a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: These Girls Code

Episode Date: July 30, 2015

We sat down with four jet-lagged high school hackers from Nigeria, Brazil, and India -- representing some of the finalists in this year’s Technovation coding competition in San Francisco -- to hear about the mobile apps they created, the culture of coding in their home countries, and what’s coming next for their nascent software empires.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. We talk a fair bit about getting more girls to code, and we wanted to hear about the issue from some hacker girls directly. Hi, I'm Soma from Nigeria. I'm Pras, David, from Croatia State, Nigeria. I'm Jacqueline, and I'm from Hesifi, Brazil. I'm Soma, Dajum, and I'm from India. The voices you just heard are four high school girls representing some of the finalists. year's Technovation coding competition. And as you'll hear, also representing the future of tech.

We had a chance to sit down with the jet-lagged software engineers in San Francisco before the final presentations at the competition, to hear about the mobile apps they created, the culture of coding in their home countries, and what's coming next for their nascent software empires. The apps themselves were designed and built by the teams to address a particular problem that each of their communities faces. So the team from Nigeria, tackled the increasing trash in their home cities by building a mobile app that provides on-demand trash pickup. You can think of it as a marketplace of trash haulers connecting to people that need their trash picked up. So after a lot of brainstorming, we decided to come up with the app that

will help users, that will help people to sign up, call the cards to come to their different houses and pick up the trash. The Brazil squad designed a game to teach kids better water usage habits for their parched region of the country. In our country, there's a lot of water, but in some states and cities, people suffer with the lack of it. In our group, one member of the group, she suffers with this problem every two days. So we decided to choose that theme, and we made a game for children so they could learn how to save water in their house. And the Indian team engineered a marketplace for a part of the Indian population that has the toughest time finding work. People with disabilities. So what we try to do is make a platform to

connect people with disabilities to NGOs who can provide them with trainings and also employers who can provide them with job opportunities. So we did that by creating a sign up page for all three contenders where they could put in their advertisements for jobs and trainings and where candidates could search for these jobs through a search portal. Mobile is the key to it all, the girls say. For them, mobile is simply the natural outlet for their work for reasons of reach, ease of use, and competitive advantage. It just makes everything easier and brings everything to your doorstep,

so you just have to click and then everything is done. We had a slider which would increase the font size, and we had a text-to-speech option, which were both accessibility features, which were going to make it easier for people with disabilities. Being mobile-based, it has a larger market reach, considering India is the third largest growing market for smartphones. And while it may seem that everyone on the planet already has a smartphone bristling with the latest apps, there are plenty of people in their home countries who don't, these girls say.

So how to reach them with a mobile app? To solve for that, the team from Nigeria, for example, is taking a sort of hybrid digital and analog approach, putting up flyers with phone numbers that people can call from any phone to tap into their trash hauling marketplace. We accept the facts that we have poor people. So we actually plan on doing something that accommodates everyone who have to print out flyers.

And on the flyers, you have contact phone numbers and the address. So even though you do have a mobile phone to sign up, you could as well call and everything will be recorded in that database and will come to your help. Talk for very long with all these girls. and you can go down a rabbit hole of features they want to deploy or the problems they face syncing their database with Google Maps or the difficulty in getting their apps live in the App Store.

In other words, they talk like every other software engineer. Except they aren't. They are still a relatively rare breed. Both girls from Brazil and India allowed that there was a healthy group of coders in their schools. Girls too, as Jacqueline proudly pointed out. But when asked if they are typical in Nigeria, Soma's response was straightforward and unequivocal. No.

Not every... It's not an average girl in Nigeria that quotes, okay? It's very rare because in Nigeria it's a developing country, so it's all these opportunities are just for the boys and the masculine gender, so it's very rare for girls to actually learn such. Yeah, the feel we are not scientifically forward. Fortunately, the Nigerian team, which ultimately took the top prize in the competition, has a plan for proving that negative contingent back home wrong.

Back then in our country, before we came over, a lot of people actually had what we are doing, and they were so, so happy they wanted to join, they were asking us, how would they join? So when we go back, would create a public enlightenment, like a campaign, and then would organize girls who would come over and want to learn. coding. And that way we hope to increase the number of girls in our country who actually want to do coding. And it

definitely doesn't stop there. All the girls have plans to keep their budding software empires going while they knock off graduating from high school. And then, what happens next? What happens according to these four girls is what ultimately changes the tech industry around the world. We all plan to continue being developers and coders to solve more problems which are already in our communities. And of course, find better ways to solve these problems. I intend to do computer science at university.

So in the future, I want to continue to programming and coding. So that way I could help more people with more apps. Actually, my team members and I are thinking of other things we could come up with. So for now we have four other ideas. So as a project director, we are trying to see how we can proceed, come up with small projects that will help our community. So it's not going to stop here. We're going further. We're going to learn coding. Hi, I'm Esomwa from Nigeria. I'm Praise David from Cross River State, Nigeria. I'm Jacqueline and I'm from Hesifie, Brazil. I'm Sama Haddajim and I'm from India. From Menlo Park, California, USA.

I'm Michael Copeland for A16Z. Thanks for listening.