the company in 2014, Andela has raised more than $180M and grown to over 1,000 employees. What lessons did you learn as you scaled the company?

So many. At a company-wide level, I learned that you have to get the company culture right at the beginning. In order to attract the kind of talent that you really need to scale successfully, you have to become a magnet for the kind of people that you want. And in order to do that, you have to get really specific about what your culture is and what your culture is not.

At Andela, we very clearly defined our culture in terms of the behaviors that are rewarded and the behaviors that are not rewarded. We articulated those behaviors in our values, which are our EPIC values — excellence, passion, integrity, and collaboration. Then we took it one step further by articulating what those values meant by department, because acting with integrity on regular daily tasks looks different to the sales team than it does to a software developer.

When we interviewed people, we sent them the department-specific versions of our values and made sure there was a good fit. We’d ask them if they felt their opinions would be valued, and if they felt they would belong as a part of the team. We factored culture fit very heavily into our hiring processes from the start, and I think that has played a big role in the success of the company.

Second, I learned that as a leader, the hardest part of scaling is scaling yourself. When you’re truly scaling, your job changes about every six to eight months, you’re focusing on different things, and you’re probably managing different people. For me, there were times when I got very attached to my teams as I worked with them for years, and it was difficult to recognize that the best thing for those teams was to bring in someone more experienced to lead them. It can be heart wrenching. You have to do the internal work to get comfortable with those types of transitions and then get behind the best possible person to lead your team to the next level.

When Andela started, all of the engineers were employed directly by the company and then staffed on external projects. Now, engineers have the option to be independent contractors instead of Andela employees, and contract directly on external projects. What do you think about the evolution of the independent contractor vs. salaried employee model?

It’s a really important question for the future of work, particularly around the gig economy and whether there needs to be a third category of worker.

For Andela, in the past year and a half we gave people the option to stay full-time employed with benefits packages, or to become independent contractors with pay increases. Depending on their personal circumstances — health, dependents, financial situation — people made different choices that were right for them.

I think contracting works when you are more advanced in your field, when you’re advanced enough to know your worth and to fully understand your options around benefits, career planning, saving, budgeting for taxes etc. I think it’s really hard to be an independent contractor earlier in your career, when you’re still growing and developing your skill set. Over time, you learn how benefits work, how to responsibly save and more. I certainly didn’t understand all that plus how to market myself plus how to increase my skills when I first started out in the workforce.

Andela is a preferred training partner for a number of large companies including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. What trends have you seen in terms of how these companies are finding and training talent at the entry level and beyond?

Unfortunately, the biggest companies still have a bias toward hiring mostly very experienced talent — they can afford it. That can also create problems where the overall workforce at these companies is less diverse, and you can end up with entire product teams from the same elite university.

I have seen more of a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion within hiring at these companies recently however, which I think is a promising trend. Organizations are beginning to use machine learning to surface a more diverse candidate pool, whether through practical exercises or by analyzing previous work, before recruiters even see a resume. I think this is going to be one of the big breakthroughs for AI — pedigree doesn’t need to be an approximation for ability. At least with software development, you can watch the way a person completes an exercise and learn more about their ability than a 45 minute interview would tell you.

Moving forward, I also think that companies at the top of their game will start to filter more for people who are lifelong learners and will enjoy the opportunity to flex between working and re-skilling. More employers will give people time and space to train and re-skill, and that can also create opportunities for less experienced workers.

I’m hopeful, but I know it’ll be a long journey.

Andela has been focused on building remote engineering teams for some time, and the company went fully remote in July. How do you think about the broader shift to remote work and the implications for employers going forward?

I’m so excited that people are finally waking up to the possibility of remote work. There are so many things that we think are impossible until we’re forced to grapple with them, and through the COVID 19 crisis, we’ve seen that remote work is utterly possible. The world just made seven years’ worth of progress in seven months toward a much more remote and independent workforce, particularly for certain skill sets.

The COVID pandemic has proven that you can work remotely and be productive. While a remote work environment doesn’t replace the experience of chatting with a colleague around the water cooler, there are a lot of projects that can be accomplished without needing those in-person interactions.

As our CEO, Jeremy, puts it, “the genie’s out of the bottle” on working remotely, which I think is a really good thing. If you’re trying to hire a top software developer in Oklahoma, you previously had a very small pool of great candidates. Now, you have access to thousands of candidates — a larger pool of candidates gives companies even greater access to diverse voices, and diverse teams build better products more quickly and in a more innovative way. That’s one silver lining that has come out of the COVID pandemic in my opinion.

We’ve talked about recruiting and remote work, but future of work is obviously a much broader category that can span everything from benefits to AI and automation. What trends are you most excited about in the future of work looking ahead?

One trend I’ll call out is the move toward automation, like you said. I don’t believe that the fear around robots taking our jobs is entirely unwarranted — I think there are elements of that that are very real. But on the flip side, I get really excited when I think about the future of work being that humans do what humans do best, and machines do what machines do best.

Along with that, I think we are going to have to focus on how we are different from machines. We’re seeing now that some companies are facing the consequences of building technology without fully considering its implications, from a human perspective and from a societal perspective. Going forward, we’re going to have to focus even more on applying the best of our human nature, knowledge, and empathy.

To go back to our earlier point around hiring, I think that artificial intelligence and machine learning are also going to help us make more informed decisions around our career choices. One of the hardest decisions for young people to make, especially in places where employment and employment opportunities are low, is which career path to pursue. I would love to see companies like LinkedIn do more data collection and analysis to surface new opportunities or training based on your previous experiences.

I also think that more data analysis will help us understand where the pools of open jobs are located and how to work backward to position students to fill those jobs, even as early as high school. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in connecting large scale employers more proactively with educators to surface unmet needs. Employers should still own some of the responsibility for training, but educators can better prepare students before they begin their early careers.

Ultimately, if you’re talking about workers who pursue careers in technology, I think the people who get ahead will share one major attribute: they will be lifelong learners who enjoy reskilling, and who can be comfortable learning a new technology or new management principles. That will apply whether you’re an individual contributor or a manager, and I think there will still be room for both paths.

What is your favorite company in / around the future of work (besides Andela)?

I’m obsessed with my friend Art Shectman’s company, Ultranauts (formerly Ultra Testing), which connects people on the autism spectrum with jobs in QA testing. People with autism tend to naturally exhibit certain skills, such as maintaining a high degree of focus when completing repetitive tasks, that make them exceptional QA testers, and those skills have historically been overlooked.

I also love Pymetrics, because of their badass female founder and CEO Frida Polli and because of the work that they are doing to bring diversity and inclusion into the hiring process. Their product is meant to make the hiring process more merit-based, which produces more diverse candidates — period. They’ve worked with a lot of major companies now, like Unilever and Tesla, and are actually moving the needle.

Connect with Christina on Twitter and join the table, a community highlighting women in enterprise and deep technology, to receive interviews, insights, and resources right to your inbox.

Know someone building an exciting new company in future of work? Get in touch @ brittany@crv.com.