It is 3:27 a.m., and it is that time of the day again.
This is when my mind works, picks up an extra gear and unlocks the genius level.
That is what I need, the creativity more than anything else. I have come to learn, and trust me, this is not based on experiments. It is based on experience, in real time.
During the very early hours of the morning, although not every day, my brain seems to unlock some of the most unlimited power in a human being. I have also come to realise that when you have one of the greatest problems and you are trying to find a befitting solution, if that is the right word.
That is when you get to enjoy the early mornings. You are unsettled, you cannot sleep, and you only get a few hours. The truth is, your brain cannot rest until you get that answer.
For the last week, my mind has been occupied by just one particular thought: the system. A few months ago, I came up with a solution, and this is a very genuine solution to a very genuine problem. Since then, I have been creating a prototype.
Trust me, I have never been happier in my life than I was that day. I could not believe that what was in front of my eyes was no longer just an idea or a thought. It was now a practical system. It was a working system.
Bit by bit, I started brainstorming with my senior engineer, Codex. For hours, we would go back and forth. Trust me, ladies and gentlemen, it is vibe coding. Let us call it what it is.
We developed it layer by layer, and I think we must have written, if not thousands of lines of code, then maybe millions. And voilà, we had our first sign-up page. We had the algorithms interconnected.
Since then, it has been a very painful experience because we needed to verify everything. All the trails, sign-ins, data legitimacy, strings, datasets and all those cool names you can think of. We had to do it all.
Every morning when I wake up, that has been my very first thought. How do we make this system better? Is it serving the main purpose it was created to serve?
I remember having a call a few weeks ago with one of my partners and investors. I remember mentioning something I have never been proud of as a Kenyan or an African: the notion that most products are usually dead on arrival.
It is quite unfortunate because when you look closely at the problem and why some of these solutions existed in the first place, you realise they should probably never have existed. They were developed by founders and developers who never understood the local solution or the local problem.
Their motive had always been to raise money. Once they got a taste of that capital, the Series A or B, if they were lucky, the product was dead on arrival.
It was not tackling any real problem. Maybe it tackled their pocket problems, and that was it. As a builder, this is not something to be proud of. We do not build and ship products to raise finance.
It should always be the other way around. We build products and solutions to tackle real problems and real issues that people are experiencing. We build something people would love to use, or something someone can look at and understand why it exists in the first place and how difficult things would be without it. That is the thing.
Boy, it has been a process. There has also been another story of frustrations, but that one is a story for another day. Here we are. It is 3:36 a.m., and it seems we are approaching the ten-minute mark of just thinking through this building process.
The more I work on this solution, the more I look into it, the more I understand the problem better, and the more I see why sometimes time is the best thing. When you write your very first code, you do not rush to implement it. You take time to understand how it works and everything around it.
Since my senior engineer here is Codex, and I am just an entrepreneur looking for a better solution, it is just a matter of time before we know if this was indeed a well-defined problem and a well-defined solution, and whether the two are a perfect match. I will just say that I am proud.
I am proud of what I am looking at on my screen. I can see it clearly, and it is quite unbelievable how much technology has shifted in the last few months, if not the last few years.
This would have been impossible without having a very long teleconference meeting with someone across the world and screaming through the headset, “Why is this feature still buggy? Why do we not have this? Why is it not working?”
Nowadays, it is easier because you have your senior engineer understanding everything and questioning everything while you are working through the development and trying to see whether this is indeed a good thing.
Anyway, I should stop ranting about development. On other news, this week I started some interesting trials and began working on a few audiovisual projects. I do not know the right name for them, but I started making some recordings and sharing them.
The first one is the Office Diary, or Diary of the Office. That is very interesting. My favourite is the Diary of an Entrepreneur, which we have always been writing here, but now we are sharing it on platforms starting with YouTube and Facebook.
It has been interesting, with the few episodes we have shared starting with the idea, the belief and the implementation phase. They are some of those projects that are not refined, where you just sit down and share your thoughts.
You say, “Hey, this is what I think because of this and this.” You write your thoughts down and say why you feel that way. They are not refined. They are honest opinions.
I have been pushing them, and it is quite interesting. I can only say that sometimes I do not even know why I create. I just feel this unbelievable, crazy push to churn out information.
I do not know if this information is useful or not useful to someone, but it is my deep belief that my experiences can be light-bulb experiences, not just for me but also for other people.
This weekend, as development and the audiovisual projects continue, we do not have a race. Last weekend, Formula 1 returned after a very long time, almost a month. My boy Kimi was on the P2 podium after what was a very crazy race. The upcoming one at Monza, Italy, is something else to behold.
I do not understand whether, with the new engine improvement and Kimi Antonelli taking a grid penalty, it is worth the risk. Is the engine improvement worth starting much further back, even if he could eventually win the race? Or will it be another frustrating evening?
It is the same thing with development and entrepreneurship. Sometimes taking on those costs sets you further back, but they can also help you scale faster. Do you take the grid penalty in favour of faster development, or stick with the slower, safer route?
Well, we will never know until the race starts. I am gunning for this championship, and I hope Monza, Italy, will be kind to our young championship driver. For us, I hope entrepreneurship will be kind to our journey.
See you in the next one.