Photo by Ruth McDowall

Dan Morrell: Seni Sulyman (MBA 2014) was born in Lagos and educated in the United States, but always wanted to return to Nigeria. And not just because he missed family or the comfort of home. He had a sweeping vision—one that he laid out in his HBS admission essay: “When I graduate,” Sulyman wrote, “I'm going to go back to Africa and lead a technology company that is creating massive impact that will propel Africa into the future.”

Today, Sulyman is carrying out that vision as vice president of global operations Andela, which connects tech companies to African software engineers. And in this episode of Skydeck, Sulyman talks to associate editor Julia Hanna about how his work is empowering Africa—and about the journey that led him to this mission.

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Julia Hanna: So Seni, you grew up on a military base in Nigeria, but you also lived in Paris, as a teenager, while you were attending high school. I just wondered what was it like to make that transition from Nigeria to France at that age?

Seni Sulyman: I think the one phrase that I would use to describe it is eye-opening. If you think of Nigeria 30 something years ago, pretty homogeneous. And leaving for the first time living somewhere else, and just realizing how expansive the world is, how diverse the world is, how many different types of people there are, actually being immersed in a completely different language. It was really eye-opening.

Hanna: Personally, how do you feel you changed when you made that transition?

Sulyman: I think it really opened my mind. I was very sheltered growing up in Lagos, Nigeria. Very loving parents, grew up in the household of five people, two siblings, myself, and both parents, and we had what I would call a very curated life. Growing up in a military base, extremely safe, extremely secure, you knew pretty much all your neighbors. Run around town and be out at night, playing around at 9, 10 PM—got in trouble a few times for that. But most of my life I remember being spent on that base.

Getting into Paris, I think the first thing I realized was, "This is huge." Lagos is very populated. If you're commuting back and forth to places you don't get to really experience it sometimes. Being in Paris, being on the train, and just literally being in the middle of the city, you can feel it. And I saw different kinds of faces, people wearing different outfits. It was just ... It's like a deer in the headlights. I'm looking around, just staring. I also remember thinking to myself, "This is not going to work." My first three months were horrible. I arrived in Paris in December of '99 it was freezing cold, I didn't know the language. The culture of France is quite different in terms of warmth and people's friendliness, and so all of that, I think was difficult for me.

Hanna: Didn't you eventually run for class president?

Sulyman: Vice president.

Hanna: Vice president.

Sulyman: I did.

Hanna: You made that transition then.

Sulyman: One thing I would say that I have taken away with me from just living in Lagos, and being Nigerian, is we have a very warm culture. When people show up, we embrace them and we try to invite them in as part of the culture. You go to the office and you have to greet 50 people. It's like, "Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Hi. Good morning." Everyone wants a greeting, everyone gets a greeting. I think that something that stuck with me, and so when I was there I always just said hi to everyone. Whether they responded or not, almost didn't matter to me, it was this is my thing and I don't need you to acknowledge it because that's just what I do. And I think over time what that did was allowed me to open conversations with people, allowed them to feel curious about knowing, "Who's this guy, who's always saying hello all the time?"

And slowly I started making friends through classes ... Well I went to the American school in Paris, so it was quite international, which meant there wasn't a status quo we had people from all over the world, from Asia, from the United States, from North America in general, from Europe. Everyone came with their own flavor, if you will. And so I guess I was bringing mine, but the story behind running for student club vice president was hilarious. So I didn't really know what the student club did. I found out they somehow got involved in helping to make things run better at school. So, "Okay, great. I'd love to do that."

So I found out that there was this fountain that people kept talking about that it was broken. It was a water fountain, and everyone keeps saying, "The water fountain’s broken. It's not working. Why is our school not fixing it?" That's why I run my entire campaign around a broken water fountain, and how, "We need to hold the standards higher. And for a school like ours, it's unacceptable." And I gave a speech in front of the entire school at an auditorium and people were cheering me on and it was great. And I won.

And about maybe a week or two later on, I was walking in one of the hallways and I literally was telling someone, "It's weird that this fountain hasn't been fixed." And they're like, "No, it's been fixed what are you talking about?" Like, "No, this is ridiculous. It hasn't been fixed." And they're like, "It's been fixed." And so, I point to the fountain and I'm pointing to a real fountain, an actual fountain, not a water fountain. So I had no idea that the thing you drank water out of was called a water fountain. And they all thought I was talking about the drinking fountain. And I had so many of those moments where I was completely lost, or in a different culture, and trying to understand what some of these things meant. In Lagos, I'd never seen a water fountain before. And so when I heard the word fountain, there's only one thing and it's the one you throw coins into. And obviously, I got involved in being a part of this amazing community in my school, and I think that really helped me to also begin to integrate more and more, and feel like I could actually just be one of them.

Hanna: And you went on to Northwestern and to HBS, and yet after you graduated you came back to Nigeria. And I just wondered if you could talk about what it's like to live there? In Lagos in particular, because most people don't have a good on the ground sense of what that's like. Why do you like it? What are the things that you're not so fond of? I'm just curious to hear more about that.

Sulyman: Yeah. I think Lagos is a tale of two cities, for me. It's an interesting juxtaposition of very high highs, and very low lows. And my experience is really trying to balance both sides, and always constantly remember why I'm there. In terms of the highs the food is amazing, the culture is very vibrant. Lagos is probably the fashion epicenter in Africa. I think it's also a lot more cosmopolitan than people think, and it's got this vibrant, just hustle if you will. Everyone is moving and trying to get somewhere, and people are migrating from different parts of the country and different parts of the continent just to be there. It's where I'm from and I think when I wake up every day and think I'm contributing to pushing the envelope in Africa, and accelerating our progress, that is exciting. On the low side, it is still very much an unstructured environment in many ways. There are laws that aren't fully applied or understood. There is chaos. The traffic is one of the worst things that you can experience.

Hanna: That's what I've heard. Yeah.

Sulyman: The traffic is quintessential because it describes a lot of what happens when you have a society that has scarcity mentality, the way people behave. Those parts of it can make days really frustrating. You have service providers who don't deliver as they're supposed to a lot of times. I think at times just finding talent for some of the most basic things is difficult to do. You probably know about the infrastructure issues we have, power, water, and things like that, are not as available as it should be. Public transportation is virtually not usable for anyone in the middle class or above. And so those are very challenging parts of being in Lagos, but I keep saying that we have to straddle between the future we envision and the world we currently live in. And as long as we can keep dreaming of the future, we can withstand any of the challenges for today.

Hanna: And Andela was launched in 2014, the same year that you graduated. It's an organization that identifies and trains software developers. Can you talk a little bit about how it fits into this vision that you have for the future of Nigeria, and then Africa, more broadly?

Sulyman: That is actually coincidental, the fact that I graduated the same year as Andela was founded. I joined the team in 2016, so it had been operating for almost two years at the time. And I came in to lead the Nigeria team first, and then eventually moved onto a different role. Andela fits in squarely with my personal vision for myself and the world. When I go back and look at my HBS essay, it's very interesting because I wrote exactly this in there. I said, "When I graduate I'm going to go back to Africa and lead a technology company that is creating massive impact, that will propel Africa into the future." Summarizing some of the words I used there, but basically that was it. That's what I wanted to do, that's what I believe was my mission, and my calling.

The picture I want to paint in how I think this works is, you have an opportunity to take a lot of the most talented individuals in different countries in Africa and connect them to a global ecosystem. By doing that one, you're allowing them to learn to work with teams around the world that are at the cutting edge of what they're doing in the space. Two, is you're giving them access to global income. Right? Because global brands begin to create access to global income. And three, because they work with Andela and our model is distributed, they live and work in their local countries. And so whatever they're earning is being spent locally. The time they spend investing in other companies, in the mentorship relationships they have with other people, advising companies, is all happening locally. For each person that ends up joining Andela, and working with us, we're going to impact 5, 10, 20, others, indirectly.

The picture that I have painted for myself, what helps me to really get excited about this all the time is, at the point in which you have 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, of these software engineers who are now high-income earners, and have the skill set to change what's happening in their communities, that begins to attract a lot of foreign investments. Because where you can find great talent, you find great investments. Through that talent is where investment comes in and you can begin to see examples. Microsoft just opened up a development center in Nigeria and Kenya, five years ago that may not have happened. And that talent then begins to create opportunities for other small businesses to serve them. Right? Now you have 10 or 20,000, or 100,000, people living in these urban cities. They need to cut their hair, they need to eat, they need to go watch movies, they need to do a bunch of things that will create other businesses. And I think ultimately that begins to create a cascading wave of, I'll say, wealth. Which is the dream, is to elevate us beyond where we are.

Hanna: Can you give me an example of someone who came to Andela and trained with you, and how it changed their life?

Sulyman: I'll think of someone that spent four years with us, came in, went through the training program, and now just became employee number one at Microsoft's development center in Nigeria. And he's an amazing person, I mean with or without Andela, he would have been fine. When you meet him, you'll know, he's on a mission. His name is Tony and he's actually a personal friend of mine at this point. I'd say what Andela did, for someone like Tony, is to provide them an environment where they fit in, where they know this is normal. Doing the right thing is normal, being excellent is normal, striving for much higher standards is normal. And everyone around you is constantly pushing themselves to get better.

Whereas you have particular environments where people ask, "Can you slow down? Where you rushing to? And why you always trying to be a know it all?" You have a place where people are saying, "No, go learn more. That's not enough. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?" When you think about the network he has, as a result of those experiences, he's basically able to build a global platform for himself that he can do whatever he wants to do with. That's one example. We have a number of others, there's another guy called Malik who recently moved on, and he's thinking about starting a VC fund. He actually said this to me, he said, "This program absolutely changed my life and open my eyes to what's really possible." And so, I think every day we're just seeing people who ... They're brilliant, they would probably have been successful anyway, but we've allowed them to find a shorter path to getting there.

Hanna: Andela also has the learning groups, the open-source learning groups. And those are available to people who may not be part of the program.

Sulyman: Yeah. And so, the way we thought about it is we have limited infrastructure, we can't hire that many people. But the demand ... I mean, every time we launch an application cycle for people to apply to Andela, we get thousands of applications. And we can't hire that many people yet. One day we will. And so, we thought, "Why don't we do this? Rather than competing for the same talent as everyone else, let's actually begin to create additional talents. That doesn't necessarily have to come work for us, but we can see to the ecosystems in the countries where we operate, and allow those people to go find opportunities elsewhere."

And so we partnered with a few other companies like Google, Udacity, Pluralsight, we also run a program in Microsoft. And what that is is literally just creating a curriculum that's fully online, and people can apply. And if they get selected they basically get a free course that they can take and then become certified, by either Google, or Microsoft, or whoever. Which then allows them to begin to build apps for those platforms, like Android. And it's been excellent, I think we've had ... I think the number is now something around 40,000 people go through that program. We're going to have to figure how to scale it even more, but our long-term goal there, is to have this community of people that are constantly learning, and growing, and investing in themselves. So that it isn't just about what Andela does within our business, but also what Africans can do when given the tools to go and create value for themselves.

Hanna: Right. You've talked about how it's a means of really changing the way the world views Africa, not so much as a continent to be given to, but the other way around.

Sulyman: Absolutely. It's already happening, which is exciting for me. I don't think of myself as being very dissimilar from a lot of the folks at Andela, to be honest with you. I think a huge part of why I'm able to lead teams, or even speak on this platform, is because I have a very strong foundation as a Nigerian who has some of the cultural values that I think are very positive. I've taken some of those and I've combined them with some of the best values from other societies, from other communities. Both in terms of professional skills, in terms of just personal attributes. We're building a business at Andela, it's not a social enterprise, it's not a nonprofit. I think any good business in Africa that is doing things the right way, legally and ethically, is partly a social enterprise, because it's hiring people, it's empowering people economically and it's teaching people how to do things the right way. Global standards, right? For me, just building a big business that will show people around the world African talent is as capable as any other talent in the world, is an exciting business to build.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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