Alishahal Macknojia
University of Houston
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Sandra Johnson, Founder, CEO & CTO, Global Mobile Finance, Inc., Cary (35.7° N, 78.7° W)

Most people do not envision themselves in the positions they end up later in life. The same held true for Dr. Sandra Johnson. In our conversation, we talked about Dr. Johnson’s journey from her undergraduate years to being a CEO, engineer, patent creator, and one of Inc. Magazine’s top 100 women entrepreneurs of 2020.

Dr. Sandra Johnson is CEO of both Global Mobile Finance, Inc. and SKJ Visioneering where she bridges the gaps between the blockchain technology and mobile app development for sub-Saharan African markets. She graduated from Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering. She received her master’s degree from Stanford University and PhD from Rice University. She was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in computer engineering in the United States. She was also an IBM technical leader and is an IEEE fellow. In our conversation, we discussed how her engineering background and time spent at IBM helped her become successful later in her career.

During her college years and beyond, her engineering education has taught her how to think about approaching a problem from a broad perspective. She has applied the experiences she gained in her college and post-graduate years to all aspects of her life, not only to engineering problems. I especially enjoyed hearing about her long career at IBM during the height of IBM innovations and her part in the design team that developed the prototype for the IBM Scalable Parallel Processor (SP2), which is the base machine for the Deep Blue chess machine.

In her current career as an entrepreneur, her focus is on giving back to the community and creating a deep impact; specifically, she wants to use her technology background to help the people in sub-Saharan Africa and developing countries. To achieve her goal to this end, after leaving IBM, she started her own global remittance company to make money transfers to Africa more secure, cheaper, and easier.

She also talked about the importance of networking and having a mentor for career development. Connecting with people in positions of power helped her advance her career to the next phase. It gave her more mobility and insight into what she wanted to do in her career. These past experiences led her to search for new mentors with entrepreneurial experience when she left IBM and started her own company.

Dr. Johnson’s advice to students interested in a similar career path is that “they should go for it” if they are passionate about it. If you have an interest and passion, then you can develop the STEM skills needed for emerging technologies to expand your future horizon. With a genuine passion, Dr. Johnson encourages anyone who decides to pursue this field and says that “the world is your playground.”

Highlights from the interview:

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you growing up? And did you stick to it? Or did you stray from it?

What was expected of me from my family is that I go to college, get a good job, make a better life for myself, and make a positive contribution to the community. From my perspective, I did live up to that.

You were named among top 100 women entrepreneurs of 2020 by Inc. Magazine. You are an entrepreneur, CEO, consultant, innovator, and patent creator. When did you first envision yourself in any of these positions?

I never really envisioned myself in any of these positions. I walked into them without even putting up a plan in place to make it happen. When I first arrived at IBM, after I graduated from Rice University, I was in the research division, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, just outside of New York City. I did some work that was initially an extension of my PhD thesis at Rice; I had some preliminary results, and I sat down with my manager to review the results. He said he believed that my work was patentable. Very surprised, I drew up a patent application based upon that work, and it did eventually become a patent. I can share with you many more examples like that, where I walked into without even planning. I was just doing what I thought was interesting and exciting work, work that was satisfying to me, and it happened to be innovative and creative as well.

How do you think college years, and engineering background specifically, benefited you the most?

During college and especially Ph. D, you are trained on how to think to look at all the angles of an issue. The process of learning how to think about approaching any topic from a broad perspective was the most valuable experience that I learned. And I have applied that to all aspects of my life, not just education.

How did you validate the market for your product or service, and what was the assessment that made you think ” I’m ready and confident enough to pursue this full time.”?

I have worked for IBM for 26 years. My last role at IBM was Chief Technology Officer for Central, East, and West Africa. I lived in Nairobi, Kenya. In that role, and the one before that, where I was in Dubai for two years, I spent three years traveling around the Middle East and Africa. Traveling to many different countries, learning about the cultures, meeting with C-level technology executives and business executives made me think about what I wanted to do next in my career. I really wanted to focus on leveraging my technology skills to help the people of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but even more generally, people in developing countries and make an impact. I came to the conclusion that if I could not find another role that will enable me to do that and have a significant influence within IBM, then I would be willing to leave IBM and become an entrepreneur to make that happen. When I lived in Nairobi, I used mobile money; when I came home for a vacation and tried to send money back to that part of the world or other countries, I experienced the pain of remittance. When I used mobile money in Nairobi, Kenya, it was like a financial account or a cash app associated with a mobile telephone phone service, not backed by a bank because more people have mobile phones there than bank accounts. So, I put two and two together; remittance where the money is transferred into the mobile money accounts of the recipients, and that’s how I got the idea of starting my own company.

What was the scariest moment in your career? And what was the solution?

Most financial institutions across Africa and Middle East that are IBM customers have very high-end services that use IBM servers for most of their major banking needs. There was a situation where the system of one of these banks went down, and they couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was scary. It got to the point where the president of the country started calling IBM to say what’s going on. We, being IBM, worked with a team to do root cause analysis and concluded that the IBM has the skills to solve this problem for various corners of the world. So, we had to get on the phone and call the IBM people literally from every corner of the Earth to get on a plane and go to this country as soon as possible. Finally, they worked through the problem and resolved the issue. That one was a little fearful because if we did not resolve that issue within some reasonable period, the banking operation would have gone to a halt for several days.

Did you have any mentors that you worked with either right out of college, or when you first started your business?

In my interview trip to the IBM Research Center, I had a female host, who greeted me at the door; she put my interview schedule together and ensured that I was moving along throughout the day. She eventually became my mentor. I did not know at the time that she was a highly regarded researcher in a different field. And she went on to become the first female IBM fellow and also the first female to win the ACM Turing Award, which is the highest award you can get in computing. So, even before I started working there, I had her as a mentor. When I arrived at IBM, I also connected with a few others who were in positions of power and influence to make things happen for me, especially when I encountered obstacles. Given that experience, once I left and started my own company, I also searched for mentors with experience in entrepreneurship. And I did connect with a couple of them who have been very helpful.

Can you give an example of any current or past projects you have worked on?

I can give a brief description of the one that was probably the most fun. It was when I worked with a team of about 30 people on a research project called Vulcan, which eventually became an IBM server product. I was part of a sub-team of that project, which was designed to be a very powerful supercomputer and targeted to be one of the fastest in the world. I worked on the design of one of its subsystems. Once a research project reaches a certain point, then it is productized; i.e., we work with the developers to turn it into a product. There was a team within the research project who took that product and added just a few accelerators to it to make it a chess machine, called the Deep Blue chess machine, which played with the world chess champion two separate times. The first time, the human won. The second time, the machine won. IBM attempted to get Garry Kasparov to a third match. But he said no. I think he was smart enough to realize that in a couple of years between the two matches, the machine became more powerful. It was just raw computation looking at the moves back and forth; 12, 13, 14 moves straight, and another couple of years, it would be able to go deeper and faster than any human can. Kasparov knew that and didn’t want to lose again. It was fun working on that project.

How is technology reshaping the work that you do? Do you foresee any changes coming in the next five or 10 years?

I am definitely leveraging technology; what I do is a mobile app. But I am also leveraging analytics. Looking at customer behavior to gain insights to make predictions for the customer for additional remittances or for suggestions. Part of what this app does is to enable the sender, which is our customer, to contribute to a nonprofit organization that focuses on transforming lives from a list that we provide, take a percentage of the transfer fee, and deposit it into an account that they can control. And then save that money for the recipients, future milestone events, like starting a business or going to school. Much of that is driven by analytics, by looking at customer behavior, to make suggestions to the customer. We are leveraging quite a bit of technology as part of the process, in addition to a basic mobile app technology, and I can see even more insightful results from analytics in the future. The other thing is that right now, we are partnering with a b2b, business-to-business, that already has a global payments network. In the future, we want to look at the blockchain technology to leverage that to create our own global payments network, but that’s something we want to do in the future and it’s not part of the solution at this time. These are just a couple of examples of how we are leveraging technology.

What do you think is the biggest issue facing your industry?

I think the biggest issue is that FinTech companies are coming into this space. There are players that have been around a long time, like Western Union and MoneyGram. But FinTechs are coming in and providing faster and cheaper service. So, the business is becoming more of a commodity, and profits and gains that “the old timers” may have benefited from may not necessarily be sustained. When a business becomes a commodity, you address the issue of revenue and margins and build a value on top of that commodity. That is what we are doing; we are building the value of developing the customer, the relationship with the customer, and the customer experience.

Do you think it is beneficial for college students who want to become entrepreneurs to join the accelerator programs such as AngelPad and Y Combinator?

I think it is beneficial to connect with entities that will provide you with the guidance and direction that you need. A lot of it depends upon the experience of the founders. So, for example, I have been in corporate America for 26 years, and what I learned in those 26 years enables me to teach in an accelerator program. So, it really depends on the experiences of the founders as well. Many accelerators, and incubators to some extent, require some amount of equity in your company, whether is 4–5%, sometimes 10–15%. But, you can get a similar amount of information, education, and knowledge through programs that are free. It may require some due diligence to find them. I have been in three accelerated programs, and none of them have required that I give up equity. What I learned in those free programs and in those that do require equity are approximately the same. So, I would encourage anyone to focus on the knowledge that they need, but also on getting that knowledge without paying, without the cost of giving up equity in your company, because there are programs out there that enable you to do that. You just have to find them.

What advice would you give to students interested in your field?

If they are interested in my field and they have a passion for it, they should go for it. Electrical and computer engineering is a wide-open field. When I think about the technology of the future on the horizon, there is a critical need for individuals with these types of skills, with STEM skills in general. The world is your plate, your playground. So, if you have an interest and passion for it, go for it and have fun.

Do you have anything else you would like to mention?

I have a few closing words I would like to share. First of all, know your purpose and then do that well, even if it has nothing to do with what you went to school for, or what you’re in school for. Also, please do relax, have some balance, but by doing something that you are passionate and excited about. Chances are your purpose is associated with that. You will be happier, you will probably have less health-related issues associated with work, and as a result, you will be a more productive, positive contributor to the society. So, find your purpose and then pursue that and be happy.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.