A Fika with... Ariel Camus, Founder & CEO of Microverse

Michiel Kotting: Ariel, why don’t we start at the beginning! What you’re building is super exciting. What made you decide to embark in this field?

Ariel Camus: I think it was a trip to Burundi, where I spent almost a month teaching Computer Science at an East African university. Being there showed me an extreme example of people who were on the opposite side of the professional opportunity spectrum to what I could see in San Francisco, where I was based at the time. I remember thinking, “How do I fix this?” Do I go back to San Francisco and start a developper shop so that I can hire them? That’s not going to scale. So what is scalable? A year after that, I met Sid, the founder of GitLab, and I saw how he was growing, how everyone was remote, and how they were hiring around the world. Education has been my passion since I was 10 or 12 years old, so I thought, remote work plus education — there’s something I can do here.

What was it exactly that clicked? Was it a sense that there was a customer base for this, or that you could actually build a company remotely?

I think it was more the latter, but in an exaggerated way. It was like, wow, this solves all the pain points I keep hearing San Francisco startups complain about: there aren’t enough people, the salaries are too high, our employees are getting poached, retention is really low, and so on. At GitLab, they’re avoiding those issues: they pay lower salaries overall while raising salaries in almost every country they hire in. I felt it was inevitable that 1. companies would start realising this was possible, 2. there was a playbook on how to do it, and 3. there were already good tools and success stories to back it up. Though it came much later (this was all in 2015-2016), the pandemic did help us accelerate a few of those steps.

Clearly, scaling so you can help millions of people is one of your strong underlying principles. How does networking play into that? 

Absolutely. And peer-to-peer networking is one of our main focus points. Between code reviewers, mentors, group projects, learning partners, our students get to interact with a lot of different people in a highly competitive way. We’ve also started training ambassadors, where instead of having a referral programme, students are writing content directly with the marketing team. 

On the other side, instead of expanding partnerships, we’re getting students who already have jobs to share their Microverse network with their employers, vouch for them, and help them ramp up. We’re heavily focused on nurturing this community by giving even more incentives, like a discount on your income share agreements when you bring someone from Microverse to your company.

So much of that relies on who you study with. I remember when I was doing my MBA, part of what made it so special was that there was a real mix of people in the class. How do you factor that in?

In addition to encouraging multiple ways of interacting, as I mentioned before, we also have a rigorous admissions process — our selection rate is below 1%. A lot of that is selecting for what we call readiness, i.e. you have full-time availability, financial support for a year, a strong internet connection, a high level of English, and so on. While we want to accept as many people as possible, we know exactly who we can help today, who will do well in the programme, and who will positively impact the experience of their peers. That’s very important to us because as you say, the people who are part of your experience will determine the quality of your experience. 

Inspiring. What countries would you say most of your students come from?

Africa represents around 40% to 50% of Microverse students. As a continent, Africa doesn’t just have potential, it also has a lot of momentum. Within Africa, our top country by far is Nigeria. The energy Nigerians have… it’s something I haven’t seen in any other part of the world — and I’ve been to more than 80 countries! 

Africa’s Achilles’ heel is infrastructure. But the future is bright! There’s a city being built outside of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. It’s called Nkwashi, and a Zambian asset management firm is deploying $1.4 billion to build 10,000 houses and world-class infrastructure to demonstrate that if you can provide Africa with world-class education, you can get world-class outcomes. Microverse, together with GitLab, has a house there, where any Microverse student from Zambia can live for free for the entire duration of the programme. They have access to stable internet, electricity, housing, food, and they pay nothing — it’s all covered. The incentive is that those people will stay after they land a job and help build the city up. It’s all very promising. 

The other vast majority of our students come from Latin America, which has the massive advantage of being in the same time zone as the US. As a result, we see much higher employability and much higher salaries than in Africa. Their Achilles’ heel, however, is their level of English. If Latin Americans can conquer that, they’ll be unstoppable.

Amazing, thanks for the tips and thanks for sharing your vision with us, Ariel! The world is lucky to have people like you who are hungry to make a difference, and who have the drive and skill to actually do it.