Podcasts about nexmo

Send us a textWe are excited to present a fascinating new episode to kick off the year strong with some remote wisdom. This time, we sat down with Tony Jamous, CEO and co-founder of Oyster—a pioneering global employment platform. Joining our host Kaleem Clarkson for this insightful conversation is guest co-host, Jeff Frick. Together, they explore Tony's purpose-driven journey and how it shapes his approach to entrepreneurship, sustainable leadership, and remote work culture.Tony's entrepreneurial story began with the founding of Nexmo, a communications platform whose rapid growth eventually led to its acquisition first by Vonage and then by Ericsson for $6.5 billion. This experience, while financially rewarding, led Tony to reassess his priorities after seeing the toll intense work demands were taking on his health and well-being. This period of introspection inspired him to take a sabbatical and rethink his career goals. Determined to pursue a more meaningful path, Tony envisioned a platform that would enable economic freedom and allow individuals to access global employment while staying in their home communities. This vision led to the founding of Oyster, now valued at $1 billion and dedicated to providing cross-border employment solutions that empower individuals and benefit local economies.A key aspect of Oyster's mission is its focus on hiring talent from emerging markets, with 40% of its team now hailing from these regions—a significant increase from 30% just two years ago. This strategy goes beyond simply filling roles; it embodies a commitment to measurable social impact. By allowing companies to hire globally, Oyster directly invests in these economies through salaries and taxes, bolstering local development.What values does Tony consider essential? At Oyster, diversity and inclusion are foundational, with operations spanning over 80 countries and a workforce representing more than 100 nationalities, achieving gender balance across top management and the board. Tony also dives into the topic of compensation within remote teams, highlighting Oyster's three-zone pay system, designed to promote fair wages and reduce global income disparities. His insights reveal a profound commitment to sustainable leadership, inclusivity, and a progressive workplace culture. Through Oyster, he is championing a new model of employment that transcends borders and fosters global equality.To top it off, Tony shares his philosophy of 'sustainable leadership‘, a concept that has become foundational to his approach to building and leading teams. Unlike traditional models focused solely on servant leadership or relentless growth, sustainable leadership prioritizes leaders' well-being, enabling them to support their teams better. Inspired by the “oxygen mask” analogy, Tony emphasizes the need for leaders to care for themselves first to lead effectively. This approach promotes empathy-based management, which is especially relevant in today's evolving remote work environment.Tony's mission is to democratize job opportunities worldwide and create a new employment model that drives social impact, especially in emerging economies. His dedication to building a more equitable global workforce and his principles of sustainable leadership make this episode a valuable roadmap for leaders seeking to align business success with positive social contributions. Start this year strong: put on your headphones and get your remote-work inspiration!Learn more about Tony: More about us: Remotely One's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/remotelyone Remotely One's Webpage: https://www.remotelyone.com/

In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur, Tom Hunt interviews Tony Jamous, a seasoned entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Oyster HR. Tony shares his journey from scaling Nexmo, a mobile SMS company, to hundreds of millions in revenue before its successful exit, to his current venture in the remote work space. Oyster HR, Tony's latest company, is revolutionizing how businesses manage global remote teams and payroll. The discussion explores the parallels between his previous and current ventures, his implementation of Objective Key Results (OKRs) to align global teams, and his insightful perspective on work-life balance. Tony's experience offers valuable lessons for B2B entrepreneurs navigating rapid growth and international expansion in the evolving landscape of work.

Podcast Episode: Empowering Leadership with Tony JamousIn our latest podcast episode, we dive deep into the heart of leadership with Tony Jamous, the visionary CEO and co-founder of Oyster, a unicorn company revolutionizing global employment.Tony shares his inspiring journey from building and scaling Oyster and Nexmo (now Ericsson) to creating a company culture prioritising mental health, sustainable growth, and global opportunities for all.We passionately discuss the importance of leading with purpose and passion, stressing the need for leaders to truly know their teams and lead by example. He emphasises the necessity of intentional vulnerability, explaining how it fosters trust and authenticity within a team. He also highlights the critical balance between leadership and followership, reminding us that seeking constant recognition isn't the hallmark of effective leadership.Our conversation covers creating a supportive work environment that addresses burnout, prioritises mental well-being, hears insights on the power of self-reflection and mental downtime, illustrating how these practices can enhance leadership effectiveness and overall team productivity.Tune in to hear Tony Jamous' valuable perspectives on empathetic leadership, innovative HR strategies, and the future of work.Whether you're a seasoned leader or aspiring to make a mark in your field, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you lead with empathy, support your team's mental health, and drive sustainable growth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TADHack is the largest global hackathon focused on programmable communications since 2014. The event has helped tens of thousands of developers and innovators use programmable communications (UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, AI, vCon, IVR, Telecom API, etc.) to solve real-world problems). TadHack will take place in the weekend before Enterprise Connect 2024, and the winners (there's a $3K prize) will be announced on Tuesday at a scheduled event at EC24, at the Gaylord in Orlando. The hackathon will take place at the nearby Valencia College West Campus, in person and online. In this special Cloud Communications Alliance and TR Podcast, Alan Quayle Founder TADHack, TADSummit and Thomas Howe, of Strolid, discuss why everyone should consider participating: “Innovation is not the sole domain of developers, everyone can innovate,” says Quayle. Thomas Howe, of Strolid, discusses their creation, vCon, being standardized by the IETF, a PDF for conversations. Strolid is a sponsor. They created. It's going to be important for all communications companies in our industry. What may be interesting for your audience is at TADHack we have 2 categories of entries: Showcases and Hacks. Explained here in the rules: https://tadhack.com/2024/hackathon-rules/. Hacks are what developers create. A Showcase could be an idea about how a UCaaS, CCaaS, Conferencing, or good old telco could use vCon. Strolid wants to see application ideas, and Showcases get free publicity at TADHack, and in the EC24 session. A showcase is simply a short video about the idea, with perhaps a couple of slides. We've had Showcase submitted since the first TADHack in 2014. Innovation is not the sole domain of developers, everyone can innovate. TADHack enables developers (hack) and innovators (showcase) to share ideas on using the TADHack sponsors' technologies (STROLID with vCon). A showcase is simply a short presentation of an idea about how you can use the sponsors' technologies in your business. Previous TADHack sponsors include: Cisco, RingCentral, Jambonz, Avaya, Telnyx, Subspace, Simwood, Sagoma, NTT, Flowtoute, Matrix, Tropo, Temasys, Ericsson, Vidyo, Telestax, Symbol.ai, Stacuity, Huawei, Oracle, Ubuntu, Google, Nexmo, and more. https://tadhack.com

Tony Jamous is the CEO and Founder of Osyter, the automated global employment platform that removes barriers to remote work and distributed hiring. Oyster is the second Unicorn that Tony has founded.In this episode, Tony talks about:What he means by sustainable leadership and what caused him to embrace itAchieving higher performance without taxing yourself and others as muchSetting the bar high and being ready to be disappointedWhen to use your heart rather than your brainHow he enables a fully remote organisation with people in 60+ countriesThe importance of connecting in person at a deeper level with others in the teamTony is passionate about empowering talented individuals from emerging economies through access to global career opportunities. Before launching Oyster with co-founder Jack Mardack in early 2020, Tony was the co-founder and CEO of Nexmo (now Vonage).Oyster is a fully distributed organisation driven by the mission to create a more equal world of work. The platform enables people-centric hiring anywhere in the world with reliable, compliant contracts, payroll, and great local benefits and perks.For more, follow Manageable Conversations on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and tune in to insights and advice straight from business leaders.

"My childhood entailed growing in a post civil-war era in Lebanon with no cellular network... That enticed me into the world of telecom!" Tony Jamous, Co-Founder and CEO at Oyster in conversation with Anurag Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at Globe Teleservices. In this episode, Tony walks us through his journey which started in Lebanon all the way upto Cyprus now, creating ripples in the telecom and CPaaS industry with Nexmo and now shifting focus towards creating a global talent pool via Oyster, which he strongly believes is the future competitive edge for every organization! He also shares glimpses of his tryst with playing the guitar, raising three amazing children and celebrating two birthdays every year with an open invitation to all listeners to join the celebrations in Cyprus!

My guest this week is Tony Jamous, CEO of Oyster.Oyster mission is to make global employment easier for companies and talented workers.Tony's team is fully distributed and has grown by over 650 people in the past year alone.Previously Tony was previously founder and CEO of Nexmo, acquired by Vonage in 2016 for $230 million.We discussed:Why Tony is so passionate about remote work and the opportunities it unlocksWhy the best talent choosing remote work will shape future organisations.How to build trust when you're not meeting people in real life.The skills needed to create a thriving remote working culture.What defines a good leader, whatever the company structure.How distributed work creates opportunities for people and communities in developing economies....and more.LINKS:OysterTony's LinkedInFuture Work/Life newsletterFuture Work/Life websiteMy book, Work/Life Flywheel: Harness the work revolution and reimagine your career without fear, will be published on 17th January 2023. You can pre-order your copy HERE. Here's what Daniel Pink has said about it:"Creating new opportunities requires fresh thinking. With the Work/Life Flywheel model, Ollie Henderson gives you the system you need to make bold changes in your career and the motivation to share your ideas with the world.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since the rise of COVID-19, every company has adopted remote work, and our guest's mission is to create a more equal world by making it possible for talented professionals to work from any country they choose to. Tony Jamous is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Oyster, a global employment unicorn that helps companies hire employees and contractors anywhere in the world. Before Oyster, Tony was the founder of Nexmo (2010), a Twilio competitor that was acquired by Vonage in 2016 for $230M. In this episode, Tony takes us through the product-market fit journey of Oyster. Join us as we discuss: The origins of Oyster in April 2020 as world implemented lockdowns Tony's approach to product-market fit and the milestones and key metrics that gave them confidence that they found it The learnings that Tony took from his first company Nexmo, to help him build Oyster The challenges of creating connection across a remote team and how Oyster uses Kona Tony's best advice for seed stage founders just starting out on their journey  About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services.  Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, 
and Vivun. About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/). Further reading: Managing remote teams: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/leadership-managing-remote-teams Key metrics for product-led SaaS (from SaaStr 2022): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CT34wM2QSVhNErZ_5tB-VMv_OCREwM4vdJ20PfbLIIo/edit#slide=id.g13acbf38164_0_86  Leading through uncertainty: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/leadership-through-crisis

After his first startup went public in 2016, Tony Jamous took time off to align what he does with what he believes in. In his previous company, Nexmo, he saw the power of distributed hiring worldwide and how it changed people's lives. So in January of 2020, he started Oyster, a software company that helps make it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere. The timing of Oyster was perfect, 2 months later, remote work changed forever. Oyster's raised 230M in 2 years, and its network includes 100 nationalities distributed across 70 countries. The business grew 20x last year and is in the top 2% of all VC-backed companies in employee engagement.   Listen to Nathan and Tony discuss: Growing up during a civil war in Lebanon  What living in 10 different countries taught him about people Taking 10 flights to Casablanca to pay his first employee  Strategies for leading a global and remote business  The perfect timing of Oyster's launch in 2020 The importance of risk management in decision making What he looks for in companies to invest into  And much more remote leadership advice…       Who do you want to see next on the podcast? Comment and let us know! And don't forget to leave us a 5-star review if you loved this episode.   Wait, there's more… If you enjoy the Foundr podcast, check out our free trainings. Get exclusive, actionable advice from some of the world's best entrepreneurs.    Speak with our friendly course experts to get clarity on the next steps for your idea, business or career. You will get tailored insights from results achieved by our proven practitioners as well as thousands of students. Book a call now...    For more Foundr content, follow us on your favorite platform:  Foundr.com Instagram YouTube Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Magazine

Tony was born in Beirut, Lebanon, during a violent civil war, and was lucky enough to travel to France at the age of seventeen to study for a computer sciences degree, then attended the IMD Business School in Switzerland. After graduating, Tony founded Nexmo, a pioneer in the Communications Platform as a Service (“CPaaS”) category. Nexmo made it easy for software developers to add essential communications capabilities (like sending messages between ride-sharing drivers and passengers) to their applications, on a global scale. Nexmo went public via a merger with Vonage in 2016.After the Nexmo exit, Tony took some time off to consider what to do next. He began to invest in “platform models that can change the world”, Tony's investments include Pento, Truelayer, Dialpad, Hopin, and Claap.That other talented individual in emerging economies should enjoy similar career opportunities, without the need for geographic displacement, is a persona, passion and the ideological cornerstone of Tony's career. It is where the idea of Oyster was born.For most people in emerging economies, career fulfilment means moving to another country. Tony believes this necessity to be in the office sets up unassailable inequalities for many people in emerging economies. Why should they have to move halfway around the world, away from their community and support system, to have a successful career? Tony created Oyster to remove the remaining barriers to successful remote work, including hiring, compensating and managing team members who are physically far away from the office.In this episode, Tony reveals the secrets that helped him scale Oyster to 1$ Billion valuations, as well as his unique journey to success. Simon and Tony also go deep on how to get investment, purpose and Web3.TopicsHow Tony Became An EntrepreneurGetting InvestmentChoosing The Right InvestorHow Tony Came Up With The Idea Of OysterBuilding Oyster From ScratchConnecting World LabourBeing Purpose-DrivenWeb3Are Entrepreneurs Born Or Bred?Tony Jamous:https://www.tonyjamous.com/

Welcome back to Season 2, Episode 152 of the Asian Hustle Network Podcast! We are very excited to have Carey Lai on this week's show. We interview Asian entrepreneurs around the world to amplify their voices and empower Asians to pursue their dreams and goals. We believe that each person has a message and a unique story from their entrepreneurial journey that they can share with all of us. Check us out on Anchor, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Spotify, and more. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a positive 5-star review. This is our opportunity to use the voices of the Asian community and share these incredible stories with the world. We release a new episode every Wednesday and Saturday, so stay tuned! Carey Lai is a Founding Member and Managing Director at Conductive Ventures with $450M in AUM focused on investments in the areas of software, hardware, technology-enabled services, and blockchain. Carey has over 18 years of venture capital and technology experience. Prior to Conductive Ventures, Carey spent over four years investing at Intel Capital focused on Internet and enterprise software companies. His portfolio included 500Friends (acquired by Dentsu), Box (BOX), BrightEdge, Gigya (acquired by SAP), Kabam (acquired by Netmarble), Nexmo (acquired by Vonage), Onefinestay (acquired by AccorHotels), Sprinklr (CXM), and SweetLabs. Prior to Intel Capital, Carey worked at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) where he focused on rapidly growing later-stage and growth-equity investments in Internet & enterprise software companies. He actively worked with the following IVP portfolio companies: ArcSight (ARST), At Road (ARDI), Business.com (DEXO), Concur (CNQR), Cortina Systems (acquired by Inphi), Danger (MSFT), Data Domain (EMC), Mobile365 (SAP), SuccessFactors (SFSF), Synchronoss (SNCR) and Yodlee (YDLE). Carey also worked in the Technology Investment Banking Group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as an Investment Banking Analyst focused on the software and financial technology sectors. His transaction experience included offerings for some of the leading technology companies in the world, including Blackbaud Software (BLKB), Computer Associates (CA), Hewlett Packard (HPQ), and Sungard Data Systems (SDS), and Tibco Software (TIBX). Earlier in his career, Carey worked at eBay in Business Development. Carey has an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He also graduated with a B.A. in International Economics from the University of California Los Angeles. Asian Hustle Network knows how important it is for small business owners to have access to tools and resources that help them thrive, which is why we have partnered with Comcast RISE, a multi-year, multi-faceted initiative launched in October 2020 to help strengthen small businesses hit hard by COVID-19 with FREE services! They have already provided nearly 8,000 POC- and Female-owned small businesses - and yours could be next! Qualifying businesses can apply to receive consulting, media and creative production services from Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, or technology upgrades from Comcast Business. Comcast RISE is now accepting applications from people of color-owned or women-owned, small businesses. Learn more and apply at bit.ly/RISEQ1_Podcast_AHN and share with all your fellow business owners. To stay connected within the AHN community, please join our AHN directory: bit.ly/AHNDirectory --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asianhustlenetwork/support

Tony Jamous is the Founder & CEO of Oyster, the remote work employment platform. The company is on a mission to remove the barriers between talented people and great full-time jobs globally. They believe it should be easy for any company to hire any person, no matter where either is located in the world. Oyster's software platform is created to solve for the complexities of giving full-time, full-fledged employment to anyone in the world, while providing a delightful experience to employers and employees. Prior to Oyster, Tony was Co-Founder and President of Nexmo, a Vonage Company. He joined Vonage as part of Vonage's acquisition of Nexmo, Inc. in June 2016. Some of the Topics Covered by Tony Jamous in this Episode What Oyster is and why Tony started it The unique way Tony began building the Oyster team Why the pandemic forced Oyster to accelerate their growth process Oyster's ideal customer, target market, and customer acquisition strategy How Oyster is partnering with VC firms The strategic way Tony approached the fundraising process for Oyster The process of building a world-class distributed team How Oyster is utilizing asynchronous work The way being mission-driven informs how Tony approaches competition as coopetition The Oyster experience How Tony got into angel investing and how he sources deals How Tony manages his time How emigrating from Lebanon has affected Tony personally and professionally Sign up for The Grind, for actionable insights and stories from successful entrepreneurs delivered to your inbox once per week: https://www.justgogrind.com/newsletter/ Listen to all episodes of the Just Go Grind Podcast: https://www.justgogrind.com/podcast/ Follow Justin Gordon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justingordon212 Follow Justin Gordon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justingordon8/

In this interview, we speak with Tony Jamous Founder & CEO of Oyster. This Podcast is titled "Express your true self" Tony, left his home in Beirut at the age of 17 and from there, his journey began. He was the founder of Nexmo which he sold to Vonage for $230 Million. After working at Vonage, and taking time off, he founded his new company Oyster, based on his values and personal life mission. In this conversation, we take a deep dive into growing up in the Beruit, Personal Growth, Humility, how to express true vulnerability, and how to find a career that is aligned with your values. After listening to Tony you can expect to walk away with: Align your values together with your career. Take more risk. How to express vulnerability Staying humble. Building up your self-confidence and multiple more lessons. So enjoy and please spread the wisdom so more people can benefit.

OpenAPI: Clarity and structure for API developmentThe OpenAPI specification (formerly known as Swagger) is a blueprint to help develop APIs and to make sure what’s in the API is clear and understandable, before development even starts. Lorna Mitchell, a Senior Development Advocate at Nexmo and one of our guests today, explains it like this, “OpenAPI is an API description standard. It's a way of explaining everything in your APIs. So think of when you would write documentation and the endpoints, the parameters, the responses you should expect, but it's in a machine-readable format. So you can generate documentation, but you can also generate mock servers, clients, feed into Postman and try out the requests. There's a bunch of possibilities.”OpenAPI, open standardBecause OpenAPI is an open standard, one of those possibilities (and advantages!) is being able to use a variety of tools with it. Lorna continues, “So OpenAPI, because it describes your API in its entirety, gives you a bunch of things that you can do out of the box, it's an open standard. So there's a lot of different tools, providing a lot of different features. When the machines basically read this detailed spec, you can use JSON, you can use YAML. The big advantage is that by sharing the standard, then we can also share the tools.”Postman, a leader in API testingAs the need for building APIs with a clear structure has risen, so has the need for testing them. This is where Postman comes in. Joyce Lin, a Senior Developer Advocate at Postman, describes Postman as a flexible, extensible API development platform that you can use for testing, deploying, as well as documenting your APIs. Joyce says the two primary use cases for OpenAPI and Postman are:Driving the design and development of your APIAutomatically generating documentationShe adds, “Postman is like a tool chain. And it’s opinionated, but it's not going to shame you because you've poorly designed your API. What Postman can help you do is interact with it a little bit more.”She reveals support for OpenAPI in Postman happened because of customer’s requests, “Last year, one of Postman’s most requested features was support for OpenAPI. So we finally launched that, and we've been making some improvements.” Other improvements in Postman’s future include improved JSON schema and Graph SQL support.Build and test your APIs more easily with OpenAPI and Postman on Platform.sh Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Tony Jamous is the CEO & Founder of Oyster, the remote work employment platform. Before that, he was president of Nexmo, a Vonage Company. He joined Vonage as part of Vonage's acquisition of Nexmo, Inc. in June 2016. The company is on a mission to remove the barriers between talented people and great full-time jobs globally. They believe it should be easy for any company to hire any person, no matter where either is located in the world. Now more than ever, smart companies can't allow their HQ location to dictate the size of their talent pool. Your next transformative hire could be anywhere. They also believe the most in-demand knowledge workers today want to leverage a global career perspective, the freedom to live where they want, and the security of full-fledged employment with benefits. However, the flow between talent and opportunity worldwide is still blocked by the costs and legal complexity companies face before they can fully employ in another country. Cross-border hiring is still arcane, remarkably un-transformed by software, and ripe for disruption. I learn more about the story behind the software platform created to solve the complexities of giving full-time, full-fledged employment to anyone in the world while providing a delightful experience to employers and employees.

Why are so many marketers so afraid of sharing what works and what doesn’t? In this episode, we chat with James Winter, VP of Marketing at Brandfolder, who has a decade of marketing experience. His current company has been making big news lately after getting acquired by SmartSheet. James has also held previous marketing roles at AspireIQ, Dialpad, Nexmo, and Seagate Technology.

Why are so many marketers so afraid of sharing what works and what doesn’t? In this episode, we chat with James Winter, VP of Marketing at Brandfolder, who has a decade of marketing experience. His current company has been making big news lately after getting acquired by SmartSheet. James has also held previous marketing roles at AspireIQ, Dialpad, Nexmo, and Seagate Technology.

Tony Jamous is the CEO at Oyster - a talent platform that enables companies to hire great people anywhere on the planet. Previously Tony co-founded Nexmo – a cloud communications platform – & led them to a $230m exit! We explored: How Nexmo grew from 10m to 100m ARR in 6 years & how leadership style & organisational structure evolved at each stage of growth Why Nexmo chose to exit via M&A in preference to the IPO route chosen by their US competitor Twilio How Oyster reduces inequality by lowering the barrier for companies in any country to hire talent in any country  How virtual organisations reduce the differentials between extroverts & introverts and improve employees' mental health Why Oyster partnered with Connect Ventures as an investor who shared their goals for “Impact 2.0” in preference to other VCs who's interest was purely ROI  For more insights into Oyster's platform check out https://www.oysterhr.com/ & for advice on hiring diverse, high impact, B2B software scaleup leaders head over to https://alpinasearch.com

In Yeshiva - a system of advanced learning in the orthodox Jewish world, there’s a saying: “Shiv'im Panim laTorah” - which means “there are 70 faces of Torah”, but implies that there are many equally valid ways of getting to a certain point. That idea resonates with IT practitioners, because there are many paths that led us into our career in tech. In this episode, Leon speaks with guests Corey Adler, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, and returning guest Yechiel Kalmenson about how that made that literal pivot, from yeshiva into the world of IT, and what their experiences - both religious and technical taught them along the way. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on https://adatosystems.com. Thanks! Josh: 00:24 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:48 In yeshiva, a system of a dance learning in the orthodox Jewish world, there's a saying: "Shiviim paanim laTorah,", which means "there are 70 faces of Torah". But it implies that there are many equally valid ways of getting to a certain point. That idea resonates with it folks, because there are many paths that led us to our career in tech. Today I'm going to speak to people who made that literal pivot - from yeshiva into the world of IT - and what their experiences, both religious and technical, taught them along the way. I'm Leon Adato, and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are returning guest Yechiel Kalmenson Yechiel: 01:20 Hey, thanks for having me back. Leon: 01:24 No problem. And also his partner in coding crime, Rabbi Ben Greenberg. Ben: 01:29 It's great to be here. Leon: 01:31 It is wonderful to have you. And sitting across from me, because he's also a Cleveland-based Orthodox Jewish Geek, is Corey Adler Corey: 01:39 Live long and prosper, Papu. New Speaker: 01:41 There we go. Okay. So before we dive into the actual topic at hand, I want to let you all do a little bit of shameless self promotion. Everyone, take a minute and tell the Technically Religious audience a little bit about who you are and how they can find you on the interwebs. Corey: 01:58 So, hi, I am Corey Adler. I am a team lead engineer at Autosoft. You can find me on Twitter @CoreyAdler and I am the constant pain and Leon side, Leon: 02:08 Literally and figuratively, yes! Yechiel: 02:10 Well, uh, my name is Yechiel. I'm a software engineer at Pivotal. Um, on Twitter you can find me @YechielK. My blog is at RabbiOnRails.io, and I also co-author a weekly newsletter called "Torah & Tech" with Ben Greenberg. Ben: 02:26 And I am that Ben Greenberg that Yechiel just mentioned. I'm a developer advocate at Nexmo, the Vonage API platform. And I also am that coauthor of "Torah & Tech" with Yechiel, and you can find me on the Twitter world @RabbiGreenberg, or on my website at BenGreenberg.dev. Leon: 02:44 Great. And for those people who are wondering, we're going to have all of those links and everything in the show notes. And finally I should just to round out the four, uh, Orthodox people of the apocalypse, I guess? I don't know. Corey: 02:56 You've been watching too much Good Omens. Leon: 02:58 Right? I just finished binge watching it. Anyway. I am Leon Adato and you can find me on the twitters @LeonAdato, I did not attend to Shiva, which is a point that my children who DID attend yeshiva are quick to mention whenever I try to share any sort of Torah knowledge. I started out in theater. I know that comes as a complete shock to folks who wonder why I could do that if I'm so shy. It's almost as weird a path to IT as Torah is. And one that's definitely informed my understanding along the way. But again, we're focusing on this yeshiva path and that's where I want to start. I want to hear from each of you, where you started out, what your sort of, growing up experience was. Ben: 03:41 Uh sure. So I guess I'll start. So I grew up in San Diego, California, a little far also from the center of what seems like the center of Orthodox Jewish life in America, in New York City. But I moved to New York for Yeshiva and college at the same time. And I went to a yeshiva college called in English, the Lander college for Men, and in Hebrew, or in a New York accented Hebrew, The Beis Medrash L'Talmud, which was and still is in Queens, in a little neighborhood in Queens called Q Gardens Hills. And so I was there for four years, right, that simultaneously yeshiva and college. And then after I graduated that I said, "I'm not done with yeshiva." So I went for another four years to another yeshiva, this time to study for a rabbinic ordination. And I did that at yeshiva called - and they only have a Hebrew names so I apologize for the three words in Hebrew here - Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, which at that time was based near Columbia University in the upper west side of Manhattan, and is now in Riverdale, which is a neighborhood in the Bronx, also in New York City. Corey: 04:55 So I guess I'll go next then. I grew up, born and raised in Chicago. I went to Skokie Yeshivah, and that's yeh-shivuh, not Yeshiva. Why? It's that way. Nobody knows. Leon: 05:07 But they beat you enough until you just stopped saying it the other way. Corey: 05:10 You get shamed if you say it the wrong way there. After high school I went to tlearn in yeshiva in the old city of Jerusalem for two years at a place called Nativ Ariyeh. Afterwards I came back to the United States and went to New York University. Not "YU" Leon: 05:30 Yeah, NYU, not YU. I went to NYU also, although we didn't know each other because I'm old and you're a baby. Okay. So that means Yechiel you're bringing up the rear on this one. Yechiel: 05:43 Yeah. I'll round off the lineup. So, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, center of the world. But for yeshiva, I left town. I went to Detroit, I was there for five years after which I went to a yeshiva in a small village in Israel called Kfar Chabad. Then I came back to New York and I studied, for my Rabbinic ordination at the Central Chabad yeshiva in Crown Heights in New York. Leon: 06:10 Fantastic. Okay. So now we get to laugh at ourselves when we were young and idealistic and had no idea what the world was going to throw at us. What were your plans at that time? Like what did you think life was going to be like? You know, IT may not have been your ultimate life goal. So what did you think it was going to be? Yechiel we'll go backwards. We'll start with you this time. Yechiel: 06:32 I'm glad you can laugh because I actually look back to those days pretty fondly. So back then I was of course very idealistic. My plans were to be a Chabad rabbi. For those in the audience who don't know Chabad is a sect within Orthodox Judaism. And at least for the sake of simplicity all I'm going to say about them is that they're very strong into Jewish outreach and bringing Judaism to unaffiliated Jews, all Jews. So back then I had plans to be, to go out somewhere in the world and be a Chabad rabbi and that's what I was studying towards and what I was learning. And in fact after I got married, I even did live out part of that. I moved to Long Island for a few years and we helped a local Chabad house until eventually the bills caught up with us and we realized that it wasn't paying. Leon: 07:23 So Ben, how about you? Ben: 07:24 So I first of all, I do want to comment on the fact that only a Brooklynite would think "moving out of town" was moving to Long Island, New York. I do just want to make that comment as we're engaging in this conversation. Leon: 07:39 It is definitely the New York state of mind. Corey: 07:41 Yup. Ben: 07:42 And I also do want to say another wonderful thing about... well *a* wonderful thing about Chabad: In my role now is a developer advocate. I do a lot of traveling and I have encountered and have had the great fortune to spend, many Shabbatot and holidays - many Jewish Shabbats, Sabbaths - with Chabad houses around the world and have truly seen the diversity of both Jews and non Jews who attend Chabba for Shabbat meals, for Shabbat services. Just a couple weeks ago I was at Chabad in Venice in Italy and saw just really like every, every type of person. The whole spectrum of human life, it felt like, was present in the Jewish ghetto in the courtyard, celebrating Friday night services and dancing in the streets for Shabbat services with the Chabad. So it was really just quite beautiful. I had such a wonderful time in yeshiva for those eight years, I decided I actually wanted to be a rabbi and so I spent about 10 years of my life actually working as one. And I worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a campus Rabbi, A Hillel Rabbi, which is central for Jewish student life on campus. And then I went from there and I worked as a congregational rabbi in Colorado. And then I actually did some community organizing work after that in Chicago around gun violence and immigration reform. And so I kind of got to experience both nonprofit Jewish organizational life in the latter part of my career in the Jewish world. And then also in the beginning part, more traditional forms of being a rabbi, like a campus outreach and congregational rabbinate, the synagogue / pulpit rabbinate. So I actually did it for a bit and I feel fortunate that I've had that opportunity. Leon: 09:49 Wow. That was kind of the gamut. Okay. Corey top that! Corey: 09:54 For me, actually, I've known since fifth grade, pouring over old Tiger Direct catalogs Leon: 10:04 Oh that brings back..., Corey: 10:04 I've known for a long time that I wanted to get somewhere into the tech industry. But I always, I imagined myself originally going into programming video games. I loved playing Starcraft and Madden and all these fun games and I wanted to actually work for one of these companies and imagined it was going to be so much fun programming video games for a living. Speaker 1: 10:32 So, so you didn't, you didn't have visions of being a Chabad rabbi on Mars? Corey: 10:37 No. Leon: 10:38 Okay. All right. Okay, fine. So, um, along with that, along with what you thought was going to be, what was the part - because I know a lot of the folks who listen to Technically Religious don't have a window into this world. So what was the thing that you enjoyed the most; or the most impactful thing about that part of your life that, you know, the time that you were learning in yeshiva? What was it that that really just, you know, would have drawn you back? That you would've gone back again? That you look back most fondly. Ben: 11:05 So for me, I think there are very few spaces in life, or opportunities in life where you get to just sit and ask questions, meaningful questions, and engage in the pursuit of trying to figure out what... meaning: trying to figure out the intentionality behind why... why you do things, why you don't do things? And get engaged in just intense philosophical, theological questions ranging from sometimes the most pragmatic - like, "Is my dishwasher kosher?" And all the ramifications and permutations of that; To very theoretical questions around, "Well, who possesses greater reward for doing a good deed: somebody who is obligated to do that, or somebody who's not obligated?" And spending hours delving deeply into questions like that. Where else do you get the opportunity to do that, and just take the time? It was a precious gift to have that time and to have a carved out dedicated space for those kinds of ponderings and intellectual pursuits. Leon: 12:15 Nice. Nice. Corey, how about you? New Speaker: 12:19 For me it was the ability to stop thinking about the end result and focusing on those individual steps that lead to that end. Quite often we, as a society and as individual people, we end up trying to jump to the conclusion trying to find ... just go straight to the end, see what happens. But when you're learning, Talmud in particular, you may already know what the law is before you started learning a particular section. You may have read it in some law book else elsewhere before you even seen this discussion. But that doesn't mean you're going to know all the particulars. You don't know what all of the edge cases are, as we would say. Arguments for and against various positions. And even on something simple like, "hey, my animal just caused damage to your animal." Like, what do we do in this circumstance. Even that, just getting that ability to focus in and delve into the steps versus getting straight to the end. Leon: 13:25 Nice. Okay. Yechiel anything to add to that? Yechiel: 13:29 Yeah. For me it was actually, the fact that how yeshiva was a world where you're totally immersed in - like people I speak to are generally shocked to find out that a regular day for yeshiva boy, or yeshiva, bochur in our parlance, would start at 7:30 AM and go till 9:30 PM sometimes. And it's nonstop learning. You have a small break for eating, obviously for the three prayers every day. But other than that, it was just nonstop sitting and learning for over 12 hours a day. And that's something that you don't find anywhere else. It was, I think, a totally life transforming experience Leon: 14:07 You know, for those folks - and again, I didn't attend any of that, but I watch, I'm watching my kids go through it - and it's a very different thing than sort of the secular educational system where the goal of every school child is, "how do I get out of this as fast as possible? How do I skip as much as I can? How can I just memorize the questions for the test." This is a culture, this is a world that, as I like to tell folks, it's almost that nobody cares about the answer. The highest praise, the highest reward you can get from a teacher is "you asked a really good question." And that says something about the attitude that's there. That we enjoy this, we enjoy the playfulness with ideas. Yechiel: 14:51 And to add to that, that's actually a big difference between studying in a yeshiva for example, or studying for a degree or for a certification or whatever. Whereas in most cases you're studying, you're trying to gain a piece of knowledge. You want to... you're learning for your degree, so you want to know all that. Let's say you're learning for your law degree or for your computer science degree, wheatever it is - there's a certain piece of knowledge which you want to acquire. In yeshiva it's not about learning the subject, it's about, like I said, it's about the journey, not about the destination. It's about spending the time learning. It's not like if you can finish the tractate of Talmud quicker, then like, "okay, that's it. You can go back to you know, to your house and go to sleep." That's not what it was about. It wasn't about gaining a particular piece of knowledge. It was about the process of learning. Leon: 15:38 And the joyfulness of... taking joy in the process. Given that: Given how wonderful it was and how exciting and fun it was, what made you decide that you are going to pivot away from it? That you weren't going to become the Chabad rabbi, Yechiel. That after 10 years as a pulpit rabbi or organizational rabbi, you're going to make a move and specifically into IT What, what was it that got you to that direction? Yechiel: 16:04 Okay, so I'll take this one. So as I mentioned earlier, for various reasons we wont' get into, the rabbinate didn't work out at the time and got to a point, you know, a growing family, bills don't pay themselves., food doesn't put itself on the table. So I started looking outside of the rabbinate for other sources of income and tech was a pretty natural choice for me. When I was a kid I was that kid in the back of the classroom with the mechanical pens taking it apart, breaking and trying to figure out how the spring worked. Or anything. I don't know how many watches my parents bought me that ended up in like a mess all over my desk. So that was always something I enjoyed, figuring how things worked. And when computers, when I started getting access to computers, that was like a whole new world for me to take those things apart. I, I'm not one of those kids like wrote code at the age of 10, but I did enjoy figuring out like, you know, what tick, what made computers take, how they worked on what was going on under the hood. So when I was looking for something to do, my first job actually out of the rabbinate was doing tech support. Which was great for me because I was learning these different systems and how they worked and how to troubleshoot them and how to debug them. And it slowly progressed from there. Eventually programming was just the logical next step and haven't looked back since. Leon: 17:25 So Ben how about you? Ben: 17:26 So I've always been a bit of a geek and I've always loved tech. In fact, so this is my second career, but in many ways it's also my third career because when I was in high school, I founded a hacker conference with my friend and partner in crime at that time. And we actually just celebrated its 20th year of the Hacker Conference in San Diego, and it's one of the largest infosec conferences in southern California to this day. And we had our own little network penetration, security testing company back then as well. We didn't necessarily use those words back then because then the mid to late nineties, it was all kind of new and everything was evolving at that point. We were kind of right on the cusp at that point. And so it was actually a really exciting time to be in it. And so when I decided that it was time really to take a break from the rabbinate take a break from the clergy life - 10 years in the clergy is kind of like 40 years in another career. And I was ready for a bit of a break and it was also correlating with the desire of my family and I to think about a move out of the States into Israel. And to start thinking about ways in which we would support ourselves in Israel. And the idea of going back to a career in tech, which was something I was always interested in to begin with. And I had a bit of a history in it, albeit a very old history at that point because tech has moved and has continued to move to move really fast. So things that I was doing in the 90s like writing some code in Perl for example, would be like totally... Right? Leon: 19:11 Perl! Everyone else: 19:11 (general mocking of both Leon and Perl) Ben: 19:16 So one of the conference I was at a few months ago was at FOSDEM, which is one of the largest open source conferences in the world. Totally a free conference. Unbelievable amounts of people are there. It's in Brussels or, at least was that year. And literally every sector of the tech community is under that roof, including Perl associations and Perl groups. Leon: 19:39 Ahhhhh. It's my happy place! Ben: 19:39 And it was so beautiful to see that, it brought back so many memories of my childhood. And so tech felt like a good place to go back to. And it's a very good career and a good career path where I live now in Israel. So it just, it made a lot of sense, Corey: 20:00 Dear God, you guys are old. Everone: 20:01 (laughter) Leon: 20:05 OK Corey. All right. So what about you? Corey: 20:08 Well, I second the idea of being a total geek as you well know, Leon. But for me yeshiva was always just the first step in a journey. I knew I was going to end up in IT, but I knew that the whole yeshiva experience was something that I needed for myself in my life, it helped me become more independent. It helped me figure out a lot of things about myself along the way. So I knew I needed that. I knew what I wanted to get out of it and needed to get out of it, but it was not the permanent solution for me. I knew that eventually I was going to come back down to Earth as it were and... Leon: 20:48 Oh yes. Come down from on high, the Crystal Tower of Yeshiva and back down to down to the dust, in the gutter, Corey: 20:57 Which is better than the dark tower. Leon: 20:58 Well, okay. Corey: 20:59 Of Perl for example. Leon: 21:01 Oh See, okay. See we had to go there. Al right. So I'm curious about this because again, it was such a pivot. Were any of you resistant to the idea at first? You had this opportunity, you each had a predilection for technology, so you saw that it could work. But was anything in you saying, "Nah, that just... Oh, you know, what will the neighbors think? What will my mother think?" Was there anything that held you back? Yechiel, how about you? Yechiel: 21:27 So yeah, actually I was pretty resistant to the idea at first. Like I mentioned, I've always seen myself going into community service, going into adult education. Teaching is something that I really enjoy. I still enjoy it. I try to incorporate it into my tech career. Like the Torah & Tech newsletter and my blog and also at work mentoring, mentoring interns. Teaching is in my blood. And I always thought that I would be someone who taught, who led, who spoke. And in addition I was also, I was raised on the ideals of community service. So going off to the other direction was tough for me. Though what helped me come to terms was going again back to when I was a kid, a particular genre of stories that I really lovedwas stories from the old country, from the shtetl. There were the Jewish towns with a Jewish shoemaker and the Jewish tailor. And there's actually like a class of Great Torah scholars who could have easily gotten a position as a rabbi or in some yeshiva teaching. But they specifically did not want to use their Torah as a means to support themselves. And as a kid that was something that really touched me and I sort of romanticized it. So now when I started looking away from the rabbinate towards working for myself and I realized that actually technology nowadays is the blue collar work of today. Today's programmers and developers and sysadmins - those are today's shoemakers and blacksmiths. And you know those are the people that make the world run. And the idea of supporting myself through my own handiwork started appealing to be more and more. Leon: 23:11 It's an interesting thought. I have met one rabbi who is also an auto mechanic, but that's not the typical career path that you find for folks. So yeah, I like the idea that, IT is the next tradesman for, especially for itinerant scholars. Ben: 23:27 I will say though that now having lived in Israel for about a year, this is an area where there are, I do believe there is a cultural divide between American Orthodox Jewry and Israeli Orthodox Jewry. And the fact that in my own neighborhood, I know somebody, for example, who has a Ph.d in Academic Bible from Hebrew University and works with his hands all day as a craftsman. And it just brings back to mind stories of maybe some famous Jewish carpenter from 2000 years ago that some people might have been around... Leon: 24:03 Wow. We're just going to throw little shade. Yechiel: 24:07 Pretty sure this is your first all Jewish panel. So we had to, you know... Leon: 24:11 Yeah, we had to at least take one shot. Ben: 24:14 But I say that as a joke, but there's so many people like that in my neighborhood and my community who have ordination or I would advance degrees in Jewish studies or both and who are not working in that field, who are not working in Jewish communal service. And yet they volunteer. They give classes at night or on weekends on Shabbat. They teach they offer sermons. Our community is basically... Our personal community, where we go to synagogue, our community in Israel is essentially lay-led. And so people take turns signing up an offering words of Torah on Shabbat and holidays and a lot of those people who do that are, those possessing rabbinic ordination. Or, if not rabbinic ordination, having spent years of their life in yeshiva and who had decided to pursue a career as opposed to making the Torah or Jewish life their career. And a part of that is just the economics of the country, that it's just hard to sustain oneself in Jewish communal service in Israel. So people end up taking other jobs. But it's also, I think there's part of an ideal here of, we would call maybe "Torah v'Avodah" of Torah being combined with a job - of Torah and some kind of occupation going hand in hand. And that not being a less than ideal, but that actually being the ideal. So just an interesting reflection as I'm listening to this conversation and thinking about how I situate myself and sit where I sit now and can see both sides. And I've lived in both sides and the differences between those two. Leon: 26:02 Nice. Okay. So Ben as long as you're going, how about you? What was the challenge pivoting away from the rabbit into a career in coding? Ben: 26:10 I think it's a challenge that a lot of people who are going into a second career often face regardless of what their own particularities are, which is letting go of what others think; or what you think others are thinking. And for me that was a challenge. Leaving the rabbnic world was challenging because you - especially if you go to a hyper-focused mission driven rabbinical school, which I went to - there is, uh, a real sense of serving the community and that being the passion and drive of one's life. And switching to another career can feel like you're letting down your teachers, your mentors, your rabbis, your peers, your fellow alumni, you're a co collegial community. But recognizing that what helped me was the recognition that all of those people that I just mentioned, they also care about you and they wants what's best. They want what's best for you as well. And if they don't, they probably are not somebody you want to be invested in a friendship with to begin with and you shouldn't be necessarily taking their opinion to heart to that extent. That anyone who cares about you, who wants what's best for you, will recognize that maybe it's time. Will recognize along with you, and honor the fact that you expressed the idea that maybe it's time to switch careers and maybe it's time to move to something else. And I think getting to that point where recognizing that others value you and care for you and are not looking down upon you or critiquing you. And if they are, it's okay to say, "enough of you, you're out of my life." It's okay to do those things and to put your life first. And what's best for you and your family. Those were some major hurdles, but once I got over them became it became pretty straightforward. Leon: 28:18 Nice. Corey! Corey: 28:20 For me wasn't too difficult because, as I previously mentioned, I knew I was gonna go into IT all along. For me, the most difficult part - was because I had grown up and been in some religious schooling system for my entire life - It was the idea, of leaving the cocoon as it were. And you know, now not everybody I'm going to meet is orthodox. Not everybody that I'm going to have to deal with in school or in work is going to be, you know, a member of the tribe as it were. You know, so there was a little bit of trepidation, but I knew it was gonna happen. Leon: 29:12 Got It. Leon: 29:13 We know you can't listen to our podcasts all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular discussion up. Come back next week where we continue our conversations about "Pivoting Our Career On the Tip of a Torah Scroll." Roddie: 29:25 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon: 29:38 So there's these three rabbis that walk into a bar. Ben: 29:40 Uh, that's not how it goes. Yechiel: 29:42 I think you totally ruined that joke. Corey: 29:44 This is how that joke goes.    

Today Ben & I talk about the lessons he learned from his time as a community organizer and Rabbi and how he applies them in his role today as a Developer Advocate at Nexmo, the Vonage API platform. He shares the story of his brave decision to pursue his dreams and learn to code by attending the Flatiron School.He and I discuss the value of embracing the qualities that make us different in addition to the importance of diverse perspectives and backgrounds on a technical team.His passion for community organizing and storytelling is contagious and this episode is not one to miss! Follow Ben @RabbiGreenbergCheck out his talk about technical interviews & liberal arts students here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTZ3pWoDkjc&feature=youtu.beRubyConf Opportunity Scholarship: https://rubyconf.org/scholarships An article I wrote about the experiences @ RubyConf 2017 (where Ben & I first met!): https://codeburst.io/31-thoughts-i-had-while-attending-my-first-rubyconf-as-an-opportunity-scholar-eaa5d886bac0 Visit our We Belong Podcast site here: https://webelongpodcast.com/

Steve Crow is using Nexmo to communicate. This episode is not sponsored! Want to be a sponsor? You can contact me or check out my sponsorship gig on Fiverr Show Notes: Nexmo Nexmo developer portal Viber curl is a command line tool to make HTTP requests OpenAPI initiative Fun video on DTMF tones A highlight video of Twitch Plays Pokémon (you might want to jump to about 2:30 to get to the good stuff) A video on the Monty Hall Paradox featuring Alan Davies! cr0w.st SpringOne Tour in Columbus DevNexus Nexmo blog posts from Steve Crow Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.

GUEST BIO: Lorna is on the Developer Relations team for Nextmo. Before that, she was a developer advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services which meant that she got paid to play with and talk about open source database technologies.  Lorna is also the author of the books “PHP Web Services” and “PHP Master” as well as being a regular conference speaker and writer. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest today is Lorna Mitchell.  She has a software engineering background and has worked as a developer advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services. Today, she works for Nexmo as part of the Developer Relations team. Lorna is also the author of two, very well received, books about PHP. She describes herself as being at her happiest when her GitHub graph is green. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(0.99) – Phil asks Lorna to tell the audience a bit more about herself? Lorna replies that Phil has pretty much covered everything with his introduction. (1.38) – Phil asks Lorna for a unique IT career tip. Lorna says here advice is to write things down. When you write something down, you process it in a different way. If you explain something to someone else you have to gain a deep understanding yourself. When you write a blog post you come to better understand the topic. Plus, once you publish, you get feedback and become known for being interested in that topic. As a result, you learn more. That continues, over the years. People know you are interested in the subject so start to share what they know too. This expands your knowledge even more. Plus, when you publish what you write online, people often leave insightful and helpful comments. (4.07) – Lorna is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. Lorna was once fired, which was a horrifying experience. She was left wondering how to pay the bills. Plus, Lorna was already having doubts that a software engineering career was for her. But, at the time, she had no other skills. So, she ended up having to take an IT related job even though she was reluctant to do so. As it turns out, she was very lucky. That job was a stepping stone to great things. It led to her speaking at conferences and becoming recognized for the code that she writes. She came really close to giving up a career that she now loves. Lorna comments that she has noticed a lot of people who are new to the industry wanting to give up. At the start, it is hard to find a company that has the resources and budget to allow you to do a really good job. It is all too easy to become disheartened and give up what is actually a great career once you gain enough experience to move on and secure a role with a good company. (6.15 – Phil asks Lorna what her best career moment has been. For Lorna, that was getting published by O’Reilly. It gave her an amazing sense of achievement. Plus, people started to listen more to her, which enabled her to help even more people. (7.29) – Would you write another book? Lorna replied that she definitely will when she can fit it in. Right now, she is working full-time, so that could be tricky. She wrote her other two books when she was a freelancer. (8.16) – Phil asks what excites Lorna about the future for the IT industry. For Lorna the fact that tech is everywhere and constantly changing is exciting. It means that she is always working on something fresh and new and learning about all kinds of industries. (9.40) – What drew you to a career in IT? For Lorna, working in IT was not the original plan. She was good at math and physics and has a degree in electronic engineering, so she never saw a future in IT for herself. While studying for her degree, she did a little bit of coding and really enjoyed the experience. So, when someone offered her a job in IT, building games, she took it. From there she was hooked. (10.40) – What is the best career advice you were given? At one stage, Lorna had an awful job. She knew that potentially she could get out of it by working as a freelancer. But, she was hesitant to take that step. So, a friend, who also worked in IT, said to her “Lorna, what’s the worst that can happen?” When she looked at things from that perspective, she realized it was actually the right move for her and she became a successful freelancer. Now, if she is finding it tough to make a career related decision, she asks herself “What’s the worst that could happen?”  This helps her to make up her mind and continue to move forward. (11.35) – If you were to start your IT career again, now, what would you do? Lorna would not change a lot. She says it is good to take a lot of different jobs to build up your experience and broaden your horizons. However, Lorna wishes she had got involved in open source at an earlier stage. Working on these projects enables you to build a big skill set and do so fast. You will learn everything from coding to project management skills as well as how to interact with and work well with others. (13.02) – Phil asks Lorna what she is currently focusing on at the moment. Lorna says for her career objectives are a really difficult thing to think about. She is still progressing by moving from one interesting project to another. It is an approach that seems to work for her. (14.14) – What is the non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? For Lorna, being able to write well and explain things in writing is an incredibly important skill. She has pretty much always worked remotely, so has needed to be able to explain things in writing and do so in an understandable way. There has rarely been someone available to physically look over her shoulder and spot the problem. So, she has to be able to explain it concisely to them in writing. (15.17) – Phil asks Lorna to share a final piece of career advice. Where ever you are or whatever you do make sure that you participate. If you attend a conference or working group, ask a question. Hang around afterward for a chat. Get involved. You do not necessarily have to give a speech or write something to be able to participate. In online communities and on blog posts share a comment. This will really help you to find your peer group, to belong and grow. BEST MOMENTS:  (3.09)   - LORNA – “You should write things down. The rewards and the echoes of that action have been amazing for me in my career.” (11.57)  - LORNA – “I had a variety of different jobs early on. And I think that's a really good grounding.” (15.30)   - LORNA - “Wherever you are, and whatever you do. My advice is to participate.” (16.29)   - LORNA – “Keep doing what you're doing and sharing what you do. Choose who you amplify and the content that you share and you will find your peer group.” CONTACT LORNA MITCHELL: Twitter: https://twitter.com/lornajane LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lornajane/ Website: https://lornajane.net  

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.

An interview with Neo Ighodaro, co-founder of Laravel Nigeria and CTO of hotels.ng Notes: Neo's Earliest drawings Laravel Nigeria Hotels.ng Building the Laravel Nigeria Community With Over 200 People Attending the First Meetup Neo speaking at Laravel Nigeria - Deploying Your Laravel Application Lagos CreativityKills Greymatter Mark Essien, founder of Hotels.ng FlashDP Kohana framework Prosper Otemuyiwa ForLoop Neo in a black hoodie Transcription sponsored by Laravel News Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to Laravel Podcast, season three. This is the second interview, episode three, where we're going to be talking to Neo Ighodaro, big man around town in Laravel Nigeria. Stay tuned. All right. Welcome back to Laravel Podcast! I've got to figure out how to number these things because technically, this is episode three because the first one was a preview, but that confused a lot of people, so welcome back to the second interview of season three of the Laravel Podcast. I have my actually relatively recent friend with me. His name's Neo, and I've been pronouncing it Ighodaro the whole time. Is that actually how to say it? How do you say your name? Say it, not me saying it. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, you're actually saying it correctly. Matt Stauffer: Could you say it, though? I want to hear you say it. Neo Ighodaro: Okay. Natively, the "g" is silent, so it's more like I-ho-da-ro, but a lot of people call it Ighodaro and I kind of feel more comfortable with Ighodaro because it sounds better, in my opinion. Matt Stauffer: So, if I tried to say it without the "g," you'd actually prefer I say it the way I just said it? Neo Ighodaro: With the "g." Matt Stauffer: Okay. I have some friends.. one of my friends whose name is Al-bear-to ... I don't even know the Spanish pronunciation. Neo Ighodaro: Alberto. Matt Stauffer: I would try to learn how to say it, right? "Al-bear-to." He's like no, no, no. Just call me Alberto (pronounced like an American) and I was like, "But that's not your name," and we had kind of this big back and forth and what he ended up saying was, "When an English-speaking person says it in an English sentence, I prefer it to be the English pronunciation, and then when a Spanish-speaking person says it in a Spanish sentence, I prefer it to be the Spanish pronunciation." I've never heard anybody say that before, because I'm always like, "I don't care. I want to pronounce your name the right way," but for me, more important than the right way is what you want, so I'm here. I'm with you. Neo Ighodaro. It's fantastic to have you on. If anybody hasn't heard about Neo before, the way that he has most primarily been known in the Laravel world is because he is one of the three organizers. I don't know ... who's the founder? Are all three of you the founders, what are you the founder and now three of the organizers? How does that work? Neo Ighodaro: I and Prosper basically are the founders, so we just got together and started it. We decided to get people on board, so Lynda was the third person. Now, we have a couple of other people who are silent organizers, but they help out every single time we have a Meetup. Matt Stauffer: Okay, and by the way, I didn't actually finish my sentence before I asked you one because I interrupt myself. The "it" that Neo and I are talking about is Laravel Nigeria, which is this kind of Meetup, but it's kind of a conference, because it's as big as all the other Laravel conferences, even though they're calling it a "Meetup," but people are traveling from five hours away. It's a really big deal, so we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. But what I told Neo beforehand was, "This is not actually about that Meetup. This is not actually about you being the CTO of a big tech company. What this really is about is knowing you as a person and what you're about," and if anybody listened to the Taylor interview I did before, we didn't talk so much about Laravel. We talked for a little bit about just kind of Taylor and where he comes from, so maybe we'll down the road there, but the tiniest little bit of context, he's one of the two founders. He's one of the three formal organizers, and there's also some silent organizers of Laravel Nigeria. If you haven't looked it up, I'll put a link to a write-up that he did in the show notes, but you're just seeing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people once every couple months come together and teach and learn. There's actually a couple of your talks that are online, so I'll make sure to link a couple of those that I think Pusher's hosting. You can hear him speak. You can see what he's organizing. He's the CTO of Hotels.ng, which is a really big tech company out of Nigeria and y'all are in Lagos, right? Ah, pronunciation. Neo Ighodaro: We're in Lagos. Matt Stauffer: More of them. I've been saying "lay-goes" like "go," but then last night, I looked it up and they said "lay-guhs," not "goes", so is that another one? Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Oh, I'm murdering these things. Neo Ighodaro: Lay-gas, yeah. Matt Stauffer: I also, several times when we were first talking, I would refer to Lagos as if it were only a city, not knowing it was both a city and a state, so it's kind of like a New York, New York thing, right? Like New York is both a city and state, Lagos is also a city and a state. Now I know these things. Neo Ighodaro: Yes. Matt Stauffer: The tiniest bit of context, and I want you to teach me a little more, because basically over the last week, I've been Wikipedia-ing all these things, is that Nigeria's the biggest economy in Africa and then Lagos is the most significant economy in Nigeria. Then Lagos city is such a significant economy that it would have been one of the biggest economies in Africa just as a city alone, and it is the twentieth largest economy of any city in the entire world. This is a significant thing because I think a lot of folks, they understand some general names, some general locations, some general cultural concepts of various African cities and states and countries, but I don't know if they have that much context, understanding that this is a huge place. Are you actually in the city, or are you in a different city in the state? Neo Ighodaro: It's kind of hard to explain, but- Matt Stauffer: I figured. Neo Ighodaro: Lagos, as a whole, like you said, is a city and a state. It's a city and a state because it's quite small geographically. It's really small, so you can't really call it a state and it's so small that you can't not call it a city, I mean, and it's so small in the sense that you want to call it a state because officially, it is a state, but I mean, it's just so small for you to call it any other thing. Matt Stauffer: Now, is it like Singapore, where if you're in the state, you're also in the city? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: I assumed that there were other cities within the state? Neo Ighodaro: No. Matt Stauffer: So, if you're in Lagos the state, you're basically in the city? Neo Ighodaro: They're just ... we like to call them local governments. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: They are like small, small, very tiny, little regions that you can probably drive like one hour across each region, so it's kind of like a big- Matt Stauffer: But all those regions are within the city? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: Within the city slash state. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so it is a little bit like Singapore in that way. When I think of big cities, I spent a couple years living in Chicago, so I think about Chicago as being a very large city, so Chicago has three million people. It has, I think, I'm trying to remember how many square ... 230 square miles and so Lagos has 16 million people and it has, I think 400 and something square miles, so we're talking many, many, many times the size of Chicago. Also, it's a city, it's a state, and it's all these kind of things, so I think just getting that kind of out of the way and understanding those things helped me a little bit of the context of why when I was like, "Oh, yeah. You're in Lagos," you're like, "Yeah, but" ... We've got to talk a little bit more than that. -So, you are in Nigeria. You are the CTO of Hotels.ng. You are doing all this kind of stuff, so let's actually get to the meat of it. First question: When did you first have access to a computer and where was it, and for what reason? Neo Ighodaro: I would say when I was about 13. Back in the day before internet was quite popular in Nigeria, it was really, really difficult to get your hands on a computer, so I think one of those cybercafes. They're not really cafes in the sense of it. It's just basically a shop where you have a bunch of computers and then you pay some amount of money to get access to those computers to use their internet. I think one of those days, I was about 13, and I got some extra money and I just went to the internet. It was mostly to chat, though. Matt Stauffer: What was the chat protocol that y'all used back then? Neo Ighodaro: I think Yahoo Messenger was very popular then and MSN- Matt Stauffer: I remember that. Neo Ighodaro: Or one of those ones. I was always on them. Matt Stauffer: Did they have computers in your schools at that point, or not until later? Neo Ighodaro: It's kind of tricky because we did have computers in the school, but it was not computers for everyone. It's privileged access at the computer. Matt Stauffer: Really? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It was horrible. Matt Stauffer: I told you beforehand that you get to tell me when I'm digging too far, but- Neo Ighodaro: No, it's fine. Matt Stauffer: What privilege gives you access? Is it a particular type of study or something else? What privileges someone to get to use the computer? Neo Ighodaro: Back then, the first thing is ... we had this computer science subject, basically, where we had to learn about computers, but they usually just write it on the board and like, "Okay, this is a CPU. This is a disk." Was it disk? Did we call it disk back then? What's the name of that thing, the square thing where you save stuff? Matt Stauffer: The hard-drive? Neo Ighodaro: No, no. The one back in the day, so you have this thing- Matt Stauffer: Oh, you mean a floppy disk? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Floppy disk, so they'll tell you, "This is the floppy disk," and we never saw any of them. We just had pictures and then- Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: Once in a while, maybe once in an entire term, they'd be like, "Let's go to the computer room," and then we go and we see them. We don't touch them. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: You're actually forbidden to touch them. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: You see them and they're like, "Oh, that's the CPU they were talking about. Oh, it looks so cool," but looking from five meters away like, "Yo. Don't touch it." Matt Stauffer: Now, why was it that you couldn't touch it? Was it because there were so few that they were precious, or was there something else going on? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. It was more like a new thing back then, so they were pretty expensive. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: And they didn't really trust kids back then, so- Matt Stauffer: Understandably. Neo Ighodaro: If you became a prefect, for instance, we have this thing where certain students, depending on your academic abilities or your leadership skills, you become a prefect, so to speak, and then you'll be able to have access to certain things that other students didn't have. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: As a prefect, I was able to have some access, limited access. Matt Stauffer: But it was still very limited, so it was really the cybercafe that gave you the space to do what you wanted to do. You started out chatting. When did you transition from chatting to thinking that you were going to be able to create something? Neo Ighodaro: I was 15. I remember very clearly the day. It's actually a kind of funny story. I was subject to some bad people in school and I wasn't really keen on going to school at that point because they were always bullying because I was very little in school. They were always bullying and at some point, I was like, "You know what? Screw this, man. I can't deal," and then I started going to cybercafes. Instead of going to classes, I'd just go to cybercafes. I mean, I'm not happy about it, but it was sort of- Matt Stauffer: It's what it is. It's your story, so ... Neo Ighodaro: One of those days, I decided to check out an internet café and that was it. I just liked going there. I felt safe there. I could literally just bury myself in whatever I was doing and not worry about anything else. Matt Stauffer: That's really cool, so you spent more and more time there, even skipping class to go there. You were chatting originally, but what was the moment or was there a project, or what kind of piqued your interest in creating something on the web? Neo Ighodaro: I don't really remember the thought process, but I remember thinking at some point ... I saw this one guy. He went to the café to, I don't know what he was doing there, but I saw him typing some random stuff and I was just like, "What is this guy doing? It doesn't seem like English." It just looked random. I walked up to him and I was like, "Hey, dude. Sorry, but what are you doing?" and he was like he's learning how to program. That was the moment I just thought, "Okay, program. What exactly is a program?" I'm not sure if Google was a thing then, but I know I was using Yahoo Search a lot, so I tried to Google and I stumbled upon the word HTML. One thing led to another and I started thinking, "Hey, how is yahoo.com actually made?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I started digging and I find out, "Oh, okay. You need something called HTML." I had no idea what it was, and I was like, "I could probably learn that instead of chatting and wasting my time"- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"I could probably learn how to make HTML." That was pretty much the thought process and one thing led to another. I just kept on going and finding out more about HTML. I literally did not know the meaning. I didn't actually care. I just wanted to learn the thing. Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating, so you learned enough that I'm sure you were making your own little local HTML things. Do you remember what the first page you made was about? Neo Ighodaro: Oh, it was a personal page, obviously. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: A site called uni.cc or something like that. It was one of these Geocities type of thing- Matt Stauffer: Sure. Neo Ighodaro: Where you just go and then they give you a sub-domain and a name and then you just kind of mash up the HTML in there. I created one of those and I remember there was this guy. I've forgotten his name, but he was a really big influence back then. There was the time of Greymatter. I don't know if you've heard of it? Matt Stauffer: I haven't. Neo Ighodaro: It was a blogging platform. It was close to what we have in WordPress, but it was called Greymatter. I think his name is Tony. He used to create all these blogs and then there were a lot of young people and they had a lot of blogs that they created. They create these blogs and then they just write random stuff in it, but I was more interested in how the blogs looked. They looked so beautiful and I was like, "Why does mine just look like a bunch of marquee running around the screen?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was forced to learn design, so I had to start digging in. I heard about Photoshop, so I picked it up. Matt Stauffer: I love that you got there because when we first met, I went over to CreativityKills. Would I be right to describe CreativityKills as essentially your freelance web development kind of company? And I don't even know freelance, but your web development consultancy that was your main thing before you started working at Hotels.ng, and you still kind of keep it running on the side? Is that a good description for it? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, pretty much. Matt Stauffer: What I noticed there ... I went to portfolio, and the moment I see ... I think it was portfolio or work or something, but what I saw instead of code or descriptions, was I saw screenshots. The moment I see that, I say, "This person's probably a designer," and the design was good too, so you're not just a programmer. Tell me how do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as a designer and a programmer? Have you trained in one more than the other, or do you think of yourself as a hack in one and really good at the other? How do you kind of approach your skillset? Neo Ighodaro: I think to really answer the question, I have to go a little back to the origins. Like I said, I learned about you have to design your sites for it to look good. I was like, "How do I get there?" and I heard of Photoshop. I started going to the cybercafes. Instead of learning how to write HTML, I was learning how to design, so it was a hassle, to be honest. It was really difficult because you had 30 minutes to learn, literally 30 minutes to learn everything you wanted. I basically started learning and a couple of people just noticed that I come regularly and some people just randomly gave me some extra time. Matt Stauffer: Oh, cool. Neo Ighodaro: I was able to pick up a couple of designs. I actually have a link to one my first ever designs. I still have- Matt Stauffer: That's going in the show notes. That is going in the show notes. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It took me about 12 hours chopped into 30 minutes- Matt Stauffer: I was going to say, 30-minute increments of 12 hours, and it's not as if you could take it home. I mean, once the 30 minutes is up- Neo Ighodaro: You're done. Matt Stauffer: Did you have a thumb drive that you were saving everything on, or how did that work? Neo Ighodaro: I had a floppy disk, so every time I go, I was like, "Does this computer support floppy disk?" If they were like, "No," I was like, "No. I'm not doing this." I actively looked for a computer with a floppy disk and I had to download Photoshop- Matt Stauffer: Every time. Neo Ighodaro: Every single time. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro: It was hectic. Matt Stauffer: That's incredible. Neo Ighodaro: Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: You taught yourself how to design, so both in terms of design and HTML, I'm assuming that ... because I know that when I started, there weren't a lot of books around teaching this. Were you learning it purely online and, if so, do you remember any of the sites you used to learn? Neo Ighodaro: I remember the site I used to learn how to make my first-ever graphic, but I don't think I really learned any of the other ones, I mean, the tool sets and everything, using any site online. I was basically just "mash, mash, mash." It's "mash, mash," and it worked, I'm like, "Oh." Matt Stauffer: View source, copy, paste, modify. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Something like that, so I was just editing. I would just pick a tool and drag it across the screen. I was like, "Try to figure out what does this do." But the first night I learned about actually making vector images was vexiles.net. I don't know if they're still around right now, but it taught me how to take a picture and turn it into a kind of vecto graphic. Matt Stauffer: Trace it with the ... what are those things called? The pen tool and everything like that? Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I think that's pretty similar to how I learned. I remember I got my first book when I was five or 10 years into it and it was such a foreign process because I was like, "Wait. I have to sit down and read 50 pages and then" ... It just didn't translate. I was like, "No. You just kind of figure it out as you go." You started programming when you were 15. I'm guessing the design was a little bit later than that. At which point did you realize this was not just something that was just a fun thing to do with your time, but it was something you were actually going to consider turning into a career? Neo Ighodaro: I think I was about 17 or 18. That was when I actually creating the skills unofficially. I had a couple of friends back then and they had these really nice names for their website. There was Aether Reality.net. They just had really, really random names and I was like, "I could come up with one," and I don't know. I can't remember exactly how, but I was thinking in the lines of, "What if you had a company that portrayed designs to die for?" I sort of just circulated around that concept until I got to the point CreativityKills. I can't remember how it clicked or when I clicked, but I just know at some point, I was like, "Creativity kills." It kind of had a negative connotation, especially culturally, but I felt like people needed to ask questions like, "Well, how does creativity kill?" It kind of was the one thing that I knew could make my brand stand out, because people became curious. Matt Stauffer: I love that. It doesn't give you all the answers just from reading it. It makes you ask questions and that's something you wanted. I mean, that clearly lines up with the story you're telling me is you literally walked over to somebody else in the café and said, "What is that jumble you're typing into your screen right now?" That's really fascinating. Did you have any people around you or any role models where you said, "Oh, I'm going to do this like that other person I know or that other person I've seen," or was it more of a just kind of, "Hey, this is a thing I can try out and see what happens"? Neo Ighodaro: For design, yes. The Tony guy, I really can't remember his name. I wonder why. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: But anyways, the Tony guy, I think I still have him on Facebook or something. He didn't know it, to be honest. I was just more of an admirer from afar type of person and I really liked how he designed and everything, so he was sort of my role model in design. But when it came to HTML and PHP and the other program language, I didn't really have anybody. It was just me. Just me and nobody else. Matt Stauffer: At some point, you went from, "What is this computer and internet thing?" to "What is this coding thing?" to "What is this design thing?" to "I know these things well enough that I could make things" to "I know these things well enough that I could convince someone else to pay me money to do it." Those are a lot of shifts to happen over the span of, I think, two years basically. There's not a lot of other people around you who are doing kind of development consultancies and design consultancies and stuff like that, so how did you figure it out? What were your early challenges? Who were your early clients? What did it look like for you to create CreativityKills and turn it into actually making income? Neo Ighodaro: I had to figure out every single thing myself. I didn't know anything about marketing. They didn't even cross my mind, to be honest. When I started, I created a website for it. I don't have the template anymore, but I was proud of it then. I'm not sure I would be now. Matt Stauffer: Right, right. Neo Ighodaro: I had this lady. She wanted to create a website for her NGO and she met me. She heard of me from my friend, so my friend told her, "Oh, I have this guy. He's probably be cheap and he does websites." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: She was like, "Okay. Let me meet him," and I talked to her. She told me, "This is what I want. This is what I want," and I was like, "Okay, cool." Back then, I only knew HTML to be honest. I didn't know PHP and so I was like, "How do I swing this?" I then went to a cybercafe again and I started Googling, no, I was Yahooing, basically- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Because I don't think I was using Google then. I was trying to figure out, "How do I make a website as dynamic?" and I think that's where I stumbled upon PHP. Somebody was talking about PHP and CGI scripts and all the stuff and I was like, "This seems like something to go into." Then I had about two months, so I gave a deadline of two months to deliver the project, so I had roughly about a month to learn PHP. PHP just jumped at me. I was like, "Let me just go with this one." I heard of ESB. I heard of a lot of ones, but PHP just seemed welcoming. I mean, that's the allure of the language, anyways. I was like, "I'm going to do this," and I jumped on it. The learning process was difficult. I didn't pick it up in one month. I actually just knew a bit, a few things, because of 30 minutes increments, 30 minute, 30 minute. At some point, I stumbled upon Greymatter and WordPress and then I was like, "Okay, so this kind of makes you build a website easily. I could do this. I mean, it doesn't look so complicated." I had to figure out how to host websites, so I hosted her website. I paid for the domains and everything and then in about two months, I came and said, "Hey, look at your website," and she paid me. I was so happy, like, "This is my first income. I did it alone." It was a happy moment for me, but from then on, I started feeling like, "What if I could take that one client and kind of expand my reach, try to reach other people?" I mean, one person old one person, so obviously, there's some sort of system to it. I started digging about SEO and I started digging into marketing and that's pretty much ... one thing led to another, and most of the things I learned, I had to learn because when you work to a certain degree, you hit a bump. Then you're like, "What to do next?" and then you get introduced to certain concepts, and then you learn about that. Then you hit another bump, and, then, "What do I do next?" That was pretty much my learning phase. I just kept on hitting bumps. Initially, it was the HTML. Then I was like, "The HTML has to look nice," so I had to go to CSS. "Now the visual aspects have to look nice," so I went to Photoshop, then I went back to HTML. I realized that you can't really do much with HTML. You need some dynamics. I went to JavaScript and it was really, really difficult, so I left it. I heard of PHP. I went to PHP and I realized I have to go back to JavaScript. I went back to JavaScript and then to Jaggery. It was just- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: One thing leading to the other. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. You do what you can until you hit a pain point and then you figure out the simplest possible thing to fix that pain point and then move on to the next pain point. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. You were writing procedural PHP back then. This is pretty early. I'm guessing it was right past when WordPress was created. You got WordPress. You got into Greymatter. Did you spend just a couple years there, basically building HTML and CSS websites with some Photoshop design and some WordPress and some Greymatter? Is that kind of your bread and butter for a while before you made shifts over to things like Laravel? I mean, Laravel, obviously came out much later than that, but did you kind of sit in that space, or were there other kind of steps in your journey between then and Laravel? Neo Ighodaro: No. I sat there for a while. I really didn't think of structure or anything. I was there for a long time, probably a year or three years, between that range. I remember the first time I got introduced to CodeIgniter. I learned about CodeIgniter and I didn't really understand what MVC was. In my mind, I just wanted to write spaghetti code and be done with it, but I started seeing the benefits I made of separating concerns and I felt like it could help eventually. I mean, all those things I've created, plus it's a framework. It gives you a jumpstart and that was really what sold me. I didn't have to write my skill connect to this or my skill connect to that, I just put my details and I'm done. I got into CodeIgniter. After a while, I started ... my learning of PHP started evolving from spaghetti code to "How do we structure an application?" Then I started, and this is very interesting, actually. Because I didn't have a laptop or a PC. Laptops were a stretch. I didn't have a PC then. I had to do this thing. I decided to write a framework of my own, but I had just 30 minutes in a cybercafe, roughly. Matt Stauffer: Is this still a floppy disk that you're using, or is this what you're about to tell me? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. A floppy disk, so what I did was I bought a diary and I literally wrote my code in ink- Matt Stauffer: No. Neo Ighodaro: On the diary. Matt Stauffer: No. Now why couldn't you just save it as HTML files and PHP files down in your floppy disk? Neo Ighodaro: Let me explain. I had a couple of minutes, where if I'm going to ... let's just say, maximum, an hour and thirty minutes at the cybercafe- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That's when I have access, but I don't want to go there and start thinking of what to do. Matt Stauffer: Oh. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly, so my solution to- Matt Stauffer: You're writing in the diary when you're not at the cybercafe as your brain is roiling over. Oh my goodness. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. I mean, I've done architectural diagrams in a journal and I've done the tiniest little bit of code, but writing a framework that way? No way. So, you basically show up, and the first thing you'd do is basically transcribe all your diary notes down into code and then see- Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer:"Hey, did it work?" Wow. Neo Ighodaro:"Did it work?" "No." "Oh, bugs, bugs, bugs. Fix, fix, fix, fix, fix. Oh drat. I forgot this." Matt Stauffer: Wow. Fascinating. Neo Ighodaro:"Yeah. I got to go home. Just log out. Go back home." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: And write, write, write, write, write, write. Matt Stauffer: And write more in your diary. Neo Ighodaro: There was this thing. Nigeria's a very cultural state and then there was this day my mom stumbled upon the diary. She thought I was writing a lot of demonic stuff. She was like, "Oh my God." Matt Stauffer: Oh, no. Neo Ighodaro:"What is all this?" She literally thought I was possessed. Matt Stauffer: It's funny because I was going to ask about your family, so this is perfect. What did your family think about this whole thing? You're skipping class. I mean, I don't know if they knew you were skipping class, but you're doing these computer things. You're in the cybercafes all the time. Was that something that you got a lot of support for, you got a lot of criticism for, or were they kind of ambivalent, they weren't sure how to feel? Neo Ighodaro: A lot of criticism. An African family is a family that places a lot of value on education, so me skipping school then was horrible. I was literally the black sheep of the family just instantly. The day they find out, they were so disappointed. "How could you do this? Blah blah blah," and I was just staring, like, "Sorry." Then they were like, "We're really, really disappointed," and everything. Then the day they saw the writings on the book was my mom, she freaked out. She thought I was on some demonic tick and she was like she's going to call an entire family meeting, so the entire family gathered and they were like, "What is this you're writing?" Matt Stauffer: Oh, no. Neo Ighodaro: And I was not good enough to explain it, so I was just like, "It's code." "It's code for what?" And I was like- Matt Stauffer: Right, right. Yeah. Code as if ... "It makes computers work." Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, so I couldn't really explain it and they were like, "We don't want to ever see you doing this again," and I was like- Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro:"Yeah, sure. Right." But I knew, deep down, I wasn't going to stop. Matt Stauffer: How long did it take for you- Neo Ighodaro: I think that was one of the few things that- Matt Stauffer: Oh no. Go ahead, go ahead. Neo Ighodaro: Really made me continue to really fight for it, just because I felt like it made me a rebel. Matt Stauffer: I love it. How long do you think it took before they really kind of understood, or do they now? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, they do. It took a long time, until I was in the university, actually, and they started seeing some dividends like it was paying off. They were like, "Okay. This dude hasn't called us to ask for pocket money or anything, actually." Matt Stauffer: Right, right. Neo Ighodaro: They were like, "He probably is doing something right," and then they were like, "Okay, so what is this thing exactly?" Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: They were willing to come to the table and ask me questions like, "What does it do? How does it work?" Matt Stauffer: Very cool. Neo Ighodaro: Then there's this thing in Nigeria, so there are internet fraud stars a lot. They scam people of money and blah blah blah, but the idea is back in the day, when they see you, any young person in front of a computer, that is the instant thing they think, that you're a fraudulent person, that you're being ... they called it a "yahoo yahoo boy." Matt Stauffer: They call it ... can you say it again? It didn't come through on Skype. Neo Ighodaro: Yahoo yahoo. Like "yahoo" twice. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: So they call you a yahoo yahoo boy. They were really concerned that that's what I was doing. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: They really wanted to know because it was illegal and they didn't want any of the stuff and I was like, "No. I promise it's not actually that. It's literally the opposite," and they sort of just went with it. I don't think they really believed. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: They just had faith, so I guess they started to come around from there. Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating and that transitions to the university. At some point, you were doing CodeIgniter, and I assume that was before university. At what point did you decide to go to university, or was this all happening at the same time? Neo Ighodaro: Pretty much at the same time. After they found out that I'd been skipping school, I had to change schools, so I had to go to another one somewhere closer that it could monitor my movements and- Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: It didn't really stop me, actually. I did what I wanted to do anyways. The good part was I was sort of book smart to a point- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was able to ace my exams and everything. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That was the good part, so I didn't really need to go to school, because I knew if they found out that I didn't do a couple of tests, they would probably come and check the attendance sheet and everything. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I made sure I aced most of my tests, most of my exams, but on the low-low, I was still trying to figure out what this entire programming thing was about. Matt Stauffer: All right, so you went off to ... what did you actually study in university? Was it programming, or was it engineering? What was the actual formal title of it? Neo Ighodaro: Mathematics and economics. Matt Stauffer: Is that something you use in your daily life right now? Neo Ighodaro: Nope. Nope. Matt Stauffer: All right. Well- Neo Ighodaro: Very big no. Matt Stauffer: Well, yeah. I mean, I studied in English education when I was in school. I mean, technically, I don't use it, although the experiences I had there still inform me today. All right, so you went to university. You graduated from university. You got that degree. At what point did you transition from being Neo of CreativityKills who does kind of freelance contracting stuff to Neo who is, I mean, you're doing stuff out in the community. We'll talk about that in a bit. You're working at Hotels.ng. Now, I did see you had a blog post, I think it was in maybe 2016, so was this a pretty recent transition for you? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: What was that like? Neo Ighodaro: Let me step back a little. I'll tell you another interesting story. Ever before I owned my first laptop, how I got it was there was this guy, Kolade, he had a friend who wanted a programmer on one of their projects and then it was like, "Neo, you need to get on this," and I was like, "You know I don't have a laptop." He was like, "Okay, you know what? I'll tell them. They'll get you a laptop and then we can go from there." I was like, "How do I pay for it?" They were like, "No, don't worry." I was like, "Okay, cool." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was so excited, but I just wanted to play it cool. Be cool, be cool, be cool. Then they brought the laptop and it was ugly. I appreciate it. Matt Stauffer: Right, right, right. Neo Ighodaro: I mean, I still have it. Matt Stauffer: It's a laptop. Nice. Neo Ighodaro: I appreciate it, but it was horrible, meaning if you unplugged the laptop, it would go off. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: The battery was finished. It was literally horrible. Matt Stauffer: It was like a big gray box kind of thing? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, and the problem with that was the situation of power in the country. You could literally go for an entire 24 hours without power at all. The internet was so expensive, but, I mean, somehow, I was able to manage. I had to go to school a couple of times. There's this hub where you could plug your stuff in. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: I'd go there and plug. I remember some of those people always laughing at the laptop, like, "What is that?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "Just ignore them. Just ignore them and do what you need to do." Fast forwarding, I had a sort of big break, right? It was during the period where BlackBerry was very popular in Nigeria, so I created this website with PHP. I think that's actually the first product I've ever created for myself. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: It was called FlashDp. What it did was it used ImageMagick to create a GIF and then you were able to use that GIF as a display picture on your BBM, BlackBerry Messenger. I did it because ... back in the day, because I wasn't too rich. Let me rephrase that. I was poor, so I had to find a way to make money at least. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I found out people really like these GIFs and I used to create them on Photoshop a lot and then I thought about it, like, "There has to be a way to do this in PHP or some language." I was like, "Let me try." I sat down that day and I used Kohana. I don't know if you know it? Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Neo Ighodaro: Kohana framework? So, I used it and I came up with FlashDp and I gave a friend ... I was hosting it on Pagoda Box, so I gave a friend, like, "Hey, help me try this stuff. See if it works," and I went to bed. The next morning, the server had crashed. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "What is happening? What happened?" Then I went to analytics and I check. "Wow. A lot of people used it," and because it was very resource-intensive, I mean, it was ImageMagick trying to- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Generate images over and over again, so I was like, "Let me try and reboot the server." I didn't really know about servers then, but it was a click and reboot thing. I decided to create another version two. I decided, "Let me just give everybody, make people use it." Right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I mean, it doesn't hurt. Then I gave people and I just put AdSense on it, and that was literally one of the best decisions I've made ever, because in the space of ... so I created it 2013 and in the space of about a year or two, I made about $37,000. Matt Stauffer: What? What? Just from AdSense? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. And in Nigeria, that's huge. Yes. In Nigeria, that's huge. That was huge money, so I was able to get my first MacBook. I was able to get a nice Mac and literally that point was the turning point, because I had all the tools I needed. I didn't need to write in a diary anymore. Matt Stauffer: Right, right, right. Neo Ighodaro: I could practice it without need for power for a long time at least. I literally had everything I needed to actually become better and I felt so empowered. That was around the period when I was in school, so I had a lot of time to myself. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: A lot of time to learn, a lot of time to actually go back, and that's when I started redesigning CreativityKills again. I went back to the drawing board and I was like, "How do we appeal to people?" I spent about eight months creating that site and I released it. I think it was on adwords.com for an honorable mention or something like that. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Neo Ighodaro: I was really proud of myself. I came out and I did it. It was crazy for me, but creating FlashDp itself was the turning point. That was the landmark in everything. Matt Stauffer: That's incredible. I feel like I could dig into just this part of your story for another hour. I'm trying to keep this short. I'm going to move on, but that is fascinating. You said that was 2013, so at that point, you had gone from CodeIgnitor, you had moved over to Kohana. Let's move into modern Neo. Let's move in to Laravel. Let's move into the Laravel Nigeria Meetup. Let's move into Hotels.ng. When did you transition from Kohana to Laravel and what made you make that transition? Neo Ighodaro: FlashDp made me make the decision. It was around this period where people were arguing about whether to use static methods or not, and I started feeling bad about Kohana because it had a lot of static methods. I was like, "Is there something out there that's better?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I mean, obviously there might be, so I started digging and I found out about I think was it FuelPHP? I think Slim. I don't know if Slim was really around then, but I know I saw a bunch of them and I heard of Laravel and I was like, "I like the name." It has a ring to it. That was literally the only reason why I jumped on it. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Wow. Neo Ighodaro: I just liked the name. It was like, "I could try this," but I think it was around version four, around that period or something like that. I was like, "How does this work? I mean, it's usually the usual MVC stuff." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "This seems cool," and I realized that every single thing I did was easy. You want to do this? Easy. You want to do that? Matt Stauffer: It just works. Neo Ighodaro: Easy. Yeah. I was hooked. I was like, "I'm sold." It was hard for me leaving Kohana, because I had built a lot of packages back then. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I built a Honey Pot module or Coconut. I forgot on what they called them, but it was a package for Kohana then, so I was kind of tied to the community, but I felt if it's better with Laravel, I could just try it. That was my switch. I created version two of FlashDp using Laravel 4. I just basically kept on digging into Laravel and digging and digging and digging. I also picked up Objective C during that period. Matt Stauffer: All right. Neo Ighodaro: I got an iPhone and I learned to jail break in. I learned you could create awesome stuff using a language called Objective C, so I pretty much dived into it and started learning Objective C, creating jail break tweaks, and all that stuff. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. Neo Ighodaro: Now, my transition into being Neo ... I had this thing where I said I was never going to work- Matt Stauffer: For someone else? Neo Ighodaro: For another company. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: But I realized that if I was to run any successful business, you need experience. It goes without ... you just need it. I was like, "I need to pick the right company." You just don't jump into it, right? Matt Stauffer: Yep. Neo Ighodaro: From, I think, 2015, I started scoping the Nigerian tech scene. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"Who would I want to work for?" I was nobody. I wasn't really known. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: But I knew I was good, so I started digging and digging and I found nothing, to be honest. I found nothing that I felt I wanted to work for until I think 2016. I was still in Benin. I schooled outside Lagos, by the way. I was still in Benin and I went to a school called University of Benin. That's UNIBEN. Then I sort of heard of Hotels.ng and I didn't really think much of it. I hadn't heard much about it, so I was like, "Meh." Then I had a friend called Lynda. So, cool story, she was the friend of somebody I knew back in the day, so my friend had been telling me, "Okay, Lynda, she's really good. She's really good." I was like, "Who is this Lynda? Who is she?" I went online and I researched and I heard she was the head of product at Hotels.ng and so I just pretty much said, "Hi. Oh hey, how you doing?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Then we got to talking a little and then we kind of just hit it off pretty much. We were just talking and talking. Then I think I told her that I'm looking for a gig or something. I can't really remember the backstory, but I remember receiving an email. I came to Lagos because my mom had an accident. Matt Stauffer: I'm sorry. Neo Ighodaro: A very, almost mortal one. She was in a sickbed for a long time, so I was really sad. I came down to Lagos and went to see her in the hospital. It was a very bad, very depressing moment in my life, but, I mean, coming back gave me some sort of perspective on life, like, "Things don't last forever. You need to use whatever you have as quickly as you can," so I think I sent an application. I'm not really sure if I applied or not, but I remember receiving an email from Mark Essien, he's the CEO, and he was like, "Hey. I heard about you from Lynda. Can you come to the office for an interview?" My initial reaction was, "No," but I thought about it. Matt Stauffer: Even though you had sent something in to them, right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Then I thought about it. I was like, "You know what? It doesn't hurt. Let me just go." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That was literally my first interview ever. Ever. Matt Stauffer: Ever, anywhere? Neo Ighodaro: I was about 20-something then. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: Twenty six-ish? And I was like, "Let me just go." I went and- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I remember him sitting in the office with three devs. Lynda wasn't around. I think she was on leave then. It was like, "What are these? What are these?" and it was calling computer science terms. I really didn't know any of them and I was like- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"If this interview's to go like this, I'll literally fail because I don't know any of these terms. Give me a laptop." Matt Stauffer: Do you say that out loud? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, I did. Totally. I didn't know any of these terms. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"Just give me a laptop and I will show you what I can do." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Then he looked at me for a minute or so and then it was like, "Okay." Then he left and then sort of, I just felt like I'd already gotten the job. Then he left me with the devs and they kept on asking me different questions, like, "This, that, that," and then one of them was like, "I think I've seen your CreativityKills somewhere." I was like, "Ha, sold." Matt Stauffer: Brilliant. Neo Ighodaro: Then he was like, "Yeah. Can you show us stuff you've done?" Then I brought in my laptop and then I showed him ... I had this music site I created using Angular and PHP backed in on Laravel. I showed him, and the first thing he was like was, "Do you design your code?" Because it was so cleanly written. It was during a period where Jeffrey was always talking about, “small controller, thin controllers, this, that. Best practices, SOLID. This, that," and he literally asked me, "Do you design it? Do you sit down and format your code?" I was like, "No, not really. Maybe I have OCD or not. I don't know." But he was really impressed at the structure of the code and I was like, "Wow. He's never seen anybody designing this, like your code. You just write code. It makes no difference to the compiler, you know?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "I like to see my code as art. If I feel good about it, I feel happy, but I just don't want to jumble everything. He was like, "Cool." I think that was the day I got the job. I hadn't even gotten home and I got another email saying, "You're hired." He was like, "Can you start tomorrow?" and I was like, "Okay." Matt Stauffer: All right. Neo Ighodaro: It was a big leap. That's right. I literally- Matt Stauffer: You were hired as a programmer upfront, right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, as a programmer. I hadn't even settled with the fact that just got my first interview. I already had my first job. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I decided to go in and what really caught me was the culture. I've always had this culture, this ideology of what I want CreativityKills to look like and I literally saw everything right there. It was there, and that was what sold me. Everybody seemed so compact. It was a very good mixture of fun and work and that was literally what made me stay. Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. And Mark's very young too, right? It's not as if you're- Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, he is. Matt Stauffer: Joining this kind of giant, pre-existing thing. It was other people with a kind of same young Nigerian "figuring this out as we go" kind of mindset. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. All right, again, I want to ask you an hour of questions about Hotels.ng, but because we're getting close on time, what I want to do is to talk about a few things real quick. First of all, we're going to talk about the Lagos tech scene, because you mentioned about how you looked around there, and it obviously exists, but I would guess that when you first started, there really wasn't much of a tech scene. I want to hear your thoughts on that. I want to hear your thoughts about the Meetup, and then the last thing, I want to hear about hoodies. Let's start with the Lagos tech scene. When you first started, you said there weren't a lot of people around you that you could look at. There weren't people who you were saying, "That is this person in my town who I want to be like. I identify with that person and I want to be like them," so do you have any thoughts? Did you watch transition happen where all of a sudden, there were other Laravel developers around you and other tech companies? Do you have anything to share with us about what that growth process looked like? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. When I started, either there was nobody, but they were there, but social media- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Wasn't as prevalent as it is now, so I didn't really notice or see anybody. But the first person I did notice was Prosper. I just knew he was making a lot of noise. He's very, very energetic. He can shout, so he's an energetic person, and I kind of noticed him. I was like, "Who is this guy?" He was always saying, "Community, community." What is the community? What is it, exactly? Matt Stauffer: Right. Right. Neo Ighodaro: There is no community. I'm not seeing anything. He just kept on going and I was like, "Maybe there is a community after all," and so getting to Hotels.ng kind of gave me a lot of ... because Hotels.ng is kind of a big scene when it comes to tech. We like to support tech a lot, and it kind of gave me ... it's almost like I swallowed something and now my eyes were opened, and I sort of saw that there was potential. There were a lot of people, but there was just no real leadership. People were not just organized, but the people were there. It's just like Lego blocks. They were there, but nobody could put them together. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: That was literally how I noticed, and I realized that what Prosper was trying to do was to get people to come together. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. Neo Ighodaro: And create that actual community that he was shouting about. That was when I realized that it's possible for us to create something that would kind of unite every single hungry developer, for any developer that's been hungry for knowledge for a while, we can unite them and people could come out and give speeches. Then we did a lot of research on Meetups and conferences. From there on, it has been up, up. I've just been noticing that. People have just been waiting, literally, for someone to start, and once there was that spark, it just happened so quickly. Everybody was, "Meet up here. Meet up here. Meet up here." Right now, as I speak, they're having a G2G Summit and a bunch of others. Next week, I have about ... the entire week is literally booked up. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: I have a talk in Android Nigeria and there are a lot of Meetups coming up everywhere. Matt Stauffer: So, this is all pretty recent? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. I would say about three years, two years. Matt Stauffer: Because I mean, I follow you on Twitter and I see you posting stuff about a Meetup or a conference, it feels like every week, you're at a different place meeting new people. So this is all just a couple years old, then? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: Did I hear you right in saying it's not that that tech scene wasn't there, but it was very kind of individualized, like people were really kind of in their own world? A lot of people probably have a pretty similar story to yours, where people are figuring it out on their own and just recently there was ... Prosper helped. You helped, and probably other folks helped realizing there's a lot of potential if we bring all these people together in one, and all of a sudden, they're exploding. So, I'm seeing you nodding, but I asked you a question. Is that a safe way to say it? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. That's literally how it happened. Matt Stauffer: What do you think the thing that kicked that ... could you point to a single Meetup or a single person or a single event, or were there a lot of them kind of all starting up at the same time? Neo Ighodaro: I might be wrong, but I would point at ForLoop. There's this Meetup called ForLoop. It was started by Ridwan. I think he was one of the first people that started the entire Meetup thing. I might be wrong again, but it was the one I notice- Matt Stauffer: Sure, but from your perspective. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It was the one I noticed first and it kind of had the ideologies that most Meetup outside the countries have, like you just get a bunch of coders to come to the table and just talk about new tech. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That was literally my first Meetup, so I was like, "You know what? I want to speak at ForLoop." That was literally my first ever talk, so I spoke on Docker and I was like- Matt Stauffer: Cool. Neo Ighodaro:"Let's see how this goes," and it was really successful. I mean, we're having not as much numbers as we have now, because it was just starting out, but that was the first Meetup I've heard of from my own perspective, so I think that was the turning point for everything. I will literally say ForLoop. Matt Stauffer: Do you remember, when you first spoke at ForLoop, when that was and how many people there were there at that point? Neo Ighodaro: I'm not too sure about when, but I know the first one I attended, because we hosted it in my office. We used to host Meetups at the Hotels.ng. I think there were about 80, between 50 to 80 people. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: To us, that was big numbers. We really thought we- Matt Stauffer: The Meetups in my local town don't get that many people most of the time and they've been going for years. I mean, and you've noticed people are getting excited about Laravel Nigeria. I mean, part of it is because you never heard of it at all, and then all of a sudden, you've got 400 people and you're running out of space for people to sit. The rapid success that you've seen ... you say you don't remember, but it was at your office, so it had to have been within the last year probably, right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, definitely. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so this is very, very, very recently. I mean, you went from attending ForLoop the first time with 50 to 80 people. You went from speaking at ForLoop for the first time. You went to helping kind of Prosper and Lynda and others create Laravel Nigeria. For it not existing at all, to all of sudden having hundreds and hundreds of people and running out of space and we're all talking about the span of basically the last 12 months or less. This is a pretty incredible growth process and that's why people, they're saying, "Wait a minute. Where did this all come from?" And that's why I asked the question about the tech scene. It didn't come out of nowhere, but the organization that gave the space for it to be seen and to for it to be brought together seems to really happen quickly, but what it did was it touched on something that's been there for a long time. Right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: It's individuals. It's an entrepreneurial spirit. It's the desire to do all these things and the motivation to do it even when you only have 30 minutes at a time, even when you've got rolling power black and stuff like that. There's something. There's a reason where a lot of people keep saying, "Whoa. Keep your eye on Nigeria," so that's ... I mean, again, I could talk a whole hour about that, but I'm trying to keep everything short here. All right, so we talked about the Lagos tech scene a little bit. We talked about the Meetup a little bit. I do want to hear you give a pitch, where if somebody has never heard of Laravel Nigeria, give me a pitch about what it is and I asked you a lot of questions when we first talked about well, where people are coming from and what are your timelines and what are your goals, and all this kind of stuff. So, tell me a little bit about the Meetup. Tell me a little about where it is right now. When's the next one going to be? What are the things you're excited about? What are the things you're nervous about? What are the difficult and exciting parts about doing it? Neo Ighodaro: I remember when I thought of Laravel Nigeria initially, it was around December 2016, and I talked to Prosper. That was one of our first few conversations, and I was like, "What would it be like if we had Laravel in Nigeria?" I initially called it, I can't remember the name, but I called it something different. It was like, "You know what? That seems like a good idea. Why don't we do it?" I had zero knowledge on Meetups, like zero. I literally didn't know where to start, and they were like, "Okay." Then we kind of just didn't do it, so January passed. February passed. March, I can't remember when we did the first one, but all of a sudden, I just woke up one morning. I was like, "Let's just do it," and then I called him. I met him at a café, Café Neo, funny enough, so there's a café in Nigeria called Café Neo. Matt Stauffer: Love it. Neo Ighodaro: I met him there and I was like, "Guy, we should do this thing, but I want to speak in pidgin." Pidgin is a weird form of English that we speak in Nigeria here. Matt Stauffer: Really? I had no idea. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It's called pidgin English. So, I'm like, "Guy, we could do this thing now." Literally saying, "Guy, let's do this stuff." Then he was like, "Okay. How do we start?" Then I was like, "We should create a Meetup page first." He was like, "Okay," so I tried doing my card and it didn't work, so he did. His card worked, and he created a Meetup page. I created a Twitter page. I started working on the website. Generally, I just noticed people were joining the Meetup page and we hadn't really started talking about it. We just put a couple of things there and say, "We might be hosting a Laravel Nigeria Meetup." Might. That was the word, might. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Then people were like, "Oh, this is great. This is great. This is great. This is great." The Meetup page was just going higher and I was like, "What is happening?" Then that kind of put pressure on me to actually do the Meetup. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Because I was kind of nervous that it would fail. I remember telling some of my colleagues at work that, "I don't know if I can actually do this. I mean, it's huge." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"It's a huge thing. I don't have the money to sponsor it, but how would I do it?" Then someone was like, "Just ask for help," and I was like, "That kind of makes sense." The strategy I did was I went to the Laravel source code itself. I was like, "Okay. What companies are generally interested in Laravel?" I mean, that would be the companies that are more likely to support, right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I looked and I saw Pusher. I saw Nexmo and a couple of others. I was like, "Okay. Pusher, Pusher." Then I spoke to ... I think around that period, I just started guest-writing for them, so I messaged someone in their team and she was like, "That sounds great." I was like, "Cool." I didn't really believe it. Of course, she was like, "Yeah, sure." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Back then, we had about a hundred people who RSVPed and I was feeling like it wasn't enough, but she was really, really, like, "Oh my God. A hundred?" I was like, "Yeah." Then she was like, "That's huge. We will support." I mean, that's the journey. We started getting people to support the entire thing. We couldn't use Hotels.ng space because 100 people, it wouldn't fit, so we talked to Andela, which is a company that outsources developers to bigger companies and I think Facebook invested in them recently. I talked to them and they were like, "Yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, we're all for the community. Yay," and I was like, "cool." So, we had that. If I was to tell someone about Laravel Nigeria, I would literally say from my own perspective, it's the belief that you can bring something out of nothing, the belief that you don't have to know about it to be able to do it. You just need to take the first step. Nobody's perfect at anything, and Laravel Nigeria was a shot in the dark, granted, but it was a lot of hard work and that shot paid off. I mean, it might have not paid off, but it did. I wouldn't have known if I didn't try, yeah? Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Neo Ighodaro: What we try to do now is tell people, "Hey, talk to everybody. Try and get people in remote communities, because right now Lagos seems like the place where a lot of things are happening." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"We want people from other states. Mobilize your people. Try and get people to attend Meetups." In the past one month or two months, I've attended Meetups in places where I didn't expect people to come. I'm like, "Wow. Okay. Crazy." This is viewed as a state where you're like ... I didn't expect so many people to come out. People were out, and I was like, "It's happening." Laravel Nigeria is literally the belief that there are a lot of people out there. There are a lot of people who want it to happen. There are a lot of people who are hungry for this knowledge, a lot of people who already know, but just need a platform to come out and start speaking. This has given them a lot of them hope and a lot of that platform they need to really come out and be leaders, because that's what we want to create, a lot of leaders that can lead the new generation of developers, basically. Matt Stauffer: I love it. I've said a thousand times I could talk for another hour. I can't, but I'm going to wrap it up with just three

Welcome back to the show, as you all know I love how tech works best when it brings people together and I also love how it vastly improves on the old way of doing things. Awhile ago now I discovered a company called Nexmo were disrupting consumer experience by enabling brands to engage consumers through chat applications. Their API Connects Brands, Chat Applications, and Service Platforms to Reinvent Customer Engagement Nexmo was acquired by Vonage in May 2016. But Nexmo makes it easy for you to build the personalized, immediate, and intuitive communication experiences that consumers expect due to those rising expectation levels.

One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

Http://education.github.com One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

Http://somethingnew.org.uk One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

Http://weareopen.coop One of a few conversations I captured at Over The Air 2016. More content here... https://storify.com/Nexmo/nexmo-documentally-capture-over

Liz Horowitz, Host and Creator of the MADWomen Podcast, speaks with Charlotte Fors, Vice President of Sales at Nexmo and Co-Founder of Women in Wireless. Charlotte will share with us why bravery and risk-taking is important, why uplifting other women is critical for us all, and how her decision to leave a company actually lead to her being more empowered in her career and life. Is there a story we must hear? Tell us why. Nominate her today. Podcast@womeninwireless.org

In this episode of Community Pulse we were joined by Nathen Harvey (VP of Community Development, Chef) and Phil Leggetter (Head of Developer Relations, Nexmo) to talk about learning to scale a community role.

In this episode of Community Pulse we were joined by Nathen Harvey (VP of Community Development, Chef) and Phil Leggetter (Head of Developer Relations, Nexmo) to talk about learning to scale a community role.

In the 11th podcast, we meet Tony Jamous from nexmo who innovates in cloud communication & phone verification areas & shares his entrepreneurial advice.