Chike Agbai is the founder and chief executive of Azumo, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco, California, with a delivery office in Rosario, Argentina. A Stanford University graduate, he spent nearly 20 years as an investment banker covering enterprise software companies before starting Azumo in 2016.
Two Decades of Software Banking
As a banker he advised on more than $100 billion in transactions for companies including Oracle, Salesforce.com and Dell. He saw big data, cloud computing and mobile coming together as a chance for companies of every size to build intelligent applications (Azumo). He also saw his clients struggle to hire enough software engineers. “So I thought: if these companies had trouble finding great talent, wouldn’t it be true for other businesses as well?” he wrote in his founder letter.
A Distributed Company from the Start
Azumo has worked as a distributed company since its founding, a choice he ties to three values: honesty, education and freedom. He writes that it bills by the hour so clients can see what each person is doing, that everyone on the team can earn a stake in the company, and that the point of remote work is reach, not cost: “great developer talent is everywhere.” He credits a talk by Oprah Winfrey, who said she hires smart, motivated people and gives them room to work, for shaping how he manages. Azumo’s clients have included Facebook, Discovery Channel and Zynga.