An Orion Profile: Inside Samuel Ssentongo’s Meteoric Rise from Uganda to Australia’s Reserve Bank.
In February of this year, Samuel Sentongo joined the Reserve Bank of Australia as a Security Architect. The Reserve Bank of Australia is the country’s apex bank, equivalent to the Bank of Uganda. Rising to work with Australia’s regulatory bank is a far cry from the humble roots of a man born and bred in Uganda. His resume puts him at the top of his field in a country that is over 10,000 km away from his homeland.
Samuel attended Aga Khan School in Kampala for his primary education and then joined Kings College Budo for high school. By his admission, he didn’t hit the lofty heights. “I didn’t pass my A’Level so well while at Budo, and I joined Uganda Martyrs University (UMU), Nkozi, for one year,” Samuel tells the ORION Beacon to kick off the conversation. This is when Samuel had his first stroke of luck, as he calls it. “I left UMU and ended up in Malaysia, where I got a telecommunication engineering degree from Multimedia University, graduating in 2013.”
Telecom engineering was one of the most sought-after courses during that time. It was a time when Uganda’s telecom scene was hitting up with multiple players like MTN, Airtel, Warid, UTL, and Africell making their inroads in the country. Every parent at that time wanted their child to do telecom engineering because that is where the jobs were. But Samuel wasn’t sold. “I knew from the day I started that I didn’t like telecom or any engineering, but I wasn’t the one paying the tuition. My passion was in computers and cybersecurity.”
In his second year, Samuel had his cybersecurity career breakthrough. “One of our lecturers had a cybersecurity consultancy business as a side hustle. He taught me how to break into that industry, and I managed to secure an internship in a cybersecurity company in Malaysia that had a base in Australia.” Samuel had to convince the company to take a chance on him despite his telecom engineering course at university, which did not correlate with cybersecurity. The industrial training he received during that internship kick-started his journey because it ended up becoming a full-time role.
“I was able to move to Australia one year later. I was lucky enough to move to Australia because they were looking for engineers who had graduated from top-tier universities, and my university was considered one of those. They would give you a visa with no strings attached and full working rights for 18 months.”
In Australia, he started working at Ernst & Young, one of the big four accounting firms, as a security consultant. In 2021, he joined Atlassian as a Senior Product Security engineer. Atlassian is one of Australia’s most successful startups, with a current market cap of $52 billion, and builds tools for teams. Some of its most well-known products include Jira, a project and issue-tracking software application, and Trello, a work management tool that helps teams plan, track, and accomplish work. After almost two years at Atlassian, he joined the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).
“My role is designated as Security Architect. The Reserve Bank of Australia has various IT systems, and it is my job to ensure the best is done from a security and risk perspective. The RBA is in the business of Trust and my role is to make sure the right technical and policy controls are in place when the RBA carries out its daily role.” Samuel explains.
“We have to ensure the cybersecurity risks are translated into business risk for all the necessary stakeholders and the RBA systems function and encourage innovation. My day-to-day job is mainly to speak to stakeholders in the bank, advise them of the cyber security risks, and suggest technical controls and policy features in place to ensure these systems work efficiently”.
Working with the central bank means everything is done at a larger scale because the customers are not individuals, but commercial banks, the stock exchanges, and the government. The central bank is the engine of the economy, so it is important to keep everything running smoothly and maintain that confidence the country has in the central bank.”
Outside of his work in cybersecurity, Samuel has another passion, angel investing. Samuel has invested in four Ugandan companies to date, including Xeno, a wealth-tech startup in Uganda that helps its customers make goal-based investments. Others are Impala Credit, an invoice financing fintech, and Bulooka, an online real estate marketplace. Australia has a much more developed startup ecosystem than Uganda’s, and thus investing in Australian startups could potentially yield bigger returns, at least in monetary value, than Ugandan startups, where the ecosystem is still nascent. But Samuel explains his logic.
“I once worked in a startup in Australia, which gave me a front-row seat in the startup world. I got to see the grit that was required, and how founders could create wealth through startups. And then moving to Atlassian showed me what a successful startup exit could look like because I met people who had been there from the early days and had hit the jackpot because their shares were very valuable.”
This made Samuel think about finding his next Atlassian. But first, he needed to understand angel investing. He joined StartMate, which had started an accelerator program called First Believers that taught the basics of angel investing, from valuing a deal to product market fit. Due to his experience, he initially wanted to invest in cybersecurity companies, but there weren’t many of these companies. His thesis changed when he spoke to one of Australia’s most prolific investors Rayn Ong.
“He broke down the importance of having an edge for me. I needed to have an edge where I knew things that other investors didn’t, or it would take them some time to figure out what I knew. It got me thinking about my background growing up in Uganda. I knew I could analyze deals from Africa better than an investor who had never lived there. And it was a bonus that the capital requirements would be lower.” He got in touch with friends in Uganda and started investing.
Having invested since 2022, Samuel looks back on some of the lessons he has learned. “Angel investing is in a way similar to setting your money on fire. You can do it twice and get burned; then, on the third time, your investment grows exponentially covering all the two times you got burned. You always hope to get one such deal to recoup all the deals that go wrong. However, apart from making returns, there are also other benefits one can get. Investing in Xeno has made me understand the financial industry better than any university could and given me a sense of purpose in building institutions in Uganda. But it is also important to diversify your investments.”
As we end our conversation, Samuel shares something that has served him well across his career. “There is a little bit of luck involved in achieving great things in life, but you have to increase your surface area for luck. I have managed to work in great companies, but I had to apply to 10 or 15 other companies before landing on one. So you have to keep on trying. I also think Ugandans downplay themselves, but we are a very resilient group of people. I think having the faith that things will work out has served me very well.
This story was published by ORION, a community of ambitious Founders, Fund Managers, and Career Professionals in Uganda and of Ugandan descent. Samuel Sentongo is a member of ORION.
