 Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here at Slush 2018. I'm Victoria Turk, Senior Editor of Wired UK, and I'm delighted to be hosting this chat with Christina Sars, Co-Founder and President of Andella. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Slush has been incredible so far. Great. Now, you're probably best placed to give a bit of an introduction to what Andella is. So, yeah, Talis, what is Andella? What do you do? Certainly. So, at Andella, we find top software developers across the continent of Africa. We place them as full-time distributed team members in growing tech companies around the world that can't find enough great talent. So, what exactly is the problem that you're solving here? It's a lack of talent available for U.S. companies? Yes. So, in the United States alone, we find there are five open jobs for every one software developer. And for most hiring managers, it takes, on average, about $23,000 and 65 hours for its screening to hire a senior technologist. So, there simply are not enough senior technologists in the world, period. And then when you look for, you know, diverse talent or, you know, specificity in any kind of tech stack, it gets even harder to find. Meanwhile, we find every single day that the continent of Africa is the largest pool of untapped talent in the world, emerging tech sectors in cities like Lagos and Nairobi and Kampala with really extraordinary talent that are incredibly hungry and ready to add value to all of these growing companies. And so, we find and screen that talent. We spend about seven months with them. Most of them have a four-year degree in computer science or engineering before they come to Andela. And then we work with them on specific tech stacks and on critical business soft skills that our partners tell us every single day they need and want. And then we really make the match between companies. My co-founders, we all know, you know, tons of entrepreneurs out there that just can't find enough tech talent. And so, we're really, truly, removing all the barriers for that unbelievable talent to just connect to growing companies that desperately need their skills and services. And you're not from Africa. You're from the U.S. So, what attracted you to that part of the world? Yeah. So, really, my life's passion and life's work is youth employment and really connecting all of the open jobs out there to young people that are crazy passionate about it. And so, my work in Africa is really because it is the youngest continent on earth. It's the largest youth population and thus the largest opportunity to be able to connect them. So, anyway, I started working there about five years before starting Andela, was working there with one of the largest foundations, the Mastercard Foundation. It's a $26 billion foundation focused exclusively on young Africa works and worked with them and really discovered how many young people were crazy passionate about technology and really the depth of their tech talent and thus started this new thing. So, really, I'm there because it's the youngest continent on earth. As the rest of us get older, demographically, Africa will continue to get younger. Seven of the fastest 10 growing economies in the world. It's just a thrilling and exciting time to be working on that continent. So, talking about finding talent and training it, let's start at the beginning there. How do you identify talent to train and to take on Andela? Yeah. So, over the last four and a half years when starting the company, we basically have screened for what we thought were the right mix of attributes, characteristics that would make an extraordinary distributed software developer. And so, we had a hypothesis at the beginning that, you know, what would be looking for. Some obvious things like problem solving and logical reasoning and then some guesses about how important social and emotional intelligence would be. And then we basically watched, we tracked all of our software developers until they were placed on our external partners and then we watched how they worked and we watched who thrived and who was delighting their clients on a daily basis and what attributes our partners pulled out as most important. And then we went back to our recruiting process and tweaked and retweaked and looked at what our ideal candidates looked like when they applied. We've also put the word out to thousands and thousands of aspiring technologists that we want them, that there are career paths for them and put out all sorts of challenges and watched how people responded. And so, just to give you a couple quick learnings, obviously, problem solving and logical reasoning is huge. Problem solving can show up in tons of different ways. Musical instruments, languages, sports teams, anybody that is really passionate about self-learning and has demonstrated that in many ways. And then I can go on for days about this, but social and emotional intelligence is actually absolutely critical to a world-class software developer. And I think that's really counterintuitive to what we imagine those moody developers in the corner with their big old headphones. Our software developers in Lagos are the sickest dancers I've ever seen. They're incredibly well-rounded. They are able to receive feedback and incorporate it immediately. And so those are all attributes that we now look for. And just to put some numbers around it, we've had over 100,000 applications to Antella. So it's about a 1% acceptance rate. And so I really can't say enough. They're absolutely incredible top talent. So are there specific criteria that successful candidates have to meet? Do they have to have any prior software development experience, for example? They don't. So the application process is it's totally blind before they come in for the final part, which is a one to two week in-person experience. But before that, they do have to be 18 years of age. And we just look for the problem-solving and logical reasoning. In fact, a lot of our successful candidates now have applied three and four times. And they will go through the application process, will give them what we call the home study. It's a ton of curriculum and say, this is exactly the foundational level that you need to be employed with us. And people will spend time with that on their own and then come back and reapply. So no, there's no criteria. It's part of why we find incredible on tap talent is because you don't need, it's not about your pedigree. It's not about where you went to school. It's really about your problem-solving and logical reasoning. So we find people that I would call are massively underemployed. They're fixing computers in the back of an ICT department because they don't have a cousin or an uncle to get them into their first job. And when they come to us, they are absolutely like top 2% IQ. And so we're able to find all of those people and bring them right in and replace them in other roles. So it's awesome. You mentioned that stereotype of kind of the moody, non-stochable code. Do those myths hold kind of across the world? And how do you break through them to make sure you're attracting diverse talent and reaching candidates who maybe didn't think that they could ever work in software? Yeah. So I think you have to have a demonstrated passion for a lifelong career in technology. And so that you just can't fake. You have to be intrigued by an app or even just your phone and how it works and show really demonstrated problem-solving towards wanting to learn that. But beyond that, my co-founder and I once wrote a piece called This Is What An Engineer Looks Like because people were being stopped at the borders for people saying, oh, you can't possibly be an engineer. That is nonsense. We have also just talked about one demographic. We have a company-wide goal of 35% women's software developers. We are currently at 23% in most of our countries. And the global average is 6%. And let me tell you, if we can find 23% of badass women's software developers in Lagos and Nairobi, we can sure as hell do it in other parts of the world. And our women technologists are competing and in many cases out-competing their male colleagues in every measurable indicator, technical, soft skills, and most importantly, how they perform with clients. So we just have to get out there and get upstream into secondary schools, get as much curriculum out there as possible, and sort of tell the world this is absolutely a career for you if you want to chip away at it and if you want to spend the time to be great at it. But yeah, engineers come in all different shapes and sizes, can't say enough about social and emotional intelligence, but it really does take all different shapes and forms. So once you've identified your candidates and they're successful, you then train them up. And then how does it work? Are they employed by Andela or they're employed directly by the tech company seeking talent? How does the model work? So the model works. So they'll be in the application process. We open them up kind of once every three months, but when a person applies, and their final stage is a one-week in-person boot camp, because those soft skills and that commitment, that passion for technology is something that you might be able to fake in a one-hour interview, can't do it in one week, on site with our whole team. And basically, after that period, you're hired. So you get, immediately, you get a salary, you get healthcare and all of the equipment that you need. And then the next seven months is really an in-depth, I would call it like a master's level coaching for specifically software developers. So they do two things. They're in product teams, where we have like a real product that they're building, but a fake client. So we toss them all kinds of challenges. And then they focus on both the technical side, getting really specific about one or two tech stacks that they're going to be experts in. And then also we hammer home business soft skills. I've talked about it a ton. But we are constantly monitoring our partners who are hiring our developers and saying, where are they great? Where are they not so great? And this is one of the things we learned at the beginning was we weren't focusing enough on soft skills. So in that first seven months, it's almost evenly, 50% tech and 50% soft skills. And then they also work on our internal tools that we need to build the company. So they join an Andella engineering team for a while. So it's Andella as client before they're placed on our external partners. And then so after about seven months, when they're verified to be partner ready, then we have an incredible robust sales team that's out there looking for all of you looking for growing tech companies that desperately need tech talent. We will bring on a new partner and offer the opportunity, whatever that company is building, we will put it on it basically an internal system. And then our developers have to apply. They have to say why they match that skill set, why they're excited about building that thing. And then we make the match. And they're all our full time employees. So we have about 1,000 technologists on staff. And they function really as full time consultants. So it's a vendor contract with our partners for its long term for a year or more. So they will come and visit for the first two weeks of engagement. They're in London and San Francisco and New York. We love it when they come through the New York office. They'll come and sit with our partners, learn the culture, learn the stand-ups, how they operate. And then they work the rest of the year full time from one of our offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala and just recently Kigali, Rwanda. Great. So they're working remotely for US companies. Yes. And so we call them basically a full time team member of both teams. They're actually on their teams email and Slack channels and stand-ups. And so even though they're a full time Mandela team member, they are appropriated. They're a full time resource. So it really, for our partners, it replaces a full time hire. So if you're hiring, you need a team of five Ruby on Rails developers, one very senior developer, three level or whatever, we will place a pod of developers that will be your developers and have your t-shirts on and use your email. And so they'll be appropriated to you. You mentioned several times their soft skills and you learned how important it is to develop those. How do you develop soft skills? Because I think it's something that is often neglected when you're talking particularly about tech roles. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that, I mean, any of you out there who have ever built a product, you know that it's your baby. And the last thing that you want is some software developer saying, no, no, no, that's not the way it should be done. And so we want our developers to be incredibly thoughtful. And when they deliver a new feature to say, you know, you made a face right there. I didn't love that, you know, I can tell you didn't love that. What could be better? What can we do differently? How can we absolutely delight you as a partner? And so in order to do that, you really have to, you got to go back and build all kinds of confidence and their ability to speak out if something's wrong, if they don't understand something. So what we did at the beginning when we found out we needed to focus more on soft skills was we used business improv. So we use business improv tactics applied specifically to software developers. So within that first seven months of kind of master's level coaching, you'll be in a product team and your fake, you know, partner will come in and say, Victoria, last night we decided to change the logo, please change it everywhere that it exists. And then you have to in real time work out exactly what you do. Do you email your team? Do you call them together first? Do you call your boss and ask 10 questions about, you know, how to exactly get the new logo right? And then we ask them to play those out and get feedback from their peers and from their learning facilitators. And then they also have to rank themselves on how they did. So we toss all kinds of challenges at them and they have to work them out, including things like orienting to a new team, which may seem sort of intuitive, but when you do that in a distributed fashion, you kind of have to nail it. And so we asked them to be extremely prepared. When's your first meeting? Are you introducing yourself? Who's on that call? How do they relate to each other? Are you ultra prepared for that and prepared to, you know, give a great introduction? Because those things really, really matter. So that's the way we kind of drill down into soft skills. And we just listen to what our partners tell us they want more of and then find ways to train for it. And when you've got that distributed team, obviously you've got people all over, Nairobi, Lagos, and also working with the US, New York, San Francisco, etc. I mean, how do you keep company culture across such a great distance in so many times? Yeah, we're a little obsessive about company culture. I think culture is this like, you know, word that is, you know, sort of amorphous can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It doesn't. To us, it's very concrete. It's a bunch of people that have shared values, specific shared values, and when they live those values every day, it creates an atmosphere that is the company culture that people love. And so our company values, excellence, passion, integrity, and collaboration, epic values, we call them, are on the wall in every single office. And really, every team, we've done an exercise where every department has to define what excellence means for them, what integrity means for them. And by doing that, by being explicit about our values and how they play out in everyday work, what does excellence mean when delivering it to a partner? We prepare, we add value. We are transparent, these sorts of things. By consistently acting that way, by consistently behaving that way, we maintain culture. And we also just, we talk about it a lot. What does culture mean? What do our values mean? Why are they important? We orient new people who join the company. We do a really in-depth orientation on the values and why they're important. And we also, I can't give enough credit to our recruitment team. They're called the talent development team. And they recruit based on our values. They say, show us evidence of collaboration and evidence of integrity in your work history. And so we bring on the right people and then also show them what good looks like. Show them which behaviors are accepted and rewarded at Andela in a certain context. And what do developers who go through the Andela program, what do they end up doing afterwards? Where do they go from that? Well, it's still early days, but I'll tell you, it's one of the things I'm most excited about. I can't wait to see. So most of our developers are with us for four years. And after the four years, they can certainly stay on and become a senior technologist with us. But in many cases, we do, we're looking to see what they're passionate about and what they want to go do in the world. So we just started four and a half years ago. And so our first developers have just crossed the four year mark. And they are out being senior technologists for the same companies they were working for at Andela. So we now have one who's, you know, she's a senior technologist who's managing four of her other Andela colleagues, although she's now a full time team member of that company. And we have people that are starting businesses. We have people that are have joined the Andela engineering team, our first female developer, Jim Ok and Lagos. So proud that she decided to join that was the kind of engineering team we wanted to build, where our greatest, you know, technologists would want to join it. And we'll see. It's really just the beginning. I think in four and five years, I hope all of you are saying Andela alumni are changing the world. They're IC team ministers and founders and CTOs. That's certainly our intention is to give them all the power and possibility to be able to do that. So you're finding this talent in these African cities. They're mainly working for US companies. Is there a risk there that you're potentially taking talent away from those cities that you're maybe, you know, contributing to some kind of brain drain? Yeah, we do get this question quite a lot. So we think that the best possible way to allow those technologists to thrive is to incubate, to be able to add value, to growing tech companies all over the world without leaving home, right? So they get to experience a cutting edge office, a cutting edge tech team in San Francisco for two weeks or a month a year. And then they work the rest of the year from Lagos. And our developers are crazy involved in the local tech scenes, meetups, and they're volunteering their time. They're mentoring people who have applied two and three times and really want to become a part of Andela. So they're contributing to the local tech sectors in tons of ways. And then they get to, you know, work remotely, but also live and contribute to their home communities. And so that is the way that we would like to kind of leapfrog what we've seen in other places, whereas just, you know, you just take the best talent out of there. No, we want them to experience cutting edge technology companies all over the world, including we do have some, some partners on the continent. But we want them to see and feel all of that. And then, you know, bring all of that talent back home when they're ready to start. I firmly believe that Andela alumni will invest deeply in other founders and other companies in every city in which we're operating. We're running out of time already. Time flies when you're having fun. But you said you've just launched in Kigali, Rwanda. Yes. What's next for Andela? And what's the kind of long-term vision? Yeah. So Rwanda is incredibly exciting to us. It's a remarkable country. As I was telling you backstage, I just have so much respect for the Rwanda Development Board and their long-term strategy to become the ICT leader across the continent. And so they sought us out to bring Andela there. And the really cool thing about Kigali is that they've made it easy as a city and Rwanda as a country to travel all over the continent. And so we both are looking for absolute top talent in Rwanda. We just brought on our first cohort of Rwandan developers and also one Congolese developer. So what's exciting to us about Kigali is that we can now recruit in Ethiopia, in Botswana, in Togo, in the Congo, and rotate developers through there. Because, you know, we won't be able to turn around tomorrow and have a huge brick-and-mortar operation in each of those places. But Rwanda is allowing us to bring people there. And so that's super exciting for us. So you'll now see us recruit in way more places than we could have. And we're also looking for senior technologists in Egypt at the moment. So the plan is continent-wide domination, finding all the best potential talent, making them excited about a lifelong career in technology and inspiring them to think about how to incubate their skills in the best companies in the world, and then redirect eventually their efforts towards their home communities. So the short term, Kigali, recruiting all over. And then in the long term, supporting our alumni and our developers to really do, you know, all the kinds of tech projects that it's going to require to make huge strides in global health, in environment and energy, all the things that we see are much needed on the continent. Excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Christina. Thank you. And we'll be watching on Dallara in the future in interest. Thank you. Thank you, Slush. It's a pleasure to be here.