Myesha Luster Aroga is co-founder and COO of Analog Teams, a software development and talent recruitment company. Launched in 2018 by Aroga, Oladosu Teyibo and Yao Adantor, the company has developed software products for businesses and three products of its own.
Analog Teams is behind Research Bookmark, a search engine for product teams, Polifresh, a tool that breaks policies down into easily understandable briefs, and The Native App, a real-time messaging and translation tool.
Additionally, the company offers Technical Recruitment as a Service where it connects talent from underrepresented backgrounds with quality job opportunities around the world.
“With this, we are supporting Series B and C companies with the talent sourcing needed for aggressive scaling and effective product development; bridging the gap between businesses and the talent they need across industries,” co-founder Aroga told Face2Face Africa.
She also reveals that her company recently launched its Scrum School to help companies and individuals facing task management challenges by using Scrum to simplify complex problems while producing high-end results in a short time.
Face2Face Africa interviewed Aroga to explain her journey as a founder. Below is the full interview.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Myesha Luster Aroga. Chief Operating Officer At Analog Teams, a mother boy, woman, and advocate for using the Scrum framework to change and solve any problem you can think of 99.99% of the time. I’m an audiobook lover and a huge Drake fan as well.
Tell us about your business.
Analog teams are actually a dream come true. Many great dreams start as a simple idea in your head. Analog Teams as a dream come true started when I landed in the tech space, which was completely by accident, and I just fell in love with the technology.
I didn’t grow up, in a home or in an environment where computing was at the forefront. We haven’t talked about technology other than being a consumer of it. So when I landed a tech role as a business analyst to start on a scrum team, that was art for me.
When I think of an artist, I think of someone who creates things from scratch; something you’ve never seen before. This is what I feel like technology; produce things that we’ve never seen before and know that when you get into technology you realize that there are other artists like you, creating these unique, unseen things. Knowing that I could be part of producing art that had never been seen before was a dream come true.
Analog teams, my dream come true, fueled my desire to see more people like me in tech. We want to use technology to foster a better connection between black people around the world, especially black people born and raised in the United States, and those born and raised in Africa. In my experience, there has been a lot of misunderstanding about who we are.
So I wanted to build a company that could bridge that gap so we could see real proof of what it’s like to be in Africa as a Black American; was born and raised there. And on the other hand, as a black person in the United States, to see the different versions of black America that exist because there’s more to both sides. So having a company that built bridges between Black Americans and Africans in Africa, and doing it with technology, was a dream come true.
How did you fund your business?
My co-founders and I, Yao Adantor and Oladosu Teyibo, started the business from the ground up. We just invested until we had customers.
Much of how we’ve been able to start the business for so long owes a lot to our willingness to bend, not break. We had this vision, software development was our path. But we happened to have customers who wanted something different that we knew we could offer. So instead of trying to bend our customers to software development, we said, well, if we can do it, why not?
We have customers here who want something we know we can deliver, without marketing or acquisition cost. So instead of saying no to this client, because we only wanted software development clients, we complied and now those clients happen to be some of our oldest and most important clients. And that’s how we got into talent recruiting by leveraging our existing technology.
Share some of your successes and challenges as an entrepreneur.
One of our great successes is our people. Our original intention was to build bridges between black people in America and black people in Africa and have black people work together more and learn more about each other rather than just getting to know each other from this that others have shown or told us. Now we see it happening for real, but this time in a better dimension. Different people from different parts of Africa who have never worked together are now working together. We are building bridges, even within Africa.
We hear people say ‘I have never worked with someone from South Africa’, ‘This is the first time I have worked with someone from Nigeria’.
Initially, we didn’t even think that there were also bridges in Africa that we could build. For me, it was a success that I hadn’t anticipated or thought of and it feels really good.
Challenges
Every entrepreneur faces challenges and we’ve had our fair share. We’ve had challenges where we’ve had to let people go, and we’ve had clients who let us down even though we were trying our best. As a company, we thought we would now be in a different situation, but we are redefining these challenges into opportunities. The word “Challenge” is scary, which makes you see things as difficult, but what we analog teams choose to see instead is “the opportunity to give our time, our energy, our patience and our desire”. If you really want something to work, you have to put time and energy into it and, of course, be patient. it will happen.
So we’ve certainly seen challenges and great successes, but we’re still moving forward.
What can the government do to support entrepreneurs like you?
I saw something in the news but didn’t dig all the facts. The US government decided to hire 87,000 IRS agents to audit Americans and their finances. My question is, why don’t you hire 87,000 people instead to help business owners get it right?
It’s almost like you’re reacting to the problem instead of solving it.
So instead of repercussions being a reactive response to the problem, why not hire 87,000 government-certified people to help business owners better navigate the waters?
So let’s get to the root of the problem and solve it from there.
Where do you see your business in the short and long term?
As a business you do a lot of bidding when you start because you don’t have a lot of money, you accept jobs that are not what you intended to do. So, as a company, I see us becoming more stable. By this I mean that we accept clients who match us and what we want to do, and if we have to comply, we only do it because we want to.
The good thing is what we do with technical recruitment, the Scrum school and Research Bookmark; a search engine we built for product teams, are closely aligned with our new intentions.
So as we move forward, I see analog teams building more bridges. Not just in Africa, but in Asia, the UK and beyond.
For others who want to be like you, what message do you have for them?
I would start by saying, don’t try to be like me. By that I mean using parts of my journey, my story, as inspiration to figure out what you love because you are unique as a person.
Sometimes a person needs to be inspired by other people who have been there; do that and it’s good. If you want to be COO, take that part of my journey and make it part of who you are, part of who you are, and make things happen for you.
Is there anything you would like to add that I haven’t asked?
One thing I would like to add is the need for people to use their imaginations. Your imagination is your strength. As a kid growing up in the 80s without a phone, you couldn’t just pick up a phone and play video games; you had to imagine it. You literally had to use your imagination to entertain yourself.
What I see these days is a lot of people taking people’s ideas, copying them entirely, and not using their imaginations at all. These ideas are meant to be inspirations for you where you take these ideas and merge them with your imagination to produce something stellar.
The first thing I would like people to understand is that “your imagination is always there; Use it. Second, if you see something you like, don’t feel the need to duplicate it word for word, picture for picture. Take it as an inspiration, then go into your imagination and personalize it. Put a bit of yourself into it.
Well, I would just say, aim for perfection. Aim for perfection and enjoy the progress. Live and breathe the fact that you progress. But you have to start by striving for perfection. People think perfection is impossible because they don’t even try.
Keep in mind that the first attempt is mostly worse than the first draft.
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