Hi! My name’s Jordan, I’m a 21 year old from a small city in the South East of Ireland called Waterford. I’m currently a Marketing Intern at Kano.
For the past 12 years now, I’ve been very lucky to establish myself as a prominent young entrepreneur and programmer, founding a number of technology startups with mixed levels of success and traveling the world promoting and nurturing youth entrepreneurship at hundreds of different conferences.
One of my favorite (and most used) claim to fame is that I got to share a Skype call with Justin Bieber! We both share a common mentor and one day whilst hanging out in his house, Justin Bieber just randomly popped up on his laptop screen. Pretty surreal moment, but definitely a fun fact!
The fear of never traveling again has really set hold over the past year. I find myself to be a really adventurous person and whenever I had any spare time, I would always look to travel. Having that being taken away for you and with a lot of ambiguity over when things will go back to “normal” (whatever that is), it’s something that I certainly do fear!
I first became aware of Kano in 2015, when two of the company’s co-founders, Alex and Yonatan reached out to me to ask for my opinion on their new Kano product, which I’d previously seen on Kickstarter. They sent me out a test kit of their original Raspberry Pi Kano product and I was immediately blown away, it was just so simple and intuitive and something I would’ve been begging for when I first started programming 6 years prior.
After keeping in touch for a number of years, I had the opportunity to join the company as an intern during my university semester and it was one I couldn’t pass up on for obvious reasons. I feel my personal passions, visions, and aspirations for education in tech literacy align so perfectly with that of Kano, and so to be able to see how things work from the inside, was an honor.
Perhaps my favorite part of what I do is getting the opportunity to travel the world and share my story and passions with so many different people and at the same time getting to experience so many different cultures. I’ve been lucky to have traveled to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Colombia, India, UAE, Oman, Mozambique, and South Africa as well as Europe and North America sharing my vision. However, if I were to pick my proudest accomplishment, it would have to be getting invited to be the Presidential Guest at a Real Madrid game after the president of the club saw one of my talks at a conference in Madrid. It was perhaps the most surreal moment of my life, being a huge Madrid fan and getting to share some time with the President and players such as Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo was a dream come true and something I never expected to happen when I first started doing all this.
Extremely cliche but I would 100% tell myself to never ever give up. Through my journey so far, I’ve come up with countless obstacles, disastrous failures, and moments where I’d just had enough and where it would have been easier to just throw in the towel. But, I’m lucky to have a drive and I’m lucky to be motivated and because I never ever gave up, I’m better off for it. So, given the chance to speak with me, I would definitely reiterate and remind myself of it.
It’s an interesting one, and I think it aligns a lot with what users can do at Kano, but I think the most valuable thing I’ve ever learned at a young age was the power of the internet and how lucky my generation and I are to have such a powerful tool at our disposal. I’m completely self-taught in programming thanks to the internet and if I wanted to build or publish a game or app 40 years ago, I would’ve had to build it on a massive computer completely on my own, sell it to a Publishing Game, get it manufactured and then hope some stores and some people will buy it. Today, if I want to do the same thing, I have millions of resources at my disposal and can reach potentially billions of people with the click of a button. This doesn’t just apply to programming but I also think Film making, music distribution, collaboration, art, everything! I’m just so grateful that I was exposed to this at a young age.
Not exactly a secret passion but my guilty pleasure has to be football. I’m an absolute football fanatic and when I’m not watching matches in the evening, I’m spending too much time googling pointless stats, researching young players, and playing a LOT of FIFA. I’m a massive Liverpool fan and have a sweet spot for Real Madrid too, even prior to my experience. Don’t know what I would’ve done without having Football the last year.
I’ve been getting asked about my future goals all the way back to my first conference when I was 12 years old and if I look back now on my wild answers, I probably would’ve told myself to manage my expectations. In saying that, however, I think it’s extremely important to have goals to work towards. I definitely want to continue working in the area I’m at, as it’s where my passions lie. I hope to continue to have that entrepreneurial instinct and to maintain that desire to want to create. The dream has always been to move to London as well, and that’s something I’m set on making a reality within the next couple of years. Oh, and I guess I should want to get my degree too!
Something that people might not know about me is that I have an irrational hatred for milk ever since I was a toddler and I have absolutely no idea why or how. It has meant a lot of dry cereal, black tea, and black coffee for me over the last few years and it’s not information I share a lot!
My time here in Kano is only for a 6 month period, but you never know, It’s definitely a place I’d love to experience for a long time but I think it’s important to be kind, respectful, punctual and hard working and I hope that I bring these traits to the table during my time here in Kano and it’s definitely how I’d aspire to be received.
