Work

Most African cities do not have a public transport system. What they have is thousands of private operators running their own routes. No standards. No coordination. You get on a bus and hope for the best. That is daily life for about 80% of commuters in cities like Nairobi and Mombasa.

I partnered with Kikonde Mwatela, previously COO at Twiga Foods, to ask a question that sounds simple but is not: can public transportation in African cities be made safe, affordable, and decent? Can it happen within the existing model, or does it need a completely new approach?

The only honest way to answer that was to start from first principles. So we did. Started with the barebones of operating an EV bus. Engaged transport operators. Engaged government. Watched what worked and what did not. That process led us to something we did not start with: a subscription-based transportation service, launched in Mombasa through a partnership with the county government.

The interesting thing about public transport in Africa is that the problem is not technology. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is building a framework where none exists. You are not disrupting an incumbent. You are creating the structure that should have been there before you showed up. That is a fundamentally different kind of building.

Three years in. Still going.

Built this with Morris Warima. We noticed something that seemed underexplored. The cost of connectivity had dropped dramatically. 0G networks like Sigfox and LoRaWAN meant you could put a sensor on something in rural Kenya for a fraction of what it cost five years earlier. If that was true, then the applied layer for IoT in African markets was ready to be built.

We set up as an IoT studio to test where that thesis held. Looked at floriculture. Looked at poultry. Ended up in dairy. Built a wearable for cows that detects heat cycles so farmers can keep milk production consistent. An apple watch for cows.

Had revenue from our first customer and three partnerships going within six months. Then COVID hit and the market window closed. Company is an R&D project now.

What stayed with me from Platfot is how much you learn when you build hardware for a market with real infrastructure constraints. Software lets you iterate from a laptop. Hardware forces you into the field. Every assumption gets tested by a cow, a farmer, and a network signal that may or may not be there. It was the hardest and most fun thing I have done.

I started WeCashUp in 2013. Back then, nobody was using the phrase “African fintech.” We built a payments API for merchants across Francophone West Africa. Grew to 14 markets through partnerships with banks and telcos. No marketing budget. No paid acquisition. Just product and relationships.

The thing I figured out at WeCashUp, which has shaped everything since, is that growth in African markets does not work the way it works in the US or Europe. You do not run ads. You do not do content marketing. You find the right bank, the right telco, the right distribution partner, and you build with them. Your partner strategy is your growth strategy. There is no separating the two.

The company is under receivership now. What I took from it still shows up in how I work.

TechCrunch Battlefield Africa finalist, 2018.

Global SaaS company, 100+ people, doing tax compliance across the EU, UK, and US. This was a different kind of challenge from anything I had done before. Existing revenue. Existing customers. Decisions that carried real weight.

I ran GTM discovery for their US market entry. That work fed directly into the acquisition of LumaTax. I also inherited a conversion funnel that was losing almost every signup after registration and rebuilt it in a quarter to close to industry standard.

What I took from Taxually is that operating inside a scaled company requires a different instinct than starting one. You have more resources and less room to move. The constraints are political as much as they are technical. I was glad to find out I could do both.

First hire in Kenya. First product manager the company ever had. Shara was building operations tools for small businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa.

I owned product and partnerships across three countries at the same time. Validated three products. Got partner relationships from first conversations to signed agreements in each market. User acquisition went up 5x across all three.