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the newsletter  

Highlighting the achievements of female and non-binary leaders in enterprise and deep tech

Justine and Brittany here, coming at you with the january edition.

the highlights

Enterprise technology reads 

Deep technology breakthroughs

Women making news 

the insights: future of work

Each month we hold a curated event on a topic, then distribute relevant resources and an interview with a prominent leader in the space more broadly through the newsletter. Suggestions for future topics? We’d love to hear them! Want the invite to our next curated event? Hit the reply button 👇

Future of Work is a trend that got a lot of buzz in 2020, in no small part due to the dramatic increase in the number of people working remotely (read: everyone) brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with remote work, our discussion at the table session centered around two additional key themes—automation / augmentation and contractors & hourly workers

Check out the key takeaways here.

the interview
Christina Sass, Co-Founder of Andela

This month, we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to interview Christina Sass

Christina Sass is the Co-Founder and former President of Andela, a company that recruits the most talented software engineers on the African continent and pairs them with global tech companies as full-time, distributed team members. Since its founding in 2014, Andela has grown to more than 1,000 employees and has raised more than $180M in venture capital funding.

Prior to co-founding Andela, Christina directed the Program Department of the Clinton Global Initiative and advised the President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a $20B global foundation working to advance education and financial inclusion for youth in Africa.

Christina serves on the Advisory Council of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and on the board of the non-profit Global Give Back Circle. She is also a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.


Select excerpts below, read the full interview here.

  • What inspired you to start Andela?

    [One] source of inspiration was seeing so many young people who were incredibly hard workers who just didn’t have the ability to connect with employers, because every employer requires two to three years of experience. That leaves entry-level workers with no way to make the first leap, and that gap in the labor markets is a huge failure of society. Your first job should be based on merit, not on who your uncle knows at whatever oil company. And so I spoke with person after person to figure out a way to bring meritocracy to training and hiring these workers at the earliest stages of their careers. That focus on bridging the gap between education and employment is what eventually led me to start Andela.
     
  • Since you co-founded the company in 2014, Andela has raised more than $180M and grown to over 1,000 employees. What lessons did you learn as you scaled the company?

    I learned that as a leader, the hardest part of scaling is scaling yourself. When you’re truly scaling, your job changes about every six to eight months, you’re focusing on different things, and you’re probably managing different people. For me, there were times when I got very attached to my teams as I worked with them for years, and it was difficult to recognize that the best thing for those teams was to bring in someone more experienced to lead them. It can be heart wrenching. You have to do the internal work to get comfortable with those types of transitions and then get behind the best possible person to lead your team to the next level.
     
  • Andela has been focused on building remote engineering teams for some time, and the company went fully remote in July. How do you think about the broader shift to remote work and the implications for employers going forward?

    I’m so excited that people are finally waking up to the possibility of remote work. There are so many things that we think are impossible until we’re forced to grapple with them, and through the COVID 19 crisis, we’ve seen that remote work is utterly possible. The world just made seven years’ worth of progress in seven months toward a much more remote and independent workforce, particularly for certain skill sets.

    The COVID pandemic has proven that you can work remotely and be productive. While a remote work environment doesn’t replace the experience of chatting with a colleague around the water cooler, there are a lot of projects that can be accomplished without needing those in-person interactions.

    As our CEO, Jeremy, puts it, “the genie’s out of the bottle” on working remotely, which I think is a really good thing. If you’re trying to hire a top software developer in Oklahoma, you previously had a very small pool of great candidates. Now, you have access to thousands of candidates — a larger pool of candidates gives companies even greater access to diverse voices, and diverse teams build better products more quickly and in a more innovative way. That’s one silver lining that has come out of the COVID pandemic in my opinion.
     
  • We’ve talked about recruiting and remote work, but future of work is obviously a much broader category that can span everything from benefits to AI and automation. What trends are you most excited about in the future of work?

    One trend I’ll call out is the move toward automation, like you said. I don’t believe that the fear around robots taking our jobs is entirely unwarranted — I think there are elements of that that are very real. But on the flip side, I get really excited when I think about the future of work being that humans do what humans do best, and machines do what machines do best.

    Along with that, I think we are going to have to focus on how we are different from machines. We’re seeing now that some companies are facing the consequences of building technology without fully considering its implications, from a human perspective and from a societal perspective. Going forward, we’re going to have to focus even more on applying the best of our human nature, knowledge, and empathy.

 

Read the rest of the interview here.

the resources: future of work

the talent   

Sign-up to be included in the table’s directory of women in enterprise.

the community event

On January 28th, we'll be hosting our first ever community event. This event will bring everyone in the table community together on Nooks, a virtual events platform founded by some awesome female foundersfor an opportunity to meet and support other community members.  No need to prepare anything in advance, just come ready to meet and exchange insights with other awesome female and non-binary leaders in enterprise technology. 

Please RSVP here; we can't wait to connect all the inspiring talent in this community!  

the end


In the february edition, we’ll focus on cybersecurity and privacy.  Know awesome womxn working on either? Help us get in touch!

about the table

Women are still severely underrepresented in founding enterprise technology companies—only 2% of women start B2B companies, compared to 13% of men (according to MIT). the table is a community of women in enterprise technology, including founders, operators, academics, and investors, driven to change that statistic. 

the table hosts curated monthly events and publishes this monthly newsletter discussing trends in enterprise technology, sharing insights, and featuring interviews with experts across various sub-sectors. By joining the table, you can be a part of our efforts to create a more inclusive enterprise technology community. 

Have feedback for us? Get in touch at thetable.inbox@gmail.com, we read everything you send! 

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