A dedication is usually the quietest page in a thesis. It thanks the people who helped, then politely gets out of the way. Emre Varol gave his rather more to do. He dedicated his master’s work to vulnerable children in Africa. Years later, he went to Ethiopia and began teaching. A2SV, the organization that followed, would give that early intention a timetable, a curriculum, and students with questions of their own.
There is something pleasingly inconvenient about a promise that survives success. Varol had already reached companies that ambitious young programmers put on their wish lists: Palantir, Google, Liftoff. His experience could have remained a private advantage. Instead, he began working on how to make it useful to people who had the ability to become engineers but fewer routes into the profession.
Africa to Silicon Valley began in Addis Ababa in 2019. Its first class had 22 students. The name points toward a famous destination; the work has increasingly involved building things, and building capacity, much closer to where those students began.
The programmer who kept teaching
Varol grew up in Ankara. His parents took education seriously, and he was coding by 13. In 2005, he represented Turkey at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Competitive programming supplied a particular education: understand the problem, find a method, and discover whether the computer agrees with your confidence.
He also began helping other programmers learn. During his university years, teaching became a recurring commitment. At Turkey’s TÜBİTAK informatics camps, he coached students in algorithms and competition preparation. Long before he had a nonprofit to run, he had experience explaining difficult ideas to people who wanted to master them.
That matters because the career change can look more abrupt than it was. The engineer who went to Ethiopia had been preparing software. The teacher had been preparing people. Both arrived in the same classroom.
His university training took place at Bilkent, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering. Research internships at Yahoo in Barcelona introduced another setting for the same habits of mind. He then moved into engineering roles at Palantir, Google Research, and Liftoff, working on software and machine learning systems.
A professional résumé can make this sequence seem inevitable. It was also an accumulation of environments: university research, production engineering, and the recurring discipline of teaching. A2SV would draw on all three. Knowing how to solve a problem is useful. Knowing how to help someone else solve the next one is a different qualification.
Twenty-two seats, and the work around them
The first cohort launched on November 15, 2019. Varol used his savings to get started. Early practical difficulties included unreliable connections and students without laptops. Some worked on smartphones. Before a lesson could travel very far, the equipment and access around it had to cooperate.
Those details put the romance of an educational mission in its proper place. Algorithms are exacting enough without asking a small phone screen to serve as a workstation. A course needs more than good explanations. It needs the ordinary conditions that let students return to the work tomorrow.
A2SV’s model addressed several layers together. Students worked on data structures and algorithms, developed communication skills, and tackled practical projects. The program was free. Its purpose was to supplement university study with the preparation needed for professional engineering and interviews at international companies.
University partnerships gave the teaching a place to grow. Addis Ababa University was followed by Addis Ababa Science and Technology University. The second cohort numbered 33 students; by the January 2023 funding announcement, a third cohort of 109 was training across the two universities. The numbers describe a program becoming an operation, with more people depending on its ability to keep delivering.
In January 2023, A2SV announced funding from Google. The plans were tangible: a permanent Ethiopian office, more education leaders, a product manager, equipment, and expansion into Ghana. Institutional support meant room for the less glamorous ingredients of education. An organization can run on conviction for a while. Eventually, someone must organize the desks.
Football supplied an introduction
One useful relationship developed away from an office. Varol got to know Jeff Dean through football in Palo Alto. Later, an email about A2SV helped arrange Google interviews for the first cohort. Six students passed the software engineering internship interviews after the early training period.
The introduction and the preparation belong in the same story. Access gave the students a chance to be assessed. Their work supplied something to assess. Neither part explains the result on its own.
By 2023, Google’s support had become part of a broader relationship with A2SV. Dean described a yearlong program combining deeper software engineering study with teamwork and complete products. That combination helps explain the distance between a short interview tip and an education. Students need to understand how an answer works and how work gets done with other people.
The international opportunity was also meant to travel back. Experience gained inside technology companies could inform new teaching and local projects. A career move can improve one person’s prospects. When that person becomes a mentor, the knowledge acquires more addresses.
The graduate returns with homework for everyone
A2SV now describes a training commitment of more than 1,000 hours, alongside mentorship and product work. Its current public figures include more than 1,200 engineers and technology entrepreneurs trained, over 120 offers earned by the community, and more than 20 products incubated. Each measures a different part of the operation.
Cumulative figures reported by A2SV and Varol’s official site, checked October 2026. These totals cover different outcomes and populations.
The return of graduates is one of the more interesting arrangements behind those totals. Alumni work as developers, mentors, and leaders in the A2SV ecosystem. A student can learn from someone who remembers the course from the other side of the desk, then encountered the demands of professional work.
This creates a useful test for the teaching. An educator returning from industry brings fresh examples of what was helpful, what was missing, and what employers actually required. The classroom can adjust. Experience becomes material to work with, rather than a photograph hung in the corridor.
Taking the work out of the classroom
Product development gives that education another examination. At GITEX Africa in Marrakesh in May 2024, A2SV sent 40 representatives and presented six projects. Among them were learning software, AI access tools, a volunteering platform, food discovery, and a service connecting businesses with engineering talent.
SkillBridge addressed learning and exam preparation. Akil brought volunteers and nonprofit organizations together. RateEat tackled restaurant and dish discovery. AfroChat offered access to AI services. Eskalate connected businesses with engineers trained through A2SV. These are distinct propositions, with users whose needs cannot be settled by an elegant solution on a whiteboard.
Exhibiting makes that difference visible. A potential partner can ask a question the team has not anticipated. A user can find the supposedly obvious feature baffling. That is an education too, delivered without the courtesy of a syllabus.
The hackathon widened the circle further. In 2023, more than 3,700 participants from 47 African countries joined A2SV’s generative AI event. It ran across several stages from August to November, with workshops and mentoring alongside competition. Bringing that many participants together required a different form of teaching: room for teams to develop an idea, test it, and explain why anyone should care.
A curriculum that has to keep learning
Varol’s recent public thinking reflects another change in the profession. Generative AI has pushed him to emphasize product judgment, understanding users, and learning to build with models and automation alongside engineering fundamentals. He has discussed those questions with ODTU/METU NLP: what skills to develop, what opportunities remain, and what is worth building.
For an educator, this is an awkward but necessary assignment. The tools can change faster than a course. Students still need enough understanding to inspect an answer, challenge it, and take responsibility for the result. Faster production also makes the choice of problem more consequential. There is little consolation in constructing the wrong thing efficiently.
Varol has spoken about patience and the value of listening. He names books by Stephen Covey and James Clear among his influences, and a favorite reminder is wonderfully resistant to executive vanity:
“you don’t know what you don’t know”
Emre Varol’s favorite life lesson, shared in 2024
Outside the work, there is guitar, hiking, and Galatasaray. Football has already contributed a useful plot development. These interests offer a glimpse of someone whose days include more than an organizational mission, even when that mission takes up a considerable amount of room.
The dedication in the thesis remains a fitting beginning. It was a statement of concern made before there was an institution to carry it. A2SV gives that concern daily tasks: teach the class, support the mentor, find the equipment, help the team test its product. Varol’s promise has become work that other people can join. The next chapter belongs partly to them.