Arlene Mulder

Guest Speaker Arlene Mulder is a powerhouse of a woman, whose courage and determination are in equal proportion to her astounding intelligence. Growing up in Pretoria, she developed an early love for Mathematics and went on to complete a Masters Degree in Business Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Potchefstroom. She was then recruited into the graduate programme at Rand Merchant Bank (RMB), where she spent her first two years building credit rating models. Thereafter, she joined their Corporate Finance team as a Deal Maker.

It was during her time at RMB that Arlene truly began to comprehend the power of coding and it’s remarkable ability to solve business problems. While tasks like compiling comparable models could ordinarily take up to 3 days, Arlene realised that simply coding a couple of plugins could reduce the task to 3 seconds. “That’s the thing about coding,” she says excitedly. “You get to design and create anything you can imagine. Contrary to popular belief, coding is extremely innovative and creative.” Arlene’s path took an interesting turn when RMB asked her to speak at their Day 1 Conference. The topic was ‘The Competitor Landscape”, and she explored the premise that their biggest competitors were no longer other banks, but rather tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook. “I interviewed various CEOs and business heads as part of my research, and quickly noticed how many of them were grappling with questions on how new technologies could potentially disrupt their business,” says Arlene. “All of them were asking the same question: ‘Where are we going to find the talent we need to execute on these new digital strategies?”

More and more, Arlene felt drawn to solving the digital skills gap. She met her co-founder, Camille Agon, and they began to research global solutions in education. Soon, they discovered a groundbreaking, tuition-free computer programming school in France called 42. Inspired by their peer-to-peer learning model, Camille and Arlene flew to France and negotiated exclusive rights to 42 in Sub-Saharan Africa. By January 2015, at just 30 years old, Arlene had left her corporate job and co-founded WeThinkCode_. “Camille and I shared a very clear vision to democratise education. This vision is based on the premise that while aptitude is equally distributed, opportunity is not,” says Arlene. “More than anything, we hoped to unlock the potential of smart young people and expose them to employment and business opportunities.”