Tag

Techpreneur

Browsing

Stephanie Obi is popularly referred to as the Queen of Online Courses. She is an award winning business coach and the founder of TrainQuarters, the first female owned tech platform which provides tech support to thought leaders so that they can create and promote their products with ease.

She is the creator of the Course Launched Delivered program, which helps female thought leaders to earn Six Figures from creating and selling evergreen online courses.

She has helped some of Forbes Africa’s most powerful women and LinkedIn Top Voices to launch their courses and is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, Knowledge Is The New Gold.

Stephanie Obi is a recipient of the Beta Gamma Sigma 2021 Entrepreneurial Achievement Award, the Social Media for Social Good Award and was named one of the “100 Most Inspiring Women in Nigeria” in 2017 by Leading Ladies Africa.

She has spoken at the Women In Management, Business & Public Service Annual Conference, one of the largest women in leadership conferences in Africa, as well as The Lagos Business School’s Entrepreneurship Expo and Contest.

She’s a First-Class Graduate of Computer Science and holds an MBA from the prestigious Lagos Business School.

Early Life

Growing up, all the women entrepreneurs she saw owned mom and pop shops. They never grew to be CEOs of big companies and so Stephanie didn’t even know that women could be CEOs. It was not on the cards for her and she thought the best she could be was to rise up the career ladder in a good job, get married, have children and be satisfied.

Her perception started to change when she started to see other women who were mothers and wives and had founded successful businesses. She started to see that it was possible for her. What made their stories so profound was that they were just like her. African Women.

Representation matters. If young girls see other women who look and sound like them founding companies, it helps to build a pipeline of women founders.

This for Stephanie, is why she believes that the biggest hindrance to women founding companies is the lack of representation. If women see women who are just like them founding companies, they will be inspired to start.

To empower women to become founders, Stephanie’s company has helped thousands of women to start an online course business using their different training programs.

Bridging the gap

In the course of the trainings, she also noticed that a lot of women were not tech inclined and this stopped them from really growing. In order to resolve this challenge, they built an easy to use online business platform, TrainQuarters which makes it easy for women to create and sell all their training products online.

Stephanie believes that female entrepreneurship will go a long way to alleviate the effect of poverty in African households. With more disposable income in the household, children can be exposed to more opportunities.

Stephanie is particular about women empowerment because she believes that when women are empowered, communities become empowered.

She also believes that there are problems that women are in a better position to solve just because of their feminine nature. If women become founders, they will be able to contribute their innovative ideas to solving problems that society has.

Stephanie obi

Stephanie mentioned practical ways that women can be empowered and in her own words, “One powerful way to empower more women to become women founders is just by showcasing the stories of diverse women entrepreneurs from different backgrounds. Women should be exposed to more female founders as they grow up, and as much as possible, entrepreneurship should be a part of the curriculum in schools.”

“Access to funding will help a lot of women to become founders however a lot of women struggle to access the available funds because they cannot pitch themselves. There should be training programs focused on teaching women how to pitch and to access funds. It will also help if women can become investors because investors tend to invest in people who look like them.”

Stephanie Obi

Through her website, she has reached over 82,000 people in over 10 countries.

She has also been recognized as one of the 100 most inspiring women in Nigeria, and won First prize at the Wimbiz Impact Investment Competition.

To fill up key tech roles with the right people, it takes a company an average of 3 months. This is because the process is hectic, delicate, and time-consuming, and if not properly done, can lead to a poor hire, waste of time, and productivity.

The war for hiring new talents is real, companies struggle with where to find quality tech talent and the challenge of long time-to-hire, this is where CodeLn comes in.

CodeLn is a software company that helps companies seamlessly find, test, and hire skilled African tech talent i.e Software Engineers, UI/UX Designers, Data Scientists, etc.
They have a technology that automates the entire tech recruitment process; recruiters can post jobs, get matched with candidates on the talent marketplace, manage applications using an integrated applicant tracking system and also test the coding skills of applicants using an in-built assessment platform.

With CodeLn, your ideal dev is just a click away!

In 2016, Elohor Thomas, the brain behind CodeLn, facilitated a tech training program organized by the government and a top tech company. The purpose of this program was to train graduates on software development during a 3-month intensive boot camp and match all of them with employment afterward.
At the end of the boot camp, they had over 70% success, and candidates moved from tech novice to full-stack engineers in the shortest time. Their drive was mostly their desire to learn and the promise of a job from the government.  Sadly, only less than 3% of them were connected to jobs and it was mostly those who had connections in the government (“man-know-man” as it is commonly known). The candidates came back to Elohor, complaining bitterly that the government did not deliver on their promise to provide them jobs. She felt bad because there was nothing she could do to help them at the time.

Elohor Thomas started CodeLn because as an engineer, she knew that learning to code can be quite a journey and she believes that anyone that succeeds should be rewarded with their dream job.

CodeLn is addressing a niche market and their expertise to tackle the needs of this market sets them apart from other competitors. For them, it is really about their commitment to impact and solve the problem of both their users – programmers and recruiters. This has made them attractive to even notable clients and partners abroad which include Wikipedia, Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, Cloudinary, to mention a few.

CodeLn is a 50% female-founded team of 4 engineers from 3 African Countries. Elohor prides in diversity ad their greatest asset as the team comprises of a Nigerian, two Kenyans and one from Ivory Coast.

They have physical offices in Ghana and Nigeria and a database of over 9000 African tech talent.

Elohor’s entrepreneurial drive runs deep in her gene. She always had the zeal to do her own thing, she ran a business of hers for over 2 years in the university. After graduation, she, went into employment to learn how to run a business from others because she believes anyone that wants to lead must first learn to serve. She passed through a corporate firm, institutions, and startups. After that, she decided it was time to start her own. Her co-founders and her kicked off CodeLn sometime in 2017.

“It is our vision to become the global go-to marketplace for finding skilled African Programmers. I always say that there is only one global language and that is “programming language”. I believe that software engineers are not limited by borders and our engineers in African can compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world -engineers without borders.” she said.

Describing her greatest fulfilment as a techpreneur, Elohor says it is “direct impact”, running her own business gives her access to directly influence decisions and take risks that would lead to measurable impact. Something she did not get during her time as an employee. In her words, “because I understand the mission of my company and I am passionate about what I am doing, I am excited to stay up late till 3 a.m working on strategies to ensure that I get the right impact and result that the business needs.”

This is why she can boldly say to anyone who has an idea in them but are afraid to begin small. If you are that person, Elohor says ““start already”. As they say, “not taking a risk is a risk on its own”. So take the risk of starting, learn, iterate and if it is not working, do not be afraid to pivot. Remember, a business only becomes what you want it to become with the right execution.’

Let these words be your drive as you launch into the new week.

Take that risk.
Bet on yourself.
Start already!