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Africa has some of the most talented software engineers in the world. Nobody was hiring them because of where they were born. We changed that.
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Mark Zuckerberg visited our Lagos office. Al Gore invested. When the world pays attention to African talent everything changes.
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The original model was beautiful: train African engineers for four years then embed them at Google and Facebook. It was also unsustainably expensive.
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Nigeria has more software developers than most people think. The talent was always here. The opportunity was not.
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We laid off hundreds of junior developers when we pivoted from training to marketplace. That was the hardest day of my career.