Mickey and James realized in early conversations with José, Magatte and other colleagues that the true transformative power of blockchain and cryptocurrency, required mass adoption, and the needs for such an actual product market fit would be in the developing world and not in Silicon Valley.

So they set out to Africa to really validate their thesis.

Magatte Wade offered them introductions into her home country of Senegal to travel and talk to the people there about their problems.

Sharing lunch at the Mayor’s house in Senegal (Left to Right: Malick, Magatte, Mickey, James, Mr. Mayor)

They entered the Techstars Barclays fintech accelerator in 2015 and spent most of the program in Senegal.

The local post office (Left to Right: Malick, Mickey, James)

The Mayor of our pilot town in rural Senegal. Nio For is Wolof for ‘We are Together’

James made a SMS to SMS blockchain wallet system and they began to talk to users, mostly women’s’ groups, about their problems in rural Senegal.

James introducing himself to the Women’s groups ahead of a dinner and open forum hosted by Mr. Mayor

The women were so welcoming and honest, and the resounding request was for access to more capital.

Attending a Women’s Group meeting at their farm site (Left to Right: Mr. Mayor, our advisor Magatte, James, Head of Women’s Group)

Mickey and James then raised a seed round from some great investors that believed in their mission and trusted them to figure it out.

Atlas’ early Investors

They started to talk more with Barclays Africa and decided to enter the Ghana market. The team of just six at the time, dropped everything, moved to Accra, and lived together in a hacker house for over a year.

Early days of MVP building at the Hacker House in Accra, Ghana

Outside of our Accra office

Inside the Accra office

Jose

Jose in Senegal

Mickey and James first met Jose while networking in the social good space for their first startup. He was such a passionate person, obsessed with ways to empower others.

He had a diverse background of spearheading banking products for the underserved in Spain, and at the time they met him, was a Diplomat for Spain by day, and social good organizer by night, bringing together entrepreneurs with investors and advisors across New York City.

He is a certified economist with a deep background in all the things that ACX stands for and hopes to achieve — a true asset to the Access Family.

Jose in Accra with the amazing filmmaker of ACX’s first video, Tallal

Oneki

Oneki in a Ghana Market

One of Atlas’ earliest employees was Ondrej David whom Mickey and James met at Techstars. From the Czech Republic, he won an open design competition to join Techstars and help out startups in the batch. Having hustled to create an opportunity for himself purely based on merit, he immediately had the Founders’ deep respect.

Over the course of Atlas, he proved himself to be way more than a designer. As is true in most early stage startups, all of the team was doing everything, but he began to take a heavy hand in product. As the company matured, he grew with it and is now Head of Product.

He goes by Oneki, a name he made that is Honest meets Quirky… it is beyond fitting. He’s one of the smartest people and kindest people Mickey and James know and epitomizes the culture they try to foster of Great Minds and Big Hearts.

Team Senegal

Atlas’ rural Senegal office (Left to Right: Malick, Magatte, Mickey)

Mickey and James met Malick through Magatte Wade during their first days in Senegal and hired him the second they got their first funding. Malick is a lawyer and jack of all trades. He used to work at OxFam and knew both Magatte and Ruth through a program called Women of the World, a program funded by women to provide growth capital exclusively for women in Senegal. He managed the fund, ran the program and was truly the perfect fit for Atlas.

Malick

After a few months Mickey and James met a different Magatte Wade. Magatte had just finished grad school in the UK. He had countless job offers but choose to work with Atlas to pursue his passion of transforming his own country.

Malick & Magatte

Together with Malick they hired the rest of the Senegal team and were single-handedly responsible for the success of Atlas, moving from their families in Dakar to the rural area to oversee all operations, product iterations, and expansion.

some of Atlas’ Agents in Senegal

Dayo

Atlas first met Dayo through Andela, a startup that trains up local talent and connects them with high paying tech jobs at startups and larger corporations. (Sidenote: they have an amazing mission and we love working with them). The Founders and Dayo became fast friends and were so impressed with his development and leadership skills. After almost a year together, and with Andela’s blessing, they asked him the join the team full time.

He has worked his way up from a junior engineer to the Head of Engineering, from building out the core product, to now building out whole product teams. From Nigeria, he lived with the team in Ghana, visited the Founders in NYC for Thanksgiving and is truly a dear friend and centerpiece to the team.

Team Ghana

Atlas has such an amazing and large team in Ghana, but to keep it brief we’ll just highlight a few bios here.

Reginald

The first hire was Reginald, who had a diverse background in all mobile money projects in Ghana. He helped Atlas to build out its initial team, with our offices held out of the hacker house at the time. He now heads up Business Development across Ghana, focusing mainly on Community leader outreach to scale up Atlas’ agent network.

Mickey and Phyllis outside of the Barclays branch by the fish market in Tema, Ghana

Phyllis

Phyllis was employee number 2. Her background was in political canvassing which translated so well into operations at Atlas. For the first year she did everything all while earning her graduate degree and juggling family life.

She is beyond an inspiration for what intelligence, dedication and hard work can translate into. But what is one of the best things about Phyllis was how she has truly grown with Atlas into a true leader and cornerstone of our culture.

Kwesi (middle, white t-shirt) at one of our meetups. Biakoye means ‘We are Together’ in Twi.

Kwesi

Kwesi joined Atlas after they had found their product market fit and were looking at scaling up operations. He hails from a background in launching mobile money systems in Ghana and is one of the core leaders in Ghana, inspiring the rest of the team to fulfill the mission across the country.

Ori

Ori joined the team more recently as we dedicated time to Access. He is a graduate of UVA where he taught classes on bitcoin to his fellow students. He was also tapped by law enforcement to help de-anonymize ransomware scammers.

He is an outstanding solidity developer and has helped to sculpt so much of what has become Access.

His background in undergraduate, before falling down the crypto rabbit hole, was in anthropology, which made him a perfect find for blending our existing mission and values with the creation of a full-on crypto ecosystem for the underserved.

Enter Access Network

When Atlas started they were bulking up the day’s transactions and injecting them into a hash to put on the testnet of bitcoin’s blockchain. Atlas wanted to push all transactions live onto the mainnet, but at the time it was prohibitively expensive to do so for $1 to $2 transactions (and this was before the price took off in 2017).

Our vision (and still is today) was to go from a basic P2P banking platform for current accounts to a whole suite of applications that provided better access — free P2P sending, e-commerce, group loans, micro-insurance, co-owned businesses and community centers, tech incubators etc. (it was a long list).

The team began looking into making a token economy early in 2017 to both solve the problem of transaction fees and more importantly to realize their original vision.

Along the way of crafting Access Network they realized that while Atlas built their products with communities — and knew from these communities a good roadmap for new products — that the best thing to do was to empower them to make all of those decisions themselves, and to be able to incentivize such developments from an open network of global developers.

Thus Access Network was born. Access puts power in the hands of the people so they can control the development of their own communities.

While Access Network has stand alone value without Atlas, Atlas will help to push it out to sea and bootstrap it in the early days, acting as the primary and immediate exchange partner for distributing Access in West Africa.

Most of all, we are so excited to see what people can co-create together — more things, at a faster rate, that are clearly desired.

During the course of its journey Atlas has tried to foster a true family culture, hosting team members at the Founders’ parents’ homes for Thanksgiving and spending a lot of time in-market together as Atlas continued to scale.

We will try to open that culture to the world, not because we grew together this way, but because in our short experiences thus far on this Earth, through our time with Atlas’ communities, we’ve come to see that is how the world is.

It is a world full of good and loving people, smart people, who are so similar in their values and hopes — across borders, genders, religions, ethnicity or age— who if given the chance, will create beautiful things for each other, with each other, to be used together.

Together,

The Access Family

Special Thanks to all who helped review this post, including Jose Fernandez and Shannon Wu.