Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey's Visit To Andela Nigeria

We were elated to host Jack Dorsey and some members of Twitter's executive team at Andela Nigeria last Friday. The executive team included Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Consumer Product), Michael Montano (Head of Engineering), Parag Agrawal (Chief Technology Officer) and TJ Adeshola (Head of Sports, USA).At Andela, Seni Sulyman (Vice President, Global Operations), Sola Obagbemi (Senior Communications Manager, Africa) and Anthonio Pinheiro (Director of Operations) were on hand to take them on a tour of EPIC Towers, after which both parties had a closed-door meeting, with some of Andela's engineers present as well.

Twitter is wildly popular among techies and young people in Nigeria. It doubles as the go-to social media platform for everyone in tech and as a more optimal version of LinkedIn. It is where most people get their news and how many keep in touch with their friends. After the meeting at Andela, Jack and his team met with some entrepreneurs in Lagos at Townhall event put together by Techpoint Africa. A major highlight from that meeting was the spotlighting of Andela Engineer Dara Oladosu's viral Twitter bot — @QuotedReplies. Dara reported that it garnered 40 million+ impressions in October alone. Kayvon Beykpour, the Head of Consumer Product at Twitter made an offer to him to come and help them build a native version of the bot.

Africa is the melting pot for tech talent at the moment, and we are in the thick of things, investing resources and leading the charge on raising the next generation of software engineers who are doing amazing with the various brands they work with. We are changing the technology landscape of the continent, and shaping the future and nature of work.