Almost every entrepreneur dreams of becoming a unicorn — a startup that reaches a $1 billion valuation. But to date in Africa there are only seven companies that have achieved that distinction. Andela, led by co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson, is one of them. Hear how and why Andela became such a success story and gain insights on disruptive innovation from Efosa Ojomo, director of Global Prosperity at the Christensen Institute and co-author of The Prosperity Paradox.
Andela is a Nigerian company that began with a tightly focused mission to train software engineers to compete on a world stage. “The original problem statement,” Johnson explains, “is that brilliance is evenly distributed. Opportunity isn't. How do we move towards a world where those things are a little bit more uniform, where someone's potential in life has less to do with who their parents were and where they were born, and more to do with the impact they're able to create?” Andela quickly realized that the most valuable part of the business wasn’t training the talent, but making it accessible. So, to connect all that brilliance with opportunities, Andela created a global talent marketplace to help companies simplify the process of hiring and working with talent from all over the world.
This “market-making innovation” — creating an ecosystem for “non-consumers” — is what Efosa Ojoma believes made all the difference to Andela’s success. In the case of Andela, he explains, “The brilliant talents in Nigeria are non-consumers of opportunity. They just happen to be born in a country that could not leverage what they would give to the world. Andela is creating an infrastructure that connects them to that opportunity so that they can add value to the world.” And they’re doing the same for companies that face barriers to recruiting the best talent. According to Ojoma, “Unlocking this double-sided non-consumption unlocks so much value and the world becomes a better place as a result.”
While many companies suffered due to the pandemic, it actually helped Andela by reinforcing the power of remote work. In just four years the company expanded from seven to 120 countries, and its leaders realized that the tricky part of global talent was the infrastructure, or lack thereof. So, they spent time and energy building a supply chain to make it easy for people to work together between countries, covering issues from payroll to compliance to taxes. “The primary driver of the business was companies coming to us and saying, ‘We want to be able to work with great talent. Can you help us? And can you make that easy? And because you trained them, we would like to work with you,’” Johnson explains.
Listen to Johnson and Ojoma discuss Andela’s meteoric growth, regulatory hurdles, the role of data, and how looking at your product through the lens of market creation can unlock a business’s true potential.
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