Last week, Stripe announced it had purchased the Nigerian startup, Paystack for an estimated 200 million dollars. Founded in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, Paystack is a platform designed to deliver a safe, convenient, and modern payment experience for customers and merchants in Africa. Background The idea for Paystack was born when Akinlade built a simple way of integrating a card transaction into a website. It was the simplicity of how it worked that propelled him and Olubi to think about developing it into a platform for others.
In honor of October being Black History Month in the UK, we highlight ten influential Black British women who code and break down barriers. For more Black British Tech stories, see our BHM feature on UK founders from 2017. Charlene Hunter – Lead Software Engineer at Made Tech, Founder Coding Black Females Charlene is the founder of Coding Black Females one of the largest platforms for black female coders in the UK. Charlene wrote her first line of code at the age of 10 and went on to earn a
Quincy was at a crossroads. She had just achieved tenure, the golden crown of the ivory tower. Was she going to walk away from the halls of academia to forge a new path in the government and non-profit sectors? It would require a significant amount of self-reflection, self-awareness, self-care, and guidance from the sisterhood. Fortunately, these assets have been plentiful in Quincy’s sphere. Quincy had always set a high bar for herself. She just hadn’t been aware of it until she graduated from high school and realized that not everyone
During a short business trip to Nigeria in 2015, Ike Okosa witnessed firsthand the nascent but bubbling tech ecosystem in the country. At the time, Okosa was running Swoop Media, a UK-based company that provided IT and digital marketing solutions to UK private schools. The UK-born entrepreneur, who was visiting for the first time in over a decade, admits he was unaware that the country had a tech ecosystem. However, attending the 2015 edition of Social Media Week in Lagos changed his notion, and he formed vital connections there that proved helpful in
Cummins is hiring on pocitjobs.com “Rarely is survival a learning tool,” says Dwendolyn “Dwen” Williams, a 24-year veteran in Information Systems. She’s currently working at Cummins, a Fortune 500 company that manufactures diesel and natural gas engines for Volvo and Ford. With her extensive career, Dwen mentors young hires of color about survival and the skills required to succeed in the tech industry. There’s been a rapid change in technology, which went from using awkwardly-shaped floppy disks to the serverless cloud storage during her career. But Black people and other
This post was initially published by Abstract! It highlights the career achievements and thoughts of Senior Front End Engineer Andrew McCloud. What personal passions bring you to Abstract? Design communities! I’ve been installing/building software for managing communities of designers since I was in high school. Shoutout phpBB, celerondude, Pixel2Life! In 2010, I attempted to create something similar to Abstract called Pixelcloud, inspired by Facebook’s internal design collaboration tool. What’s one childhood lesson that you still carry with you to this day? I can usually avoid the pain of finding out something on my
From the day I realized I was destined to be a coder, I knew I was going to be an underrepresented group in more ways than one. It started to hit me in the few classes I took throughout grade school, but I didn’t realize how much of a minority I was until college. I’m lucky that for the most part, I have been able to fit in with my other software engineering peers. But there is still a lot that I have realized about being the only woman of
When Justina Sanchez first began working at TÜV SÜD 15 years ago, her role had absolutely nothing to do with engineering. She began her career as an entry-level administrative assistant, with no exposure to what an engineering path would look like. During her few years at TÜV SÜD, however, Justina found herself surrounded by engineers constantly testing and certifying products before they shipped to ensure consumer safety. Intrigued by the constant experimentation process going on around her, she felt drawn to learn more. “[The engineering team] would get to do
