Tech talents are the new gold. Even more precious are technical experts with the right combination of experience and exposure to work with founders and their teams. This is the reality of founders in developing economies who face this challenging reality.
“When I moved to Toronto, I realised that people have the same abilities anywhere in the world but market size and opportunities limit growth and potential. Talent cannot develop beyond the demands of their environment, and founders cannot aspire to design solutions for problems they cannot conceptualise. This is why one of our goals with JengaX is to support builders and teams in developing markets to scale globally,” says Odun Odubanjo who co-founded mobile advertising startup Twinpine (now Terragon - Africa’s leading data-driven marketing tech platform) and is now behind JengaX.
Designed as an open-source resource hub and knowledge data centre, JengaX is providing a platform where technical founders and domain professionals can share practical experiences and insights. This, the founders believe, will significantly impact the scale of products being designed and in turn provide an opportunity for technical talents who are now exporting their skills to become builders.
It would not be out of place to wonder if JengaX will become a scalable and profitable venture; after all, balance sheets and investor attractiveness remain central to any venture. “This is an opportunity for us to give back and empower the ecosystem,” says Odun who believes that it is past time for builders to not only fund other builders, but to also empower them with insights and networks that will allow them to scale in bigger markets.
According to Ayodeji Balogun, Co-founder at JengaX and CTO of Terragon: “a lot of the advice that one would find online is not from this market. One is more likely to find detailed answers to questions from someone who has built in Silicon Valley or similar developed markets. For the JengaX team and many other founders like us, we have built some of these products but have not really documented our experiences to empower others. Our goal is to document our knowledge and experiences to help founders in this region build and be more successful on a global scale.”
As an open-source platform, JengaX Ideas will welcome content from sector-agnostic founders. The platform has the potential to broaden its scope into a P2P mentorship avenue, similar to Founders Connect, where founders can link up with other founders. But for now they are choosing to back some of the founders they engage with via JengaX Ventures.
“Of course, knowledge without access to finance can be frustrating for any founder so continuing on our experience investing in startups founded by domain expert founders, we decided to back some of the founders we support through JengaX Ventures. For now, we are focused on documenting insights and experiences of builders from developing and mature markets ,” says Odubanjo.
Find out more about JengaX on www.jengax.world.
