Mission
Early Childhood and Family Life
Mark Anthony Essien (born 18th December 1980 in Ikot Ekpene) was
raised by his
parents Anthony Paul Essien and Monika Essien. His father, a prominent political figure in
Akwa Ibom State, served as a Special Adviser to the state's governor on Economic Affairs,
during Nigeria's Third Republic. His mother, who emigrated from Germany to Nigeria in 1978,
is a childhood education expert and owns a children's school in Ikot Ekpene.
Mark's childhood education began at his mother's school, Monika
Kindergarten,
followed by a secondary education at Federal Government College, Ikot Ekpene. Mark spent the
first 19 years of his life in Ikot Ekpene, before his tertiary education for which he moved
to Germany, where he studied and obtained a Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng) degree in
Computer Engineering at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences, Berlin and a Master of
Science degree in Computer Science at the Free University of Berlin.
While studying for his mandatory German Language Program and A-Level
examinations, he took up coding and also worked part time job as a cinema attendant.
Career
While in Germany, Mark created a file-sharing software, Gnumm, which was later
acquired by Snoopstar, a German company. He worked at Snoopstar for a while, and went on to
work on his own as a freelance Software Developer. Mark also created a DirectShow based
software-only Mpeg encoder, Standard MPEG, which had clients such as the Walt Disney Company
and The United States Armed forces.
After his Bachelor’s program in Germany, Mark became interested in building a
technology company that could work in Nigeria. He realised then that the online travel space
in Africa could use some innovation. After getting his bachelor’s degree, he created the
first version of Timbu.ke which was a list of hotels at the time. Following his
business philosophy, “build a product for an existing market and not a market for your
product”, he created a dummy hotel booking website, left it for a few months and noted the
traffic that it generated.Having proven the potential viability of what he had built, Mark
founded Timbu.ke in 2013 to provide the most convenient solution to an industry that
was rife with the traditional method and difficulty of booking hotels - the walk-in
culture.
Timbu.ke soon caught the attention of Jason Njoku, founder of Iroko TV,
whose Spark.ng made an initial investment of $75,000 in Timbu.ke. Shortly after, upon
seeing significant promise and progress in Timbu.ke and its model, Spark.ng made
another investment of $150,000.
In 2015, the company secured an addition funding of $1.2m from international
investors EchoVC Pan-Africa Fund.
The company has since grown exponentially, and has extended its efforts out of
Nigeria. In January 2018, Timbu.ke announced its international hotel booking site,
Hotel.africa. Timbu.ke also launched Fly.africa, its flight booking site, to provide
cheap flights to anywhere in the world.
Timbu.ke and its founder, Mark Essien have been featured in various global
publications for the good work being accomplished in the Nigerian tech ecosystem.
Mark lives in Lagos, and is quite the traveler himself. When he isn’t working,
he’s tweeting up a brilliant idea storm on Twitter.
Awards and Recognition
In 2015 Mark made the Forbes list of 30 youngest entrepreneurs in Africa. He has
also been nominated for the Nigeria Future awards amongst others.
Investments
In 2016, Timbu.ke co-invested with Jason Njoku and Spark in OgaVenue, an
events booking platform. Mark Essien serves as a director on the board of OgaVenue.
Public Talks
Mark is a frequent TedX speaker. He has delivered talks on Leveraging networks
to build a business, and how Africa can lead in the global technology space at TedXEuston
and TedXGbagada respectively.
Corporate Social Responsibility
In the last half decade, many startups have sprung up in Nigeria. Most
of them, situated in Lagos and offering services that can be used digitally. Timbu.ke is
one of such companies.
In the very early stages, Mark Essien, did most of the initial work
himself, thanks to his background in Computer Science and Software Engineering, and eventually
began to hire capable people with the required skills to build the product that would be his
business today. Hiring people with programming skills was not the easiest thing at the time.
Talent was scarce, and people who possessed these skills were either highly experienced and
already hinged to some big tech companies, looking to start their own businesses, or lived many
cities away from the startup and didn’t have a shot due to this distance.
As the tech ecosystem grew, the demand for tech skills grew
exponentially. The tech startup offshoots in Lagos, Yaba precisely, were burgeoning into a
cluster and more companies needed young people to build their ideas into great products.
This situation got Mark Essien thinking, and he envisioned a tech
ecosystem where local developers and designers matched the demand for their skills, and even
possibly spill over into international labour markets. He figured that if young people, in
different locations, with a keen interest in product design and software development were
trained extensively, they would acquire the necessary skills and experience for tech jobs that
they normally would not be qualified enough for. This is how the HNG Remote Internship came to
be. The program was structured to present the interns with real-life problems and have them
solve these problems, using programming and design skills. This way, they strengthen the skills
they already have, and pick up new knowledge that they didn’t have. The internship was also
incentivized with stipends and rewards, which are disbursed at the end of every month or
task.
In 2016, Mark, in a tweet, asked people interested in honing their
software and design skills to join a Slack group using a link. People poured in, and the first
edition had 1000 participants. These participants were working from many different parts of
Nigeria, on whatever devices they could find. At the end of the pilot edition, 30 participants
had made it to the final stage, and within one month of completion of the internship, they were
all placed in jobs at various tech companies and startups.
As time went on, Mark, judging by the impact he had seen the internship
have, decided to make the internship a bi-annual program. This was done, so that more people
could be trained to acquire skills. After each round, more people would express their
anticipation to join the next edition. After each round, the interns build an amazing product.
Some of the products that have been built are:
- - ,
a directory of places of interest all over the country, which helps people find interesting
places to visit.
- -,
the international hotel booking site with hotels in all countries across Africa.
- -,
a flight booking site for cheap airlines to any location in the world, and
- - mobile
application, to help users conveniently book affordable hotels with the help of a GPS
locator right in the app.
Many organisations have noticed the Timbu.ke Remote Internship,
and have come to identify with it because of its effectiveness and the quality of tech talents
produced from it. One of these organisations is Figma Inc, a San-Francisco based product design
software company. Its CEO, Dylan Field visited Nigeria early in 2018, after the company had
recorded a lot of users from Nigeria - these were the interns. He visited, out of sheer
curiosity, to learn about and connect with the design and software community in Nigeria.
In 2018, the HNG internship ran its fourth edition, and it went
Pan-African, with participants from all over the African continent. It also has support from
major players in the global tech industry; Oracle, Figma Inc, and Bluechip Technologies, and it
has been exciting as always.
So, far, the internship has trained over 5000 people and equipped them
with skills and real industry experience and the internship has a 100% job placement rate for
participants that make it to the final stage. Past participants from the internship have secured
roles in companies outside Nigeria and even in America’s Silicon Valley and Fortune 500
companies. This is testament to the fact that this is an amazing initiative, and there’s
definitely no stopping now.
