Kenyan Entrepreneur Jessica Colaço Defies “Luck” By Networking with Intention
37-year old Jessica Colaço is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, public speaker, TED Fellow and bass player. She believes in shaping the course of one’s own career through ‘intentional serendipity’ - making one’s own luck. Photo: Momanyi Rogers.
Jessica Colaço has excelled in her career as a techpreneur by being a cheerfully determined and intentional networker. She co-founded Brave Venture Labs in 2016, a data-driven company based in Kenya helping African companies find the right talent. She also co-founded the first tech-hub in East Africa, iHub Nairobi. Jessica is a TED fellow, an avid public speaker and loves to play bass. She joined Ambitious Africa to help young people thrive and connect across the globe.
When computer scientist and entrepreneur Jessica Colaço strides onto stages in front of technologists, entrepreneurs and young aspiring professionals, she captures their attention with a clear, unapologetic voice and a piercing gaze. “Life is not a straight line, ladies and gentlemen” she told the audience at the innovation conference SwitchPoint in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, during her 2016 talk.
The magnetism Colaço exudes on stage and in person is a direct result of her passion for what she does and her eagerness to share it. No one could guess that she considers herself naturally shy, or an ambivert - a mixture between introvert and extrovert. Her intent is to make the audience feel this intense passion for whichever topic she is addressing - what it means to be a digital humanitarian, Big Data in Africa and the need for more data scientists or why more responsive engineering is needed.
Like master and puppet, Jessica Colaço has learned to control her shyness every time she gets on stage. This was at digital business conference Next in Berlin, 2011.
Scrapping Comfort for Learning’s Sake
With a little help from supportive parents, Colaço learned to captivate audiences by continuously thrusting herself into situations of public speaking and learning by doing. This was the only real way to reap the rewards of her innate talent and curiosity, her parents told her. As a teen, she played around with her father’s Power Mac G4 Cube whenever he brought it home from the office. He knew how much she itched to learn how to use a computer. At other times, Colaço would sit in her family’s chalk white Suzuki Samurai outside the local church, playing the choir’s notes on her unplugged cherry-coloured bass. Her mother recognised her passion and insisted she go in and approach the parish. Not long after - she was in the band.
Colaço performing at Blankets & Wine, a local music festival in Nairobi, 2009.
“Am I confident? It’s just me being passionate about something. That’s when the shyness goes away, she says.”
Colaço graduated from University of Nairobi’s School of Computer Science in 2007. A year later, Colaço and the late Leila Janah, former CEO of Samasource, held a makeshift Facebook developer garage for young engineers. This event served as a forum for students from different universities and professional developers in Kenya to learn about the Facebook programming platform.
Before the event, she had to learn Ruby, a programming language, overnight so she could take one of the participants through how to build a Facebook app. On the day, there was an unexpected high turnout of young people. The pressure got to Colaço. When the event was about to start, her nerves hit. She felt like running away and hiding. Again, her mother stepped in and assured her she was capable.
-Good people push you because they want you to learn, not to make you feel bad, Colaço says.
With time, Colaço has consistently overcome her shyness because she realises she is always faced with two choices: swim through the feelings of discomfort, take the lead and be brave in front of others, or leave aspiring young people eager to learn from her hanging. The second option is her definition of drowning, so she always chooses teaching others her most valuable lessons while sacrificing her own comfort.
-Am I confident? It’s just me being passionate about something. That’s when the shyness goes away, she says.
Embracing Technology to Build Strong Networks
After graduating from university, Colaço created Kenya’s first mapping service before they had Google Maps WMS (Wireless Mapping Service). She also created java and patent scripts for Nokia phones. Due to a popular demand sparked by these innovations, Strathmore University helped organise a mobile bootcamp for a hundred young innovators, her first official event. The young innovators were invited to learn Colaço’s recipes for successful programming under her personal guidance and instruction.
Around the same time she was introduced to the digital pioneer and tech engineer Erik Hersman. He developed the mobile app Ushahidi which he delivered a TED talk about in 2009. During the talk, which has today reached over six million, he highlights how their innovation allows marginalised people to share breaking news through text messages, bringing global attention to urgent problems. Colaço supports Hersman’s work and has mentioned the Ushahidi project in many of her talks at tech conferences around the world.
Hersman has been a vital component to Colaço’s professional network. In 2010, Colaço and Hersman founded iHub - East Africa’s first tech hub. Hersman believed in Colaço to build and run iHub and it has since grown into a thriving community for ICT entrepreneurs and investors.
- Having the right network really helps in life. All the science in the world alone could not bring out the full potential in a person, Colaço says.
Jessica Colaço and Erik Hersman in April 2009 at iHub in Nairobi, Kenya.
Photo: Lars Cosh-Ishii
“Having the right network really helps in life. All the science in the world alone could not bring out the full potential in a person”
Superstar Teams Crafted by Intentional Serendipity
Since iHub, Colaço transformed her career from expanding the networks of African entrepreneurs to improving the workforce management in Africa’s top companies. Colaço segwayed into the field of HR when she founded Brave Venture Labs alongside Ibanga Umanah and Daniele Orner in 2015. Colaço and her co-founders devise scientific formulas to bring the right people together at the right place and time to work on the right projects. They use the latest technologies to harness and match the potential and talent of future co-founders by matching their skills to the right projects with advanced algorithms.
Colaço refers to this way of working as intentional serendipity. Serendipity, a word coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, means making happy, unexpected and accidental discoveries. Intentional serendipity was coined by VC firm Matter CEO Corey Ford during his TEDx talk in 2013. It means intentionally orchestrating meaningful human interactions and meetings. The definition can be expanded to include harnessing the power of modern social networking technologies and media to minimise the degrees of separation between people. Colaço meeting Hersman or her co-founders at Brave Venture Labs might look like an accident or chance encounter to the outsider. It being the result of her nifty social and professional networking skills is probably closer to the truth.
On a smaller scale, Colaço has used intentional serendipity as a nifty next-level networking skill to meet and collaborate with those who share similar values and goals. Colaço’s most significant collaborators such as Hersman, Umanah and Orner are just like Colaço, highly passionate. The combustion of their combined talent has shaped the course of their careers when they were introduced to each other at each specific point in time.
Ibanga Umanah, Daniele Orner and Jessica Colaço founded Brave Venture Labs together in 2016.
Brave Venture Labs team, January 2019.
“You never know which connections become meaningful down the line.”
Colaço’s intentional networking also led her to join the Ambitious Africa initiative in the spring of 2020. The buzz around iHub community attracted Finnish entrepreneur and founder of Pricetap, Richard von Kaufman - a founding board member of Ambitious Africa. He visited iHub in Nairobi and met Colaço. Eventually Kaufmann introduced her to Slush founder Peter Vesterbacka, another key backer of the initiative.
It wasn’t until nine years after their first interaction that Vesterbacka, in the spring of 2020, asked Colaço to be one of the leaders for one of Ambitious Africa’s first national teams - through LinkedIn. A little over a week after Colaço accepted the proposal, Colaço and the other members of Team Kenya held their first online networking event during the coronavirus pandemic with over five hundred attendees.
-You never know which connections become meaningful down the line, Colaço says.
Jessica Colaço meeting Peter Vesterbacka for the first time in Berlin in 2011. In April 2020, Vesterbacka brought Colaço into the Ambitious Africa initiative to spark new opportunities for young entrepreneurs across Africa and the Nordics.
-By Alina Weckström
Twitter: @alinaweckstrom
alina@ambitiousafrica.org