David Blair - CTO at Andela

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to David Blair, the CTO at Andela. We discussed the vibrant engineering culture being built across Africa, Andela's mission to connect brilliance, talent, and opportunity, and how seeking feedback from others will help in all aspects of growth. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:24) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(David Blair at 00:00:36) Hello, hello, hello. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Good. How are you?

(David Blair at 00:00:40) I'm good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) So the first time I actually heard about you was from Mitesh from The Zebra. Do you know him personally?

(David Blair at 00:00:49) I do. I've spoken with him a few times. The Zebra is one of our bigger accounts. They were the biggest at one point in Andela's life cycle here as a startup. But yeah, I've spoken to him a few times.

(David Blair at 00:01:03) But I don't know him that well. I mean, he's in Austin, I believe. I know the Boston technology scene. That's where I'm originally from, and that's where I've had the lion's share of my professional career. So I know the Boston scene much better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Is that where you're at currently, in Boston?

(David Blair at 00:01:19) I am, but I've been living in Nairobi for the last two years. So with Andela, I moved to the continent of Africa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) What's that been like?

(David Blair at 00:01:29) Yeah, it's been pretty amazing. I mean, I think some of the questions are around, you know, why is Andela in Africa, and I can certainly answer that. It's really interesting just from a personal observation perspective. There's a very strong dichotomy, right? In Nairobi, there's some very affluent communities, and then there's the poorest of the poor. There's slums with a million people in them who live on less than a dollar a day. And, you know, you might see those slums right up against a million dollar home, and you might see a Land Rover that costs $100,000 and then a boda boda, which is a motorcycle with a goat on the back of it, or people walking barefoot. So I think from a life lessons perspective, it just gives you the perspective that me personally, I've won the genetic lottery, right? Being born into poverty is just something hard to climb out of. And, you know, my wife works in a slum, but it's been pretty amazing from a life perspective. From a work perspective, I can certainly tell you more about the hustle and the talent and the ecosystem, which is a lot more vibrant. There's a narrative in a lot of people's head that, you know, Africa is sort of mud huts and people walking to the water spigot, you know, to the well to get water, and that certainly is the case. But there's also a really vibrant and robust startup scene.

(David Blair at 00:02:59) Technology is becoming very pervasive. There's tech hubs all over the continent that are really thriving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:06) When these communities that are poor see these cities start to form, do they have a lot of hustle and see that opportunity to go learn new skills and want to grow, or are they really in love with their current way of life and they're just happy with that?

(David Blair at 00:03:23) It really depends where you are. If you go upcountry out of the cities, people are happy and content. The village, the shamba, the farm that they grew up on—great lifestyle. You don't have much, but you don't need much. You know, the weather, the climate is nice. There's fresh vegetables being grown. You slaughter a chicken now and then. You know, we spent some time on a family farm upcountry over the holidays, and, you know, it can be pretty nice. People don't have a lot.

(David Blair at 00:03:55) But then, you know, you get into some of the city centers, and you see this very much in Nigeria. There is a huge hustle mentality, right? Hey, I got a job. I'm going to have a side hustle and then a side hustle to that side hustle. I want a better life, and so people are really working hard to get that better life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:15) Is that where you put your facilities?

(David Blair at 00:04:18) Yeah. So that's where Andela started. Andela started in Lagos, Nigeria, because one of the founders was from that area. But that is one of the—you know, Nigeria will be the third largest country population-wise in 20 years after China and India. And, you know, they're already at 250 million, and, you know, it's a very young population.

(David Blair at 00:04:43) So, yeah, it's growing very quickly. So yeah, there's a lot of positive energy and hustle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) And we're kind of talking around it a little bit because I happen to know Andela, and I've been watching you guys for a couple years. But can you give me the 10,000 foot understanding of what the mission is and what you guys do?

(David Blair at 00:05:04) Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the headline statement around Andela's mission and what we do is we really try to connect talent with opportunity. And, you know, that really means opening up the world job market to people with a lot of these characteristics of hustle, intelligence, brilliance, and offering them the opportunity to get a better job and access and exposure to, in the engineering world, you know, more modern tech stack and better learning and professional and career development opportunities. And in the early days of Andela, it was very clear we were a learning company that was trying to bring people with no skills, just a lot of aptitude that we screened for and high intelligence into the field of software engineering.

(David Blair at 00:05:55) And, you know, it was a really interesting ride. You got paid to join Andela and learn for the first nine months working. And you came to a beautiful center with great internet, two meals a day, wonderful facility. And that model, we were producing engineers and then placing as remote engineers. And that model needed to change because we had placed a lot of junior engineers, and, you know, the bootcamps of the world were catching up. And if you're thinking about having a junior engineer join your team, you probably go with someone local that you can come in and sort of pay attention to rather than a remote one. And that combination of remote and junior started to handicap us in a sense. And also, our customers were saying, hey, look, we need more senior talent. We need more mid-level. We need more types of skills than just what you're training your teams on. And so Andela has really evolved into much more of a marketplace, a talent marketplace, where we find and cultivate that talent to offer to engineering teams around the world. And so the mission of connecting talent—or brilliance in the early days, it was called brilliance—with opportunity. It's more talent now because we're focusing on more mid-level and senior engineers.

(David Blair at 00:07:13) We also place a lot of junior engineers as well to the opportunity to work with great companies like a GitHub or a Facebook or a BBC or, you know, whereas a lot of engineers, and having lived there, you know, one of the reasons why engineers come to Andela is their world has been, say, the central business district of Nairobi where they go and work in a small branch of a bank and their engineering team is five people. And so their world is really just, what do I know in Nairobi? Now their world becomes the world stage. And if I can prove myself and be a great engineer, I have much more opportunity. And so that's a big attraction for engineers to join Andela. It's just great opportunity to work with a great company, have much more career mobility. I think there's another thing that goes on in Andela. You know, just take that small company or that engineer working in the central business district. You know, his world is the five engineers that he goes into the office with. Now you're part of Andela where there's a thousand engineers, and so your network becomes much bigger.

(David Blair at 00:08:13) And you have a lot more interaction with that network, and you can find a mentor, and you can get questions answered. And so there's some growth there. So, you know, there's a value prop to engineers on the supply side to join Andela as we've evolved into more of a talent marketplace. And then also to our customers as well—just hit the easy button for trying to find engineering talent. That's why I came to Andela, quite honestly, was the problem space. You know, I've been building engineering teams my entire life, and I've tried every trick in the book to get engineers to join a team, you know, paying recruiters ridiculous amounts of money to find new talent. Because, you know, what I've learned is recruiters don't help you just find the talent. They help you close the talent.

(David Blair at 00:08:52) When an engineer has five offers, the recruiter who's doing their job well is helping you close them for you. Or hosting meetups where, really, the—you know, we'd host a meetup on machine learning, but it was really sort of a ploy to bring in engineers and try to get a few business cards and create some relationships or following the local press to be like, hey, what companies are being acquired to go out of business? That's a great time where people reflect on their careers or maybe jumping ship or doing something different, and I would go chase them down, right? And so it's just been—you know, ask any engineering leader. You're only as good as your talent, and so you're always trying to build the best team possible. So it's always a job. And it's a thankless one at that, to be quite honest, because until you find that person and fill the role, there's no half measures, right? You don't get partial credit, right? And what we have learned as engineering leaders is, look, you miss your roadmap because you don't have the team in place, or you've had a job opening for nine months. So the problem space of finding talent in new and innovative ways is really what brought me to Andela.

(David Blair at 00:09:57) And I think it's a big problem to solve, and it's an interesting one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:02) What's the story of the human side of how you got to Andela? Did you connect through friends? Did you run into them at a cafe?

(David Blair at 00:10:11) Yeah. No, it's a—well, there's, you know, there's something about serendipity in life, right? There is a personal side of the story of how I ended up at Andela, not just the problem space. But my wife has a degree in global health, and she wanted—she spent some time in Africa working on HIV. And ever since that time, before we had our family, she wanted to go back. And we felt like there was a time in our life, and that was about two and a half years ago, where we said, hey, should we go do this? Our kids are still young enough. And we sort of made a life decision, a pact to ourselves. We said, hey, whoever finds the job first, the other will follow. And she was making progress. And, you know, I joke with her, she was finding an opportunity setting up some field clinic really out away from the urban centers, in the bush, and I was like, I gotta get going. I gotta get up. And so, look, I was—I had—the company I was at, the startup had been acquired by Barracuda Networks. I had moved on. I was working with Techstars. I was mentoring and having a great time seeing some different types of tech companies. And, you know, through my network, I got introduced to Jeremy, the CEO. And, you know, as I talked to Jeremy about my background, about helping companies become more product-led, about having run remote engineering teams, about having a point of view that the role of technology is to create business value.

(David Blair at 00:11:41) He was like, can you come down to New York next week and interview? And so it just—the relationship started from there. And it was really technology at Andela had really been thought of as really just part of the CIO function, part of IT. And that's when we started to get serious about, hey, we need to build systems and technology to scale our business. How do we automate processes? How do we simplify things as we scale? How do we have a database about our talents that is searchable and can do things like matching automatically? And, you know, at the time, we were very learning-focused, and learning management systems at the time were all very vanilla. And if you wanted something for a software engineer, you probably needed to kind of customize it.

(David Blair at 00:12:28) And so we had a really interesting path towards building some learning technology. But as we've focused more on the talent marketplace update, that became lesser. But there was a realization that if Andela wanted to get to the next level, we needed technology and product to be a part of that story. So yeah, there was some life in there of looking for a job in Africa, but, you know, I had some opportunities at three other companies to get to Africa, but it was the problem space ultimately that brought me to Andela. So and was attracted me to why join this startup.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:03) And congratulations for not ending up in the bush.

(David Blair at 00:13:07) That might not have been a bad thing, but, you know, it would have been a different element. I probably would have been homeschooling my children. It would have been more of a sabbatical, and, you know, I would have some fantastic life stories, but I'm not sure if I would have been the best tech professional. So things lined up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:26) So when COVID happened, did you have to come back to the States?

(David Blair at 00:13:30) Yeah. So that's really where we are right now. I'm in the States right now. There was, you know—look, this is probably getting off track a little bit. But where I live in Kenya, you know, there's 60 million people. There's 150 ICU beds in the entire country. And so with the pandemic looming, where should you be? And there was also the agency of the airspace was shutting down. Might be better to be closer to home in case anything happened. And so we did come home during the shutdown. And so, yeah, and so the pandemic had kind of brought our chapter there to an end a little bit premature, but we did have impact. And then there were some other things. Part of Andela's business model has changed where we've gone all remote. We have been doing remote, placing remote engineers the entire life of the company, and we realized, hey, why don't we just do this as a business? We have no idea when we can go back because of COVID into our offices. And we should probably make this change across all of the operations, not just the engineers supporting our customers. And so that was a decision we took, so there was less reason to go back. I didn't have an office to go to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) Now I want to talk a little bit about you because I was doing my research with my team, and I thought it was so cool that in college or right out of college, you got to work on supersonic jets, NASA boosters, all sorts of—how did you not stay there? How did you—

(David Blair at 00:15:00) Yeah, it's a great question. And people are like, how did you end up in software? I'm actually a mechanical engineer by training. I went to Stanford, and my first job was really working as a mechanical engineer, a designer. I was building—I was in the machine shop building stuff. I was working on NASA programs. I was working for a very small sciences company that had a lot of government contracts. And yeah, we were shining lasers on the inside of the rocket boosters of the space shuttle to look for phosphorescence, because when they shoot the rockets up, the rockets land in the ocean, they start to rust. And then what they do is when they put them in stores, they lather them up with grease.

(David Blair at 00:15:36) And if you don't get all the grease off, the lining of that de-bonds, and you can have the rockets putting space shuttle into orbit blow up, and that's happened on unmanned ones. And so we had a program where we were putting those rockets on turntables, those tubes, and shining lasers on and looking for—using lasers to show phosphorescence and picking that up, and then we'd go scrub them down. And there were some cool things like that, right? Working with lasers and building things, and we were building sensors that looked at toxic waste from airplanes.

(David Blair at 00:16:11) And it was very cool, and it was innovative. But what I realized was it wasn't real because a lot of the projects were small. And as soon as they were turned over to the government, they were scrapped. They were scrapped for parts. And there was no—I didn't get to see the follow-through in the execution of turning this kind of more raw basic science into product.

(David Blair at 00:16:30) And, you know, I'm a product guy at the end of the day. And so I ended up going to a company that was really at the forefront of computer-aided design. It was disrupting the entire industry. We called it Parametric Technology or PTC. And it's a big IoT type company right now, but it really moved CAD to kind of 3D and the idea of—you could see it on the computer, and you could see how much it weighed and where things interfered.

(David Blair at 00:16:56) And it was just a revolutionary thing. And then I spent the next part of my career going to Caterpillar, Airbus, Ferrari, John Deere—all these fantastic companies around the world—just helping them kind of reengineer with modern technology and change processes and customize the software. And I got into software development that way and did programming and did product. And ultimately, I realized that the value of technology is to create value.

(David Blair at 00:17:24) And I was in the field all the time understanding business requirements. And, like, look, this is gold. We need to turn this into the value prop and really execute on solving these problems. And so as a CTO, there's a spectrum. There's CTOs on one end that are very technical. They have a bunch of architects working for them. They care about the database and all the core elements of the software stack. Or they're more—and I lean towards the other side of the spectrum—which is much more connecting the technology to the problems you need to solve to help the business be better. And so I'm much more of a product-focused CTO than an architecture-type-focused CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:06) Yeah. I've experimented with that spectrum and have gotten to see so many different types of people. And the recurring pattern I see is people not being—or I'd say they ask me, like, if it's a problem, what they're doing with the CTO title. Right? With here's my responsibilities. Is this a problem? And I'm always like, no, it is the spectrum, and the problems only come up when you're not aware of where you're at in the spectrum and some of your gaps go unfilled. Right? Because the business needs certain things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) So you having an understanding of what that is and where you sit and what you want to do and then making sure that the business is being taken care of. Because if you have a C in that title, you're a chief and you're one of the people that's responsible for the success of the business.

(David Blair at 00:18:52) That's right. That's right. Yeah. No, it's a good observation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) So I actually got this email this morning about this new passenger jet that they're doing, the supersonic passenger jet. I don't know if you're still following that stuff, but I thought it was good timing. But they called it Boom. They named the jet Boom. And for some reason, that just didn't sound right to me because I don't want explosions associated with my supersonic air travel.

(David Blair at 00:19:22) Well, there's the sonic boom, I guess, is what they're playing on there. I know. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) But it still put that image in my head. Right?

(David Blair at 00:19:29) I know. Yeah. That's where maybe not the right marketing person got involved in the naming of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:36) Right. Because it's fun for the engineers. I totally get it. Right? But you're selling tickets. This is a commercial passenger supersonic jet, and I don't know how excited the public is to buy tickets for Boom.

(David Blair at 00:19:50) I agree. Hey, look, maybe it was a code name that never got tested. I know engineers love code names, and everyone wants to—every service has its own little unique code name, and maybe that's one that got away from the designers of this plane.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) But the typography looked good. The branding looked excellent.

(David Blair at 00:20:08) Right. If you're going to go boom, that's the most beautiful way to go boom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) The most beautiful way to go boom.

(David Blair at 00:20:14) Yeah. I mean, look, design is critical to building product these days, and you have to have great design to stand out. So sounds like you recognized it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) I'm curious a little bit. You sound like a person that'd be fun to talk about the future with. And one thing that I can't help but think about is—you know, because my background, software engineer, seventeen years, then did this podcast. And due to the busyness of this podcast, I haven't been developing as much, but I still run a team of developers. But I kind of lost track of my thought there.

(David Blair at 00:20:46) The future. The future. The future. How are you thinking about the future?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:49) Yes. That's the beauty of the show. It's unscripted, but things like that happen.

(David Blair at 00:20:54) But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:54) I can't help but think about how in the future AI will be advanced enough to essentially write its own code. Right? And we could kind of communicate with it. Like, right now, we communicate with it in a very detailed way where we type out each unique instruction. But I feel like since the beginning of computing, it's gotten easier and easier and easier to program systems from low-level programming. Like, if you look at quantum computing right now, it's really only quantum computing experts that are doing it for quantum mathematical problems and things like that. But it'll eventually get to the point where there's enough layers upon layers to where more and more people can write more and more software. I'm just curious, how do you think about that, or do you think about that at all?

(David Blair at 00:21:40) I do. I mean, I think about software development in the sense that software development has changed. You used to write a lot of low-level code to kind of build your app. Right? And, look, the name of the game now is much more you're a system integrator. Right? Like, you have a service. Right? Like, you need an NLP service to do some natural language processing. You don't build that. You get it. Right? You know, TensorFlow or—you need an auth service. You don't build it. You know how many engineers I've talked to who, like, one of their first jobs was building an authorization service? Like, you don't build that anymore. Right? And so, really, the job to be done in software engineering is really about how do you be smart about using prebuilt components? And how you put it together is the sausage making that's special and how you turn it into something valuable. And look, at Andela, we have a broad spectrum of needs across our business, and it's not just building core IP, but it's also—there's commercial tools we can use.

(David Blair at 00:22:42) So we have to be very pragmatic to say, hey, look, we're going to go buy that. It may only solve 80% of the requirements, but it's good enough. And then we can stitch it together with our core IP that we're building as well as other systems. And it's how we integrate those as well that becomes part of our special sauce again. And so I think the job of software is much more of a system integration play these days. And then in terms of the future, you know, you're going to take advantage of more and more of this, and then you're also going to take advantage of more sophistication. And that sophistication is going to be data, how to use data in really interesting ways. And, you know, I mean, the topic of AI and things like that are always interesting. There's lots of things you can think about. And, look, in our world, one of the things that we're thinking about in terms of using things like artificial intelligence and machine learning is just the idea of how do you match that talent with the opportunity in the best possible way. Right? So if we—and it really is a journey where you crawl, walk, and run. Right?

(David Blair at 00:23:43) So, really, it's starting with we need structured data about the engineer or the talent. We need structured data about the requirements, and then we can use classification to make a recommendation. We can say, hey, look, here's a good match. Right? But how do you make that smarter? Right? And then you start to—you make that smarter with more data. Right? Like, hey, what if you're—if you're looking, Joel, for some engineers to add to your team that you mentioned. Right? And what if we knew some more about, you know, what type of team you ran and what are some of the team skills you're looking for as well? That could drive up the match and make the recommendation better. Right? So if we presented you with three. Right? And then in the future, how could we say, hey, look, we know something about these engineers because they've worked with us or worked through Andela over a span of time, and we have some sense of performance. So that when we serve you up three recommended engineers, we can say, hey, we think this one's the best based on past performance and linking that together. So it's the cycle of feeding more and more data into this smart match. And so, like, that's an area where we will go much deeper in terms of trying to make the best fit of the talent available to the needs of the customer.

(David Blair at 00:24:56) And that's a space that we're thinking a lot about is this idea of intelligent matching as we evolve Andela.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:04) You could go recruit some of the Match.com engineers.

(David Blair at 00:25:07) Exactly. I mean, when I describe kind of some of the things we're building to, you know, either my wife or some family, they're like, oh, you're building Match.com for engineers. I'm like, yeah, pretty much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:20) Yeah. And they're smart too. I didn't realize—I was doing some research on Match Group. I think that's who they are. They own a lot of the different dating and connection-type technologies. I think they own Tinder and a bunch of the other ones, but that was always fascinating to me about, you know, wherever there's money to solve a problem, you're going to get some of the best solutions possible. And in that world, there is a ton of money to solve this matching problem. So they're probably very adept at matching.

(David Blair at 00:25:50) Yeah. Absolutely. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:53) So Starlink. Right? We're both kind of geeky. I'm sure you're aware of that. They're putting satellites into near-Earth orbit. And I was just curious, you know, they have—I think it was like 2021—they want global high-speed coverage. Do you think that's going to be really useful for Africa, or is internet already widely available?

(David Blair at 00:26:14) It's a great question. No. I mean, one of the things—one of the reasons why Andela invested a lot in physical infrastructure in the early days and had great corporate centers is just the physical infrastructure wasn't mature enough. Right? You know, we were talking about Lagos earlier. You needed a place to have internet, but you also needed power because power goes out. Right? And so, you know, you have a generator and a backup generator. And so the infrastructure wasn't quite there. It's really changed a lot in recent years. But in the rural spaces, yes. But what I would say is, like, it's Africa and the countries that make it up. It's much more of a mobile-first type play. And, like, you think—take banking, for instance. Like, there's Safaricom in East Africa who has a property called M-Pesa, and it's mobile banking.

(David Blair at 00:27:03) And it's ten years ahead of what we're doing with Apple Pay and other kind of mobile banking solutions. And it's really disintermediated the need to go to a bank or to take a loan. It's how business is conducted, and it's pervasive. It's everywhere. And so, look, there is network coverage through kind of mobile and—and so that's what they're really relying on. But I think there is a place to bring broadband much more around as well as reliable power as well. It's not just that. It's a combination. Right? You know, you have conversations with a bunch of African engineers. They have not just their ISP at home and a router, but they have a phone. They have a backup phone. They have a battery pack, you know, so that you just can maintain connectivity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:58) I love it. Yeah. And they want to set themselves up for success, right, with backup systems and resilience. So I was wondering, I don't expect you to have this statistic, but it just kind of popped into my head about the percentage of software developers or professionals that are in contract groups or marketplaces versus full-time employees. Do you know the split there or the ratio?

(David Blair at 00:28:25) I don't. That's a great question. It's probably something I should know. But I would say that, you know, there's a lot of marketplaces out there, and they're all a little bit different. Right? You know, there's the gig economy. There's Freelancer and Upwork, and there's Toptal. There's Fiverr. There's lots of them out there to support kind of the gig economy. What Andela has realized, and, look, this really resonates with me as the leader of an engineering team, is, look, I'm not really interested—look, I may be interested in someone coming in to work for me for three to four months because I have a specialized skill that I just can't fill and it can help me on some specialization. But there's so much in getting an engineer up to speed on your stack. You know this. Right? Like, you have to invest a lot. And the last thing you want them to do is to walk away. Right? And so Andela is really focused on the long-term play.

(David Blair at 00:29:16) We're trying to get our engineers employed for eighteen months, two years because that's what our customers actually want. When they see attrition, they're like, that's a problem. I don't want—I've just invested all in this learning curve. I don't want them to walk away. And so we're really trying to offer long-term opportunity and to be the long-term place of employment versus more of a gig play for a designer or a videographer that is a jobs-based marketplace. And so we're thinking differently. And so, how do you build stickiness with the engineer? How do you build stickiness with the customer as well? But we're thinking a different way around the marketplace, if you will, the talent marketplace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:59) Yeah. And you serve companies that—and, well, I mean, you serve the Zebra, and they were under 500 employees when I talked to them a few years ago. So you serve a wide range of customers.

(David Blair at 00:30:10) That's right. Yeah. I mean, everything from GitHub to the BBC to Envision. You know, there's a lot of different companies. And what we're seeing in terms of our—the demand side of our marketplace—is we're starting to hit more mid-market, more larger customers.

(David Blair at 00:30:29) You know, we've been talking to big banks who want more diversity, more types of skill, who maybe want a presence on the continent, and we know the talent in Africa better than almost anybody because we've been there for six years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) Have you gotten to work with Jason Warner over at GitHub?

(David Blair at 00:30:49) Yeah. The team knows him. I have him personally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:52) Oh, he's an awesome person. I just had him on the show, I think, like, last week. Nice. He's becoming one of my favorite people.

(David Blair at 00:30:59) Nice. Nice. I know he was quite a hit when he visited us in Lagos. So yeah, it's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) Was there a parade?

(David Blair at 00:31:08) Well, we've had some—we've had a bunch of people visit Andela Lagos. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey. There's kind of a joke. There's someone on my team who's a product manager who's in a photo with one of these famous people. We just did a little bit of a trivia, like, a kind of a more of a just a bonding thing last week, and we played kind of Family Feud. And I think the question is who has the most pictures with the most famous people at the office? And it was this woman Faye, but yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) So Faye won?

(David Blair at 00:31:41) She won it. She's got a lot of famous people. There's pictures with Al Gore. There's pictures with Jack Dorsey. You know, we have some pretty famous investors like Al Gore, and Serena Williams is an investor as well. She hasn't visited us, but yeah, it's fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:57) Come on, Serena. Step it up.

(David Blair at 00:31:59) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) So you do some mentoring and advising. You mentioned Techstars earlier, but also, it looks like you do some stuff with this company called WOO Sports. I was just curious. How did you get involved with the advising role?

(David Blair at 00:32:14) Yeah. I think it's—look. At some point in your career, you start to realize, hey, I've acquired some knowledge and can I give back? And I think when you break it down, when you ask people who do mentor, there's just as much in it for them a lot of times as there is the receiver, the mentee. Right? Because you're getting to share and teach, and that can be really rewarding. And so I got involved with WOO. I got involved with some other companies through Techstars. And, you know, it was a lot of young companies that were just trying to navigate some things that felt like, hey, I've learned these lessons the hard way. They're kind of all institutionalized in my head, but you know, what's the best way to run a backlog? Right? Or, you know, how do you prioritize your backlog? Or how can I find the best engineer for this role? Or, you know, I was working with one company that—I was brought in and they were like, hey, we built this app? This app was, it was probably more like a sexting app than anything, but this person thought they were going to change the world as a high net worth individual. And it was an app that basically when you shared a video—when you showed a video on your phone to someone, it used face recognition to say, hey. Is this you, Joel? If it is, I'll show you the video. If it's not, I'll shut it off. Right? So it was like, sort of a privacy thing.

And they literally spent $250,000 building this thing, and I was—a contact made an introduction. They're like, hey, can you help these guys? They're trying to find product market fit. And I started—I was like, okay, I'll do that. And I was like, I'll help you guys validate what you're doing. And so I started demoing it. I'm like, look, there was latency in the system. It was terrible experience. I was like, I'm going to just build a landing page that characterizes the value prop and what this thing does. And that is so telling. It was just like this lesson of, like, or reminder that you don't need to build anything to validate your idea. I got some free landing page software, built a landing page, then I went and talked to 20 people. This is what we learned. You didn't need to build anything. You didn't need to spend dime one to see if your idea was any good. I don't know what happened to that company. I think it's probably in receivership, but my point is that's just an illustration of you learn a bunch of lessons in your career. And, you know, it's rewarding just to share those with people, or at least it is for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) What are some of the cool companies that you see that are early stage right now?

(David Blair at 00:34:48) Right now? Well, I would look at it from a bunch of different angles. You know, there are some things that I'm thinking about maybe just from the tooling stack for the IP that we're building here at Andela. QA has always been a problematic area because a lot of times it's manual. So there's a company called ProdPerfect that we're using, and what I like about their technology is they use some learning algorithms to understand what are the most traversed paths through your software. So, like, say you got an app and you gotta figure out, hey, what is the automation suite I need to build for this app? And, look, I've done this at my—in past companies, two companies ago. We just started building automation as we built the product. I wasn't running the product, the engineering team at the time. I would—but I was like, what are we doing? We don't even know if this product is going to work or if the UI is the right thing, but they were building the automation suite as the app was being built. And, you know, you had to pivot invariably, and so there's all this time building automated software. Well, ProdPerfect will actually analyze what are your users actually doing with your app. And then it will suggest, hey. Here are the test cases you should build into your automation suite. And then they help you build the automation suite, and then you put it into your CI pipeline to—as you build—as you write code, they get run. So I think it's an innovative take on sort of an old problem of how do you ensure quality assurance? And that's something innovative in the or startup I like in the sort of tooling stack.

There's other tools that we've been using more and more and, you know, I'm not sure if I'd characterize them as startups, but there's some cool tools that we've started to use more as we've gone remote, like Loom for video. Right? It's just easy to record a video. Sometimes you get sick of writing—being remote or, you know, we used to have in-person design reviews with our designers and we're all remote now. So now the designers record a little Loom video. They share it out. We get some comments on it, and it's just like an easy little add-on and a way to collaborate. Or we've been using Miro a lot more. Miro is a tool that we use to kind of replace the virtual whiteboard and, you know, a lot more people are using it. It's very collaborative. And so some of these companies are interesting to me because they replace a set of tooling that or processes that you might have done in an in-person setting. And so they're helping us be efficient as a remote-first organization now.

I would say there's a couple other companies that I like as well, but, you know, I could go on and on and on. So I can stop there, but, you know, there's other things to support the remote worker that are interesting to me as well. But I'll stop there because there's a lot of interesting stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) I've got questions for you now. Can you spell the virtual whiteboard company, Miro?

(David Blair at 00:37:43) Miro, M-I-R-O.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) Miro. Okay. Got it. I've actually been looking for a virtual whiteboard type solution. And I've asked a number of people, and I haven't gotten anyone to be like, oh, this is the one I love. So I'm happy about that.

(David Blair at 00:37:58) A lot of people have tried to solve the problem. I mean, Zoom has a whiteboard. You know? All these collaboration tools have it. You know? There is a—there's sort of even just in Google and your Google Apps stack, you know, there's a tool for whiteboarding. I mean, to be quite honest, I resort to writing things down on paper and then, you know, showing it to you. Right? Like, that's, hey. What's wrong with a paper prototype? Right? But this is one that we found to kind of stick here at Andela with more and more people, this Miro company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) And then do you have some sort of surface that you buy with it, or do you just use your mouse?

(David Blair at 00:38:39) You just use your mouse. It's not great for free hands. It's a little bit more of a lot of Post-it notes and some collaboration around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) In your role as an adviser, what's the pattern that you're seeing across these early stage companies with the founders and as far as leadership and insight and advice?

(David Blair at 00:38:59) Yeah. I've been advising one company that is trying to disrupt kind of the space around how you do appraisals for mortgages. And, like, you're like, wow. Is that a problem to be solved? And it's a very real problem because it's very antique—very, sort of old, if you will. Yeah. Antiquated. Yeah. It's paper-based. Right? And, you know, one of the things that was being asked to me is like, hey. Look. I need help with engineering. I'm a founder engineer, and I need help with engineering. And I'm not sure what I need. And it was sort of like, look. It—the decision tree that we went down was, hey. Do you feel like your architecture is in a solid place? And if the answer is yes, then what you need for an engineering leader is someone who can really drive process and build the teams. Right? Because you're probably a little bit chaotic as a founder, and you don't have all those processes in place. And, you know, do you have a good CI, you know, good build pipeline? Do you have good, you know, the right level of ceremony for, you know, scrum, if you're doing scrum? And then, you know, if the answer was no, then you need sort of more of a hard tech architect type to lead your engineering teams to get that, you know, to get the foundations in place and have the standards and the right kind of coding. So that's a piece of advice that I've been giving or questions I've been asked.

I've also been asked questions about, like, hey. Look. We have a bunch of customers and they all have enhancement requests. They all have, like, they have a lot of asks. Right? And, like, how do I manage that? And, look, the piece of advice there is, like, don't be beholden to one company because if you do, you're going to go and create something specific for them that might not address the rest of the market that you want to go capture. And so, really, your job to do there is get a really strong point of view on vision and have a great deck that shows where you're going, like, robust mock-ups, like, a great story. You know, a lot of doing a roadmap presentation really well is storytelling. What is the problem you're solving? Who are you solving for? Relate it to a story that someone in the audience may have understands or lived. And really have that really honed because, you know, my experience as you sell to bigger and bigger companies is like, look, they're buying on the promise of execution as well as what you can do today. And so if you can really have a great vision and you can articulate and you can show it with pictures, right, not just story. Words don't mean anything to anyone. They need to kind of see it so that they can internalize it. And then you can get people on the hook, and it creates some space so that you can go execute important backlog and helps mitigate losing that customer because you didn't deliver their enhancement today. Right? Like, if you told me, hey. I know you need this enhancement tomorrow, but look, it's in my vision, and we're going to get to it in six months or a year. I'm a lot more apt to work with you than if you just be like, no. I can't do it. Right? So if you have a great story to tell and you can back it up with, you know, validation and mock-ups and stuff, that really helps create some space for that early stage company that's trying to address and capture market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) No. I'm glad you said it the way you did because, you know, as an early stage tech founder, you can get into that mode where you're just constantly eating, breathing, and sleeping. So the idea of one new extra feature to add the backlog because the customer wants it is you just kind of want to sharply shut it down or push it off or—and then how you respond is so critical, you know, in the early stages, how you make your customers feel and, like you said, having a strong vision. So I really like the way that you articulated that.

(David Blair at 00:43:03) Yeah. Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:04) It's a real problem and it's super difficult because that is the natural reaction. It's just to be like, no, we gotta shut that down or we'll put it way off or—and the focus is all on the more work that you have to do, right, or the more stress being added to the team and you have to step away from that, assume the customer perspective, and you have to say, like, how do I build this relationship with this individual so that we can keep them as a customer—

(David Blair at 00:43:29) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:29) —make them happy. Yeah. And still have success.

(David Blair at 00:43:32) Yeah. Or if you say yes to the enhancement, you'll be like, you're going to under-deliver because you already got a mountain of stuff to do anyway, and they're going to get upset. Or you're going to go deliver it, and then all your other customers will suffer. So, yeah, how can you create space to deliver what's most important in front of you is kind of the thought.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:54) What's some of the best leadership advice that you've ever received?

(David Blair at 00:43:59) Oh, that's a good one. I think some of the leadership advice that I've received that's been useful, if it's very personalized, if people know you well, if they understand your style and your blind spots. And I've had some people say, hey. Look. You don't have to defend. It's clear you're the expert. Right? And it's someone pointing out the blind spot of me where when I'm under the pressure, right, under—the screws are being put to me, my natural reaction is to defend. And he's like, look. You know this stuff. You don't need to defend. Like, show where you're going and get out above that. And it was good advice. And I think the lesson here from a leadership perspective is you may have a great point of view of what you think you're doing, but talk to other people who can really help you see it right because you may be doing the same thing every day, day in and day out and you think it's 100% the best way to do it, the right way to do it, but you don't have perspective so be open to feedback and seek it out. Right? Like, hey. How can I be better? What are my blind spots? And you'll be surprised at what you might hear. That was an example of what I heard when—like, hey. Oh, okay. You're in defend mode, and people are just hearing you trying to protect something versus trying to build something. Right? And so it was a good piece of advice, but the uber advice here is seek out other people on how they react to it or what their interpretation of you is and how you're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:46) Yeah. I like that. And also, to add to the defensive thing, you know, I've had people tell me that I was being defensive. And inside, I was like, well, that's not where my heart is or that's not what I feel like I'm doing right now. And that creates this awareness of, okay, however I'm perceived externally, whatever voice tone I'm using, body posture I have, there's something that I'm doing that's making people think I'm defensive about this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:17) And then that brought some awareness to, you know, how I was communicating, and that was something that happened a couple years ago that was very useful for me. So as we start to wrap up here, is there anything that we didn't cover or talk about that we want to put out there to the world?

(David Blair at 00:46:33) Yeah. I mean, I think, look, there is a question of why didn't Andela move into Africa? And I think, look, it was an early mover advantage. The founders saw potential, and they saw, look, it's the youngest continent in the world. It's the fastest growing internet. Seven of the 10 fastest growing internet economies are in Africa. You know, I mentioned how Nigeria will be the third most populous country. There are very real emerging tech hubs like Nairobi or Lagos or Cape Town or Kampala, Uganda, or Kigali. And so there is technology on the continent, and there's just a real hustle, like I mentioned. People having, because there's resiliency, right?

(David Blair at 00:47:22) If you're in Lagos and you need power, someone who I spent a bunch of time with was like, look, I think we're better problem solvers. I'm like, what? That's a little bit of an opinionated thing to say. If I'm trying to get a couch home to my house, I have to think about how I'm going to get it there. What if that car breaks down? What if I can't take, what if I need to put it on public transportation to get it part of this way? How do I get it into my house? What if there's no lights?

(David Blair at 00:47:52) He's like, I'm at tenth order problem solving. I'm like, all right. Well, you have a point. But I think it's just indicative of that. There's a real hustle. They're smart, motivated, eager people. I lived in Africa for two years, and I saw it every day. People want a better life, and they're going to work really hard to get there. And they have an awareness. And, you know, there's something geopolitical happening as well. They don't have a government necessarily that they believe in or rely on. So they're like, it's on me to figure out my better life. I'm not going to wait for, you know, a Social Security program to solve it for me.

(David Blair at 00:48:24) And so, you know, I used to be part of lunchtime conversations where engineers would be like, I've got to be the next Google billionaire and invent the next Google because this is how I'm going to save Kenya. It's not going to be our politicians. So it's just an interesting point of view. Like, I have to get rich so that I can save my country.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:51) I love it, right? Because that's the type of person I am. I mean, I just, I want to improve and grow because it's difficult, but it's also fun. And then you get that feeling of pride in yourself and in the work you do after you accomplish something really difficult. So that energy of Africa is something that I've heard more than once from all these different sources, and so it's definitely on my list of places to go explore and visit after the world opens up a little bit more.

(David Blair at 00:49:22) Yeah. Absolutely. I'm happy to give you some advice on what to check out and do. But that's a little bit of why Africa for, you know, and kind of why Andela got started there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:33) And if people want to use Andela services, if they're interested, they want to go through the exploration process, how do they learn more?

(David Blair at 00:49:41) Yeah. I mean, I think, look, Andela is trying to be the easy button for engineering leaders who are looking to build their teams, right? I talked to a CTO who's like, I'm trying to hire a contractor in Taiwan, but I'm a fintech, and I need to do background checks. He's like, it took me six months to figure out how to operate in these locations. We know how to pay people. We know how to get them great internet so that they can deliver for you. So we solve a bunch of those problems. And so as you think about building your teams, I would just say consider Andela as a way to augment and grow quickly to get the right talent you need at the right time.

(David Blair at 00:50:23) I would say, look, there's also this idea of bringing some diversity into your teams that is useful in different perspectives. You know, if you're thinking about sort of around the sun development, but we do guarantee overlap hours to your working day because we understand business continuity is key. And just as you think about the equation of you have so much budget, how do you want to spend it? We can give you some variability to that. You can dial it up. You can dial it down. You can think and take advantage of what you need to pay in different locations.

(David Blair at 00:50:48) And, you know, I think the quality is there. We know that you may feel good about working with Andela because we help connect really bright people to opportunities they never had before. That's nice. But you're an engineering leader who has to get a job done, right? And so we live and die on the quality of our engineers, and they deliver. We have teams of 30 people at big companies around the world. So, you know, it's just something to consider as you build out. It's an option, right?

(David Blair at 00:51:25) Like I said, why did I come to Andela? Because building a team is a problem, and it's hard. And, you know, I wanted to look at some other ways to help build that team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:35) Boom. That's a mic drop, right?

(David Blair at 00:51:37) Nice. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:39) Not a supersonic jet explosion.

(David Blair at 00:51:42) How funny is that? They literally named it Boom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:45) They named it Boom. No joke. This morning, I woke up, and one of the first things I do is check this newsletter called TLDR because it's just about tech. There's no politics or anything in there. And it was like, oh, new supersonic jet. Boom. You know, it unveils 26 passenger thing. And I just said, what? And I clicked on it, and it's got the word boom on the side of it. And I just said, oh, okay.

(David Blair at 00:52:09) I'm sure I want to fly on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:11) I was just like, I don't know how that. I mean, I got it instantly because I'm a geek, right? I was like, oh, they named it boom because they're breaking the sound barrier, right? But I just thought that there's, I was like, there's got to be better names. More geeky, better names.

(David Blair at 00:52:26) Yeah. It's better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:28) But, David, this was an absolute pleasure. I'd love to have you on next year. We can catch up, learn more about what's going on. I just wanted to say thank you so much. It was a real fun time today.

(David Blair at 00:52:38) Yeah. Joel, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Hopefully, it was useful. Hopefully, it was a useful conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:43) It was super useful. You gave some amazing advice that we're going to clip out. I really like the startup advice. I think our, that is our mission over here, you know, to educate, entertain, elevate, help the next generation of tech leaders. And that insight that you gave, I was like, yes. Keep going. Preach. Preach.

(David Blair at 00:53:01) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:01) We're going to clip that out and that's going to help a lot of people. So thank you so much, David. I really appreciate it.

(David Blair at 00:53:06) Thanks, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:06) Talk soon.

(David Blair at 00:53:07) All right. See you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:11) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.