Talent Is Everywhere. Executing as one is not.
What a Remarkable Tech Organisation in Madagascar Can Teach You About World-Class Talent
When I first landed in Toamasina, Madagascar to visit Onja, a social enterprise training underprivileged youth into world-class software developers, I was full of anticipation. I have been working with Onja as an enterprise advisor for almost a year — mainly helping them with outbound sales and finding new clients. We had worked closely, but entirely remotely. This visit was the first time I got to sit with the team in the same room and experience how everything actually works on the ground.
Working remotely is very effective as the world is your talent pool, but it’s also narrow. It’s a bit like looking through a keyhole: what you focus on, you see very clearly — but you lose peripheral vision. You miss context, reactions, and the informal signals that tell you how things actually work. Being on-site changes that completely. It creates a different kind of empathy. You overhear conversations that weren’t meant for you. You see how people react in the moment, how they relate to each other, how decisions actually land. It becomes much easier to understand not just what people do, but how they experience their work.
As you often do when first visiting a new location, I too was looking for differences. Different ways of working. Different expectations. Different standards. I wanted to understand what that environment would mean for the output: the quality of the engineers, the maturity of the organisation, given the constraints they have to navigate.
Instead, what struck me most was the opposite — and it took me a few days to even realise why.
From the moment I arrived, the experience was professional in the way you instantly recognise if you have spent time in corporate settings or well-run startups. Grace, who coordinated the visit, had everything set up: airport pickup, accommodation, a welcome package, and a smooth landing into the week. It was the kind of welcoming you would expect from a well-run company anywhere in the world.
And that first impression turned out to be a very accurate signal, something that showed up everywhere in the day-to-day.
Inside Onja - A Normal Day
Walking into Onja’s offices, I was genuinely impressed. Everything was designed around enabling engineers to focus. Clean, well-maintained facilities with high-speed internet and generator-backed electricity. Proper desks, monitors, air-conditioning. Full meal service on-site. Quiet, respectful workspaces.
All these support functions remove everyday friction and let people do their best work. The intent is clear: let developers concentrate on solving hard problems, not on logistics. In other words, by impressive I don’t mean “NGO impressive.” Simply… impressive.
The day-to-day rhythm felt extremely familiar. People focused on their work. Meetings that mattered. Client conversations. Talk about priorities, quality, and deliveries.
I spent quite some time with Rinon, who effectively plays the CTO role at Onja and leads their technical training. Our talks went deep - real, practical discussions about tools and trade-offs.
We talked about:
How AI is changing what it means to be a software engineer
Pros and cons of using Firebase, Supabase, Google Cloud, and AWS — and what it means for control, complexity, and pricing trade-offs
How Vercel beautifully supports the full software lifecycle and cuts time to market — from development to deployment — with far less friction
About the challenges with building internal products and long-term revenue potential alongside client work and its short-term revenue upsides
The same type of conversations I’ve had with strong tech leaders in Europe and the US over the years. Speaking with Rinon felt no different from conversations I had with CTOs elsewhere. I felt similarly when I spent time with Sarah and Jerome two engineers who had just returned from a week’s client visit in Germany — again, something completely normal in any globally operating tech company.
All of this besides the intensive work with Adria and Ahmed on how to make sure that we coordinate our efforts to raise the market value of the engineers, and how we best convey this in our outbound sales strategies.
From Madagascar to the World
One thing that really stood out was how intentionally Onja connects local talent with global opportunity. The clients are real companies with real expectations. The engineers work on real products with real users.
And the way Onja reaches those clients? Also very familiar. Onja relies on a structured outbound outreach. Clear funnels. Modern tools. A thoughtful mix of email, LinkedIn, and relationship-driven follow-ups.
And here’s the important point: Nobody hires software engineers out of sympathy. Clients hire because they need outcomes — reliability, quality, speed, and people who can take ownership.
That’s also why Onja is fundamentally different from classic “project or task outsourcing”. Traditional outsourcing often optimises for tasks and cost. Onja is building something closer to integration: engineers who can understand a domain, communicate well, and earn trust inside a client organisation.
When building a software product with ambitions to be the best at what it does, what matters most is understanding. Clear communication — and the ability to both express and fully understand problems in well articulated English — is fundamental. In my experience tech leaders tend to make the same mistake over and over again - put all weight on technical expertise and overlook effective communication, which usually leads to technically brilliant solutions that solve the wrong problems.
Budgets are wasted, precious time is lost, frustration builds, and trust erodes between the commercial teams and the product teams.
Many distributed setups quietly fail on this point, and misalignment doesn’t show up as broken designs or buggy code — it shows up as solving the wrong problem.
I’ve seen this often enough. Misalignment rarely comes from lack of effort or competence. It usually comes from teams not sharing the same mental model of the customer and the problem they’re trying to solve. One effective way to surface and correct this is to map the customer journey together, making assumptions visible and rebuilding a shared understanding.
Part of my role has been to help sharpen this. Not by giving advice from the sidelines, but by helping align business intent, product thinking, and technical execution so trust can be built — and maintained — as teams scale across borders.
That work looks slightly different depending on the context. With existing clients, it’s about making conversations easier, keeping understanding intact, and ensuring trust continues to compound over time. When working on new relationships, it’s about clear positioning: tightening the connection between what Onja offers and what clients actually need, and translating Onja’s capability into signals a buyer can trust — from proof and case stories to credentials when trust doesn’t exist yet.
The Thing That Stayed With Me
Before this visit, I probably expected to be impressed by how different everything would be. Instead, I left impressed by how similar it all was.
The engineers at Onja are equally as capable as all the brilliant people I’ve worked with across Europe. The organisation is just as well structured. The challenges — scaling, focus, client expectations, prioritisation — are the same challenges every growing company faces.
All this leads to a simple but important conclusion:
Talent is universal.
Onja is proof of what happens when you remove the constraints for talented people to develop. And as a NGO they have managed to do something remarkable - combining the part of doing good with doing things properly.
For me, being part of that journey has been both humbling and energising. It has reminded me of my own north star and why I enjoy what I do so much: To play the role of the bridge between business and tech, product and commercialisation, strategy and execution. And in this particular case between parts of the world that should be much more connected than they are.