Trini mentors tech's best for New York firm

Kiran Mathur Mohammed

kmmpub@gmail.com

There’s been endless talk about start-ups and new companies in TT business and government circles. You’d swear the number of times the word “ecosystem” is used that policymakers and business mavens had all joined some sort of niche environmental cult. What does it really mean to create an “ecosystem” for start-ups?

That’s why I picked up the phone and called Adanma Raymond.

Having been a technical recruiter focusing on diversity at Amazon, she now works at Endeavor in New York: an organisation that started out aiming to replicate the Silicon Valley culture in emerging markets. It connects entrepreneurs with peers, giving them mentorship and cash that may not be so easy to come by in their home environments.

Tell us about your background.

I left TT for boarding school in Connecticut when I was 14. There was no script to follow, no assumptions about what I would end up doing.

After school, I took the year off afterward, working on the film festival (the TT Film Festival) and then took time off and went off on a ship with 600 students travelling the world.

When I settled in New York, that made transitioning back to traditional university life difficult. A lot of Columbia students were on this set path of finance. I did a marketing internship at Chopt (a salad restaurant chain). I did a PR internship at Showtime. When I returned to food – and food is something I’ve been passionate about – I did it at this big, rather prestigious restaurant chain called Houston’s.

Still, I wasn’t really sure that I’d exactly found my niche. I did know, though that I wanted to try out the West Coast, and I was interested in diversity in the tech community.

Wrangling programmers is never easy!

Haha, yes! I joined Amazon as a tech recruiter for the operating system behind Alexa.

There’s tons of roles and not enough people to fill them, and the talent pool is not diverse at all.

Tech recruiting is a lot like sales – it requires other people’s buy-in. First, just understanding the tech space was a challenge. I had to learn how to talk about natural language processing and distributed systems. I had to be able to figure out which candidates would be able to do a job and which wouldn’t.

That experience made me realise that it is a bigger problem than just corporations not caring (about diversity). I realised that ok, this is something that requires bigger solutions.

But I wasn’t feeling fulfilled and I also missed NY. By chance I found Endeavor – I clicked the link and went to the wrong Endeavor. The first job I saw ended up being the one I applied to. The transition, though, wasn’t easy.

What was the most stressful part of that?

At Amazon there was not a lot of pressure. There’s a massive machine if you drop the ball on something.

My work at Endeavour is the exact opposite. It’s a flat team. If an entrepreneur reaches out and says, ‘Hey, I need help with this problem' – the pressure is really on to get something to the finish line. Your window for being helpful is short, and our whole point is that we want to be a support organisation. If the entrepreneur feels there was something they could have done without our help – then we’re useless.

As a recruiter you’re not going to make the final decision. But from the start in my current job I was immediately speaking to CEOs who were asking my opinion and asking about the US market. You do have access now to what brands are doing across the whole market.

You’ve been focused a lot on improving diversity. How would you define that?

I think it’s a word that gets overused. I think representation is what companies usually talk about. There are groups or backgrounds that are important. I think an organisation can be incredibly diverse and still have problems with representation, and vice versa.

I’ve been to much more homogeneous ethnic places where there was a lot more thought diversity. At the very ethnically diverse schools in TT I never saw as much diversity of thought, compared to my white New England college.

What has had the biggest impact on improving diversity?

When I started at Endeavor we were focused on gender. We work with start-ups in the Middle East, Asia and across the developing world. You can be everywhere in the world and still see how inequality and in some cases elitism can impact entrepreneurs.

We’ve been talking about startups in Kenya, so we have Kenyan entrepreneurs. So we check that box. But we’re constantly asking ourselves – are we actually doing the work to ensure that the impact gets spread within the country?

One central theme is what we call the multiplier effect, which is how a few entrepreneurs can have an outsized impact on their communities. It can be four or five entrepreneurs that have hired people who’ve gone on to start their own businesses, and their employees go on to do the same. It’s disseminated throughout the market.

Initially Endeavor’s focus was purely emerging markets. We wait until there are enough people who can form a strong board before we launch in a country. We started getting demand from places that we thought, "Oh, we might never be there."

You can have somebody exit for a billion dollars but if they don’t have the ground-level connections, it won’t change the ecosystem.

Not only in the US do you have a Shopify (an e-commerce plug-in for businesses) but you have five Shopifys there if, say, you want to start a consumer company.

Our whole idea is that you shouldn’t have to move to San Francisco or New York to access that. You take so much for granted when you are in a major tech hub.

How are emerging market founders different in your experience?

I think it’s a benefit. As a result of being deprived of a lot of things taken for granted, you find these innovative founders.

Right – so they focus more on developing their own markets, as opposed to just a product?

In Africa, you have these industries that operate entirely on mobile money and they’ve been trying for a long time to solve the e-commerce problem.

The first companies are now creating tools for the next round of companies. It gets easier in each crop of start-ups.

But there are definite downsides, no?

It is what’s necessary and I think that’s remarkable. It shows real resilience.

I think burnout is another thing. however. It takes a lot more energy to operate a start-up in an environment without support. That’s where we try to step in.

People have to operate where they are – we’re not going to change where they operate – but we can make them well capitalised. They have to make the decision about where they are going to operate that is best for them.

You had to do that personally, right?

I think about that a lot. I was so young and I’m still kind of shocked that my parents let me run off to Connecticut at 14. I think that’s one lucky thing about coming from a small island, in that you are so aware about what is about elsewhere. I love TT, but especially having parents who didn’t grow up here, the rest of the world didn’t seem as crazy to me as (to) somebody from the mid-western US who has never left there.

It's not such a great mental leap that you might leave – or return. It becomes a less dramatic decision.

Borders are getting tighter in developed countries alongside rising nationalism. What happens to the kettle when you top it up?

If the fallout effect of that is more students or graduates staying home that’s an opportunity we should seize.

I think working in Endeavor has really gotten me excited me about this. Every time I return to TT, I feel like I meet so many exciting people. There is huge potential. I think we are creative – in different solutions and ideas, even though our market is small – we’ve sold Carnival, for example.

We can flip the script. We’re seeing people who have never left Nigeria who have exited for US$750 million.

You see so many people doing well trying to co-opt Caribbean things. I think it’s still a challenge, though – and small countries must look outside for bigger markets. When we talk about Nigeria, for example, you forget that the population is 200 million.

I worked at the TT Film Festival. Creative labour is also a lot less scalable. It's not that it won’t happen, but I think that it takes a lot of time and I think that Carnival is an example of that. You get a lot of creatives in TT but I don’t know many creatives who are passionate about business. You don’t get people who understand scale. You need that marriage to happen.

If you look at San Francisco or New York, there’s a culture of people always looking for a co-founder. Nobody feels that impostor syndrome – they jump between industries faster.

We need to embrace the Caribbean. I never felt pan-Caribbean until I left, and then the camaraderie is huge between Trinis, Bajans, Jamaicans, everyone.

If you can tap into a community greater than us in TT, you can open markets.

You spend a lot of time with other entrepreneurs. Have you ever thought of diving in yourself? What sort of problems are you personally excited about?

I’ve always loved food. This summer I’ve worked on a cookbook. It would need to be (related to a) social and environmental background. We’re kind of eating ourselves to death, right? It's tragic to see the level of damage here.

It would be interesting to see more solutions surrounding food sustainability. I personally love the chocolate market. I think about TT cocoa and West African cocoa. I can’t imagine a more fulfilling business to be a part of than that.

I don’t have the idea yet. I have this friend, he is creating an energy drink made out of Nigeria cola nut! He’s got an entire product line.

In software or consumer goods it is easy to push out a product and iterate, but I like to research and I like to read first. I would feel most fulfilled starting a business that solves a systemic problem – and that often has a longer run time. My goal is to gain more operational exposure through our entrepreneurs.

Right, you can’t just push out an update of a cocoa estate! You’ve seen hundreds of successful start-ups. What advice do you have for aspiring founders and entrepreneurs in TT?

My advice would be to obviously protect your IP, but speak to as many people as you can. We might not have that traditional entrepreneurial mindset. Find people and speak with them, because I think that feedback is so important. You do need to "do" and you do need to test – and then give back.

I think seeking out strong mentors and tapping into the diaspora – you’d be surprised at how people are really responsive even to cold messages. If there’s somebody in the States or in the UK or somewhere, you can learn from people who have built businesses and want to invest in their communities. Starting a company is a lonely thing and you really need to have a community and build your community, and you’ll be surprised where help comes from.

And also don’t put too much faith in the fact that things are done differently elsewhere. Speak with confidence, because it is a privilege.