George Boateng: The Impact Entrepreneur from Ghana

The Sydcast

Episode Summary

What happens when a tech-savvy entrepreneurial young man from Africa comes to America for school? It’s his first time in the US and what does he learn? As he describes on this episode of The Sydcast, George Boateng learns that he is black. That simple, and powerful, observation will strike many listeners as profound, yet George understands that his identity is what he makes it to be. As we will hear, that includes an EdTech start-up that is teaching young people in Africa to code, an effort to mentor young Africans to develop solutions to the real problems they are confronting, and his own work on his Ph.D. in Switzerland.

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

George Boateng

George Boateng is a Computer Scientist, Engineer, Educator, and Social Entrepreneur who has been recognized as a Pioneer in the 2021 MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.

He is currently a PhD Candidate and Doctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland focusing on Applied Machine Learning, and a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, U.K.

George is also the CEO and co-founder of SuaCode.ai, an EdTech AI start-up that is enabling young Africans to learn to code using smartphones and AI. He is also the President and co-founder of Nsesa Foundation, an education nonprofit that is training and mentoring young Africans to be innovators. He previously worked as an Applied Scientist at Amazon (Alexa AI) and a Software Engineer at Sapho (acquired by Citrix).

George has a BA in Computer Science and an MS in Computer Engineering from Dartmouth College, U.S. where he was an E.E. Just STEM Scholar and an E.E. Just Graduate Fellow.

Insights from this episode:

• What George learned along the way
• What it means to have an impact on people’s lives
• What led George to start the coding company
• How George is able to manage his time (doing his Ph.D. and running a startup)
• George’s journey to engineering
• George’s journey to Dartmouth University
• What it means to show up in America coming from Africa
• Insights on how arthritis led him to wearable technology

Quotes from the show:

• “The goal was to teach people across Ghana to code so that we can reach more people” -George Boateng [9:03]
• “We have a lot of good data, we haven’t made good use of it yet, but I think at some point it will really be useful data that other companies might want” -George Boateng [13:28]
• “Now is the single best time to have talent of any type because you are going to be in such demand, and you’re going to get paid for it, maybe more than you have been before” -Sydney Finkelstein [13:49]
• “One of the challenging aspects of coming to the US was having to embrace this new identity called black” -George Boateng [32:49]
• “I have been in Ghana all my life, the concept of race was not part of my experience” -George Boateng [33:03]
• “I think there’s got to be an evolutionary reason for it, but we do like to separate people into groups and when they don’t exist, we create them, and if they do exist, we highlight them” -Sydney Finkelstein [34:03]
• “I consider myself an accidental academic because the main reason i am in academia is because I didn’t get a job. If I had gotten a job, I definitely wouldn’t be doing my PhD” -George Boateng [34:41]
• “Very few people ever have it figured out, you just have to do the best you can and you try to go for it” -Sydney Finkelstein [45:56]

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Sydney Finkelstein

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George Boateng

LinkedIn: George Jojo Boateng

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.