Companies all over the world are facing the most acute technology talent shortage since 2007 and struggling to recruit the skills they desperately need. New startup Think.iT believes it has found a solution in North Africa, an as yet untapped talent pool and home to a highly educated but underutilised youth population.
By connecting tech companies with the region’s brightest individuals Think.iT is helping to bridge the talent gap whilst enabling youngsters to achieve their full potential.
The company takes a data-driven approach to training using the newest technologies, including AI, cloud and blockchain, to enable these tech graduates to hone their skills before being integrated as software engineers in vetted partner companies in Germany and the U.S., without having to leave the country they call home.
Launched in June last year Think.iT was founded by three entrepreneurs Joscha Raue, Mehemed Bougsea and Amal Abid, whose paths first crossed several years ago as students. Raue and Bougsea met while studying in Cologne where they were both active on the student council, and had discussed the idea for Think.iT as early as 2013.
As a child Bougsea had experienced two very different worlds: Libya, where he spent a lot of time on his grandfather’s farm, and later on a much more settled, privileged life in Germany. What he noticed, even as a child, was the significant difference in opportunities that people had, including where they went to school and university and the job opportunities that they had access to afterwards.
Later, while studying at Columbia, he developed the idea further and after some research closely looked at Tunisia as the ideal country to start. Through a mutual friend he met the third co-founder Abid, a fellow student at Columbia who is Tunisian.
“What unites us as a team is a passion for the intersection of tech and social impact and while being very different characters we follow the same values and beliefs, that have ever since driven us and Think.iT,” says Raue.
“Thanks to technology, we can integrate brilliant minds from North Africa remotely in top engineering teams and thereby provide exciting opportunities that were previously out of reach while helping companies overcome the global talent shortage.”
However, it was only last April that they made the decision to book a one-way ticket to Tunis to find out for themselves whether their idea would work or not.
Raue says: “On our second day we visited the city’s most popular co-working space Cogite and met with the major actors and drivers within the tech ecosystem. We immediately got their support, built a simple website and started a Facebook post with a call for applications that reached 45,000 young people across the country. From 300 applicants we interviewed around 35 and chose seven bright minds to start the first cohort.”
The Think.iT team faced some tough challenges, not least the Tunisian bureaucratic hurdles and the trials of building a team and a training program from scratch with very limited resources.
Raue says: “We came to Tunisia on a $10,000 grant from the International House (NYC), slept on a mattress in the basement of Amal’s parents’ home in Tunis, didn’t pay ourselves a salary for six months, and were able to finance our activities through our first generated cashflows, that our partners are paying us for the services of our fellows.”
This month they received a six-figure funding through an innovation grant from the German government and another innovation grant from the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia University. They are currently closing a pre-seed $300,000 investment round with business angels from New York City, Tunis and Germany.
The first cohort has finished their training and are already working on long-term agreements with startups in Berlin, Munich and Belgium, while Think.iT has started training another 15 engineers and has already received multiple requests from existing partners and startups in Berlin and New York to hire them.
The ultimate vision says Raue, is for Think.iT to become a premier hub for technology excellence in the Mediterranean, with the goal of training 1,000 engineers by 2020, who as well as their technical skills, have acquired effective communication, mindfulness, and leadership skills in distributed teams before being placed in top companies.
He says: “After graduating, we encourage and support our Alumni to continue as team leaders and mentors, to start their own businesses or take leading positions in local tech companies and thereby drive the digital revolution within the region."
The plan for 2018 is to scale to more hubs within Tunisia and to start expanding into another target country the following year. So far, for its three founders, Think.iT’s journey has been as much about personal satisfaction as professional achievement.
Raue says: “Starting a business in a country like Tunisia is extremely difficult, but the moment that we see someone succeed and live up to their potential releases an enormous amount of energy. For example, when we met one of our trainees Ghada for her first interview, she was super anxious and introverted and struggling to find a job. But she made amazing progress and recently proactively asked to give a talk about the intersection of applied mathematics and machine learning.
“In the end, it’s less about building a huge organization, it’s about individuals and the belief that we can help them build a life and bring opportunity much closer to them.”
