Iyin Aboyeji and Jeremy Johnson are the co-founders of Andela, the Lagos-based talent accelerator. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, the firm is democratizing access to coding skills by paying talent in Africa to learn to code.
This is an unusual model – paying talent to learn to code – but if $10 million in seed funding, features on CNN, Techcrunch and The New Yorker; and partnership with Stack Overflow, are anything to go by, Andela is certainly winning.
The thinking behind this is nifty. Something Jeremy Johnson captures perfectly in a quote he has now become famous for; “Genius is distributed; opportunity is not”. The goal is to teach anyone, technology background or not, to string decent lines of code together between 6 months and 1 year. Jeremy has been working the edtech vertical before he began Andela with Iyin. His initial edtech startup, 2U, which he co-founded in 2008 went public in 2014.
Iyin’s previous startup was Fora, an edtech startup that he intended to deploy in bringing affordable Ivy League-scale education to Nigerian young professionals who can’t afford to get on a jet-plane to Stanford and others like it. The startup was off to a good a start with early investors including South Africa’s Pule Taukobong when Iyin shuttered it and shifted focus to Andela.
Iyin is one of the more outspoken and insightful Nigerian startup founders and he has been known to jump in at the deep end of conversations.
Aside his obvious passion for education in its purest form, he enjoys writing about investors and liquidity challenges in the ecosystem. One of his more popular and controversial pieces is on accelerators who talk much and invest little. His insight into the Nigerian business, technology and startup space is the stuff of men who have spent decades building intellectual muscle, only Iyin is a 20 something with only few years in.
This Thursday, Iyin and Jeremy will be on Radar for an interactive, real-time, no holds barred AMA session.
We are excited about this and we hope you are too. The topic will be open for questions at 4pm (GMT+1) on Thursday August 6, 2015. Jump in.
