Young, Hungry and Waiting to Be Unleashed

In 1812, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a 27-year-old Swiss explorer rediscovered Jordan’s ancient city of Petra. Of course, Petra had been dwelling dormant under vestiges for centuries, waiting for a day when a man of great passion for history such as Burckhardt would unveil its marvel and bring it forward to the eyes of the world.

Very much like the “Rose-Red City”, Amjad Masad had been dwelling in the shadows of Arab education for years – undiscovered, unacknowledged. The young Jordanian coder, similarly to many Arab youth, had been swept to the sidelines of an archaic education system that was designed to reward only those who could think within the box, and blindly abide by outdated and, above all, arbitrary rules.

Born and raised in Amman, Masad acquired the basics of programming at the tender age of seven through the dedicated care and attention of his parents who gave him the freedom to explore and experiment. At school, his exceptional potential was discerned at the hands of a teacher, who voluntarily offered him advanced lessons in mathematics and computer science. However the lessons ceased with the teacher’s departure, causing Masad to lose interest and disengage from day-to-day classroom activities – only to become one of those mischievous students whose parents are “called in to the principal’s office every other day”.

With much difficulty, Masad beat all odds and managed to graduate from high school. He chose to pursue his studies in computer science at the Princess Sumaya University for Science and Technology (PSUT). Once again, Masad was challenged by an extremely rigid system that left no room for diverse abilities, passions or alternative means of learning. To keep himself involved throughout his years at PSUT, Masad decided to work in various start-ups and established companies.

Masad’s work experience allowed him to learn extensively about various computer and network systems, however things did not bode well for him in the classroom. In fact, Masad was dropped from the same calculus class on two different occasions, not due to educational deficiency, but for lack of attendance. Hence, he decided to draw the administration’s attention to his capabilities the only way he knew how: by using his programming skills to shed light on the flaws that ever so tinted the PSUT security network.

Within a month’s time, he was able to penetrate and hack the University networks. As soon as PSUT’s administration found out about the breach, they were shocked with his exceptional skills. They offered him a deal: he would be spared the retribution of such behavior, should he collaborate with the establishment’s IT team to redesign the network’s security and architecture. As a result of the “incident”, Masad was soon deemed the “Star Programmer” on campus, having received the recognition he truly deserved from his instructors and peers.

At the culmination of six long years of education at PSUT, Masad eventually graduated and found employment at Yahoo! Maktoob. He sooner than later realized that working for a major company was not as challenging as he anticipated, and so he dedicated his free time to venturing through new programming languages. His learning experience was unnecessarily excruciating and tedious. As Masad did not own a personal computer, he was forced to waste countless hours setting up programming environments on public workstations, going about it over and over again at every single session wherever he may land. The absence of a cloud-based programming environment also meant he had no real way of picking up where he left off (like you would a book) which really slowed down the learning process.

Like any hacker at heart, finding the “right” type of challenging problem excited Masad. He recruited a former classmate (and current Googler), with the aim of building a program that supported cloud based coding environments that could run in a web browser, saving users the pain of endless hours setting up new coding environments. Sleepless nights and relentlessness lead the determined duo to finally create a workable demo. Belief in freedom of knowledge and moving beyond rigid systems led the duo to release their creation to users across the world, free of charge, by virtue of a very lax open-source license.

Shortly after releasing the code, the media was buzzing with news about an emerging startup called Codecademy, a startup that was enabling users to learn how to code for free in the browser – hassle free. Masad conducted a personal search that climaxed to one of the “proudest moments” of his young career: he discovered that Codecademy was built on no other than the open source code that he, a young Jordanian hacker, had created. For the first time in his life, hundreds of thousands of end users from across the globe were benefiting from his breakthrough technological invention. Masad was finally getting the global recognition he merited.

Boosted with inspiration from Codecademy’s success, Masad was keen on launching his own online programming education platform. He was tremendously overwhelmed with the prospects of a new venture, so he quit his job at Yahoo! Maktoob, going about approaching various sources in Jordan for funding, in vain.

This minor setback was quickly compensated by exciting events, as Masad caught the attention of Codecademy’s co-founders, who reached out to him with the intention of joining them as their start-up’s lead engineer. The negotiation process progressed over falafel from Hashem’s, and Masad eventually agreed to join the Codecademy team based in New York.

From a shy beginning in Amman, Amjad Masad is today the lead engineer at Codecademy, a $12.5 million start-up, of which New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a grateful student.

Of course, Masad’s story could’ve taken a completely different turn – like that of thousands and thousands of Arab youth whose talents and ambitions are squandered and repressed under an outdated and deficient education system. How many other Amjad Masads or Zaid Farkhs has our education system branded as a disappointment? How much regional talent has been completely wasted? The future of the Arab world lies, beyond any doubt, in our ability to completely and relevantly reshape our education systems in ways that allow for the identification, nurturing, and support of our most valuable resources: our youth.

This piece is co-authored with Nafez Dakkak.

Fadi Ghandour is the Founder and Vice Chairman of Aramex where he served for 30 years as the company’s CEO. Aramex is one of the leading global logistics and transportation companies. Fadi is the co-Founder and Managing Partner of MENA Venture Investments, a seed capital investment company investing in early stage tech companies in the MENA region. He is a member of the Board of Abraaj Capital, and the Chairman of WAMDA.com, an entrepreneurship support platform for the MENA region. Twitter @fadig

Nafez Dakkak is a recent Yale Alum who majored in Economics and International Studies and wrote his thesis on Obstacles towards curriculum reform in Jordan and the UAE. A former strategy consultant, he is currently working on research and strategic planning with different education NGOs in Jordan. He is interested in Education Reform, MENA politics, social entrepreneurship, and tech start-ups. His main passion is the intersection between technology and education entrepreneurship. You can reach him on twitter @ndakkak.