Tag: Entepreneur

Abe Ankumah, the Entrepreneurial Technologist

The ability to marry smarts with entrepreneurship is a strength not many possess. However, Abe Ankumah, a son of Mfantsipim School, belongs to this great cohort.

Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1978, he entered Mfantsipim in 1992. While at the school, he was on the team that represented Mfantsipim at the 1995 Brilliant Science and Maths Quiz, the precursor of the present National Science and Maths Quiz. He would later achieve the second-highest score in the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSSCE) nationwide.

He left Ghana after that to study electrical engineering and computer science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). While studying for his bachelor’s, he interned at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He worked on the team that developed software to annotate satellite images of Earth and other planets. This was before Google Earth was created.

He graduated from Caltech in 2001. His thesis was titled “Designing an Energy Efficient 80C51 Microcontroller.” Microcontrollers are used in various devices and are programmable integrated circuit (ICs) that consist of a small CPU, RAM, and I/O pins.
After graduation, he worked at a semiconductor startup called “Fulcrum Microsystems”. He was one of the founding engineers. Fulcrum would later be acquired by Intel. In 2006, wanting to be not only a great engineer but also a manager and business leader, he enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard.

Instead of taking the consultant route after his MBA, he opted to return to the technology sector. He took a job as chief of staff of the CEO of Aruba Networks. Over that almost 4-year period at Aruba, he also served as the lead on various new business and strategic initiatives for Aruba.

With a growing reputation as a great manager and technologist, he was soon poached by a cloud-managed networking startup, Meraki, in 2012. Soon, Meraki was acquired by Cisco.

Around this time period, he had been thinking of starting his own company in the enterprise networking space. In late 2013, together with two brilliant engineers , Anand Srinivas and Daniel Kan, “Nyansa” was founded. He was not only one of the founding members but also became the CEO. “Nyansa” means “wisdom” in the Akan language of Ghana, and the company sought to be the brainchild of enterprise networking. The name also played on the wisdom of striking out on his own.

In the six-and-a-half years Nyansa existed, Abe and his team raised over $27 million from venture capital firms, including 8VC (formerly Formation 8) and Intel Capital. Their clients included behemoths like Tesla, Home Depot, Mayo Clinic, and GE. In late 2019, the company VMware reached out to the Nyansa team to collaborate on projects. However, the more the folks at VMware studied the company, the more they liked what they saw. In February 2020, VMware acquired Nyansa.

Abe went on to VMware with the acquisition to help with integration. Interestingly, VMware was acquired by Broadcom in 2023. He stayed on with VMware and then Broadcom till 2024, when he took a sabbatical to unwind and think about the future.
He is a member of the board of directors of Ashesi University in Ghana and served as an angel investor and advisor to various startups in the US and Ghana.

In March 2025, he returned to the industry as Chief Product Officer at 1Password, a company in the Identity Security and Access Management space.

Abe is not only a brilliant and great technologist – he is listed on several patents in the network and analytics space – but a seasoned entrepreneur too. His ability to navigate the world of venture capital firms to build a multi-million-dollar company in Silicon Valley is a testament to that. He attributed those latter skills to parents who opened the first travel agency in Ghana back in the 1970s. He is also driven to be the best at whatever he does and to constantly push and rediscover himself, qualities that are preached on the Kwabotwe Hill. At 47, the sky is the limit for him.

Abe Ankumah is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy

Moses Baiden Jr, the Visionary Entepreneur

He grew up watching his entrepreneur father create one successful business after another. He witnessed firsthand the work it took to create value and learned the laws of money. Above all, his father did not allow him to develop that feeling of entitlement that kills the hunger to dream and achieve.

Another contribution to his growth as a future entrepreneur was his athleticism. It has been proven that athletes develop qualities like resilience and perseverance, a strong work ethic, focus, teamwork, and collaboration, among many others.
In secondary school, besides his academic work, Moses explored his athletic abilities. By age 17, he was the Ghana National Martial Arts champion. (His fight with a group of men who attacked him one evening while outside the school’s campus is still the stuff of legend). He also did track and field and was the goalkeeper for the soccer team.

A further attribute of people who create is a thirst for knowledge. However, it is not just any knowledge. In all they read, hear and observe, be it by reading “Othello” or listening to a powerful speech, they pick lessons that feed into their purpose, passions and values. Listen to Moses speak, and one picks up on this thrist for knowledge,

And so, though he would go on to study law, it was only a matter of time before that spirit of entrepreneurship would take hold and dominate. He started his first business while working as a teaching assistant at the Ghana Law School at age 23. A love for computers drew him to technology. Due to entry costs, he decided to concentrate on consumables. With a loan of $100 and a team of classmates, he founded a lamination, binding, and consumables supply business in 1990 and named it Margins Supplies Company Limited.
Why Margins? Because in life and business, isn’t it all about the margins?
By 1995, Margins had over 2000 clients and made about $1000 per client per year.

However, that success did not dim his hunger. Driven by purpose, passion, and a desire to acquire knowledge that solves Ghanaian and African problems, he looked into the future of digitalization and saw the importance of identity on the horizon. He decided to learn all he could about bringing Margins into the business of identity. Margins ID systems was born. Undaunted by the lack of financial support in Ghana, he looked abroad and found backers in Denmark, and as they say, the rest is history.

Today, Moses Baiden Jr.’s dream is a multi-million dollar conglomeration of companies called “The Margins Group” with a presence in seven countries.
It is made up of five subsidiaries in two groups: the Margins ID Group and the Margins Supply Group. He won the bid to design and manufacture the Ghana ID card called the “Ghana Card.”
He has built the first and largest full-service certified card and secure document manufacturing facility in sub-Saharan Africa. The facility, Intelligent Card Production Systems (ICPS), is one of the subs of the Margins ID group.
He loves to say that he did it all in Ghana by finding solutions to Ghanaian problems.

He has received myriad awards. He has won “CEO of the Year” several times, Entrepreneur of the Year, and Man of the Year.
He also gives back through groups like the Margins Youth Empowerment Initiative or by constructing a lecture hall for the Law School.

Of all the honors he has received, I would wager $100 that the one he most appreciates is being named “Ebusapayin” (President) of the Mfantsipim Old Boys Association (MOBA) in 2023—the youngest Ebusuapayin to date.

You see, Moses Kwesi Baiden Junior is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.