@iaboyeji, this question is for you.
Your previous work was focused on providing education services. Do you consider Andela a logical conclusion of that work? What’s your theory on founders continuing one work through various companies like Ev has done with Blogger, Twitter and Medium?
Hello @Jeremy, what advice would you give to Entrepreneurs out there? What Skills and Qualities do you think has brought you this far considering your past successes.
Hi @Jeremy @iaboyeji , You have had a 107 fellows so far. No doubt that is a fraction of people who applied, and I noticed that you guys added a pre-interview course on you website for intending applicants. What in your opinion would you say is lacking severely in applicants to Andela and new intakes before the bootcamp is over
@Jeremy @iaboyeji What do you think about the investment landscape in Africa? How does it compare to …say two years ago when @iaboyeji was working on Fora?
@iaboyeji @Jeremy When will Andela start accepting internship for 3-6months for student currently studying in University, but want to learn from Andela?
When we evaluating applications for new fellows, we are trying to figure out a couple things :
We believe with the numerous platforms available for learning independently how to code, if you were really passionate about learning to code, you would actually try. If you don’t know where to start you can look up our resources at homestudy.andela.com!
I have always believed in Nigeria and its young people. Nigerians all over the world do wonderfully well when they are given opportunity and put in the right environment. There are a lot of challenges but I was convinced that if we could invest in Nigeria’s young people and give them opportunities to show the stuff they are made of on a global stage, we would be successful. We still have a lot to prove but so far I think more and more people believe that despite the challenges, brilliance is evenly distributed and opportunity needs to be as well.
Books: Check out two in particular: “The art of the start” by Guy Kawasaki and “The hard thing about hard things” by Ben Horowitz. Both are great reads for anyone interested in bringing something new into the world.
Other start-ups: I’ve been really impressed with a number of start-ups, but it’s rarely because of the idea. It turns out, very few successful companies do exactly what they thought they would at the beginning. The usually learn something along the way that helps them better understand what the market and their customers really want. As a result, I am most impressed by a combination of guts and execution. The entrepreneurs you want to work with and back are the ones that care more about accomplishing their goals than they do about the specific process of getting there, and are comfortable overcoming obstacles that would make others give up and declare “this is impossible”.
We started out focused on the MEAN stack but quickly diversified into Ruby on Rails, Python, iOS, Android, and a number of others. Ultimately, we care less about a specific language or framework and more about ensuring that all Fellows know how to learn and know how to solve complex problems. A great developer needs to do more than memorize a language - they need to be able to evolve as the tech ecosystem evolves and understand how to analyze different paths for solving a problem scalably.
And have some fun along the way 
Hi @Jeremy @iaboyeji , am a big fan of Andela, and I have been following your activities on major social networks.
But I am not clear on what exactly happens to an Andela Fellow after the 4 years commitment? Is he/she pushed to the world to go and preach the gospel of Andela, or are there other plans for them?
I’ve always believed in the power of education to transform people’s lives and I believe that when you add technology to that mix - you get some of the most effective social mobility programs in the world (which is in effect what Andela really is). I started on this journey six years ago with Bookneto.com where I and a few friends of mine were thinking about how we could enable people in the corporate world and government get access to new thinking that was coming out of Academia at the time. We built a social learning platform that allowed professors to efficiently offer their courses independently to the public. We ended up exiting this solution to one of our clients in 2013 before I moved on to Fora where I tried to open up Nigeria’s ivory towers to young professionals who didn’t want to leave their jobs to get the Master’s and Phd’s they needed to advance in the corporate world. With Andela, I am able to see how much more practically education can change people’s lives and enable them access great opportunities. I mean, who would have thought it was possible to be paid to learn to work with some of the best technology companies in the world. It makes me really happy to be working in an industry where we can bring the power of education and the scale of technology together to make a deep impact in the lives of a lot of people.
In my experience investing in people is always a great business decision. Our partners, technology companies like Microsoft, Google, 2U, and many others all over the world believe in us and they support us in our mission to train 100,000 African technology leaders by 2025.
It’s true, we’ve now had close to 20,000 people apply to be part of the program, and we’ve only accepted 107. Many more than 107 would probably have been able to handle the rigor or the Andela experience, but it certainly wouldn’t have been everyone.
At Andela, we believe that all people deserve respect and kindness. But that doesn’t mean that all people are the same. What is the same is the chance for brilliance within a population. Andela is a network of the best and brightest, and it would be unfair to bring someone in to that network who wasn’t able or willing to uphold the standards of excellence required to succeed.
Over time, we will be releasing more and more of our curriculum and content into the world so that even if people aren’t a fit for the Fellowship, they still have access to the resources needed to learn.
My advice would be to focus on the company and delivering value to customers more than the fundraising. Fundraising is hard, yes, but more importantly it takes a lot of time and energy. If you can avoid fundraising, try to. Once you’ve built traction and are able to show what you would do with the funds, then it becomes more of a consideration, but until then the vast majority should focus on the business and not external capital.
Hello @iaboyeji, what are your personal views on entrepreneurship? Do you see it as a path to be towed by many? And what Values/Skills would you attribute to your success so far in Life.
hello Andela, i have applied for andela thrice but didnot make the the interview for the bootcamp.i want to know if the application is always open or it is quarterly?Great job
It is open monthly at apply.andela.com
Great question. We still have a lot of work to do at Andela so I don’t think this is a conclusion but a continuation of that work. The best founders, I believe, are more focused on bringing about the change that they want to see in the world than they are about a specific company. Our hopes is Andela becomes a movement to create that change by making it possible for a lot of young Africans to become evidence of the impact that education and technology can have. At that point it becomes a lot bigger than myself or J and that’s really when we’ll know we have been truly successful.
Thanks everyone! Jeremy and I have had a great time answering all your questions. Unfortunately we need to get back to the hard work of building Africa’s next generation of global technology leaders. I’m typically on here so feel free to ask us questions anytime.
Have a great day everyone!