Trade (YC W17) is hiring software engineers for mobile-based commodity exchange

tl;dr Wilson (wilson@tradeghana.co, CEO) and Anson (anson@tradeghana.co, CTO) will be in San Francisco April 3 - 7 and would love to meet with anyone there who might be interested in working with us. _

Trade’s mission is to allow anyone to easily buy or sell any physical good.

We are working in Africa because we believe the continent, globally, has the best mix of current challenge to exchanging physical goods and future growth opportunity if we get it right.

Africa has the fastest growing population in the world, is home to many of the fastest growing economies in the world, and has barely started with intracontinental trade.

Building something to allow anyone to easily buy and sell any physical good means playing a role in:

- Transport - Storage - Exchange of money

Building a dominant product in any of the categories above would have enormous impact.

We’ve started in Ghana specifically. Ghana is politically stable, geographically small (easier to figure out logistics), very agriculturally productive (#3 in Africa, in terms of dollar value of goods), and might be the fastest growing economy in the world this year (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/world/africa/ghana-worlds...).

We’ve started in commodity trade because it is central to commerce in Ghana. Over 40% of the workforce works in agriculture and industrial transport and storage are dominated by commodity use.

If we succeed in building a platform that allows anyone in Ghana to easily buy or sell any commodity—connecting buyers, sellers, storers, and transporters—we’ll be very close to a platform that allows anyone in Ghana to confidently buy or sell anything.

We started focused on maize, which is the largest cereal crop in Ghana. To date (18 months) we have traded over 8,000 tonnes (> $2.3M worth).

We have a network of warehouses where goods can be deposited in exchange for digital credit. Farmers can then sell these credits to buyers on our platform using their mobile phones.

We also have a network of Trade Centers, locations just for facilitating the movement of fiat: paying for goods or collecting payment for goods.

We run a transport network which moves goods between warehouses.

Trade was first funded under a research grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since then it has been funded by Y Combinator, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, and Reid Hoffman.

We are hiring software engineers. We use Clojure for the backend and React Native for mobile.

The team is based in Tamale, Ghana. It is the 3rd largest city in Ghana, the fastest growing city in West Africa, and is an hour flight from Accra. The opportunity is here, and so we want the team to be here, too.

We can offer generous equity and benefits, a close community among our team, and the chance to build something of historic importance.

Wilson (wilson@tradeghana.co, CEO) and Anson (anson@tradeghana.co, CTO) will be in San Francisco April 3 - 7 and would love to meet with anyone there who might be interested.