START video content by scanning items of 032
clothing or interacting with objects in
the store. The project drew attention- and investment – from Kanye West,
Beyoncé and the designer Virgil Abloh.
But on March 31, 2019, Hussle was shot
dead in the carpark of the store.
The path from Compton to Cupertino - where Apple has its Silicon Valley
headquarters – is not an easy one.
Sandu declined a place at MIT in order
to focus on improving outreach from
the technology industry to people from
a similar background to his own. He has
worked with the Obama White House and
local politicians to launch STEM educa-
tional programmes and foster technology
development and coding skills within
under-resourced areas of LA.
Over the past couple of years, Sandu
has offered mentoring and training to
students from economically disadvan-
taged areas in LA, and founded a new
school in Ghana to increase technology
literacy. He says schools have not changed
to meet the needs of the first digitally
native generation: “Technology has a
lifecycle of about a month. But education
and the curriculum remain the same.”
For Sandu, the key objective is
exposing young people in challenged
areas to new ideas. “Inner-city kids are
not exposed to what other students are
exposed to,” he says. “This is even more
evident in the field of technology.”
He’s trying to redress the balance.
Sandu posts reading lists on social
media, and works on projects that bring
together technology and music – he is
a design and tech consultant at Kanye
West’s Yeezy clothing, for instance.
In July 2019, he received a $100,000
fellowship from Paypal founder Peter
Thiel’s foundation to take ideas about
sustainable design and technology to
Africa’s youth. His aim, he says, is “to
provide everybody with equal access
to information” so that they can choose
what to do with it. Catarina Ramalho
and Snapchat, developed algorithms
for geolocation search features for
Instagram, and created a collision
detection interface for the autonomous
vehicle programme at Uber.
In 2017, he opened the world’s first
“smart store” – The Marathon Clothing,
in the Los Angeles district of Crenshaw- in collaboration with the rapper
Nipsey Hussle, after another chance
meeting at a local Starbucks. Sandu
developed an iOS app that allowed
visitors to unlock augmented reality
experiences and exclusive music and
At 22, Ghana-born Iddris Sandu has
worked for some of the world’s biggest
technology companies and collaborated
with Kanye West. But the entrepreneur
owes his big break to Steve Jobs – and a
chance meeting at a public library.
As a child growing up in South Central
Los Angeles, Sandu was always inter-
ested in technology. “I remember my
mum getting mad because I would
always break remote controls up, and
rewire them to make other things that
I could play with,” he says. Then, when
he was 11, the first iPhone was released,
and the youngster was captivated from
the moment Jobs walked out on stage
wielding the era-defining smartphone.
After that, Sandu spent his summers
at the Torrance Public Library near
Compton, where he taught himself how
to code in C#, JavaScript and Python, and
studied the work of German industrial
designer Dieter Rams. In 2011, a Google
designer spotted the youngster checking
out books at the library and offered him
an internship with the search giant.
There he worked on the development
of the social network Google+, and later
created a mobile app that provided a
turn-by-turn navigation system for
his high school grounds. Throughout
his teens, he consulted for TwitterIddris Sandu:going straightback to ComptonAbove: Iddris Sandu counts Kanye West as a business collaboratorA chance meeting in an LA library took this young
technologist from South Central to Silicon Valley. Now
he wants to give inner-city kids the tools to succeedPHOTOGRAPHY: ROBB KLASSEN11-19-STIddrisSandu.indd 38 20/08/2019 01:10