There is a myth that floats around the edges of Africa’s tech ecosystem. It goes something like this: you have a big idea, you pitch it to the right people in the right room, the capital arrives, and you build. This myth has a specific geography—it is usually set in San Francisco, occasionally in London, and sometimes in Lagos or Nairobi, if the storyteller is feeling continental.
But I built Pawa IT in Nairobi. And the reality of building here is far less glamorous, but infinitely more grounding.
P001 — The First Believers
Every company has its P001. The first person who believes in a vision enough to bet their livelihood on it. At Pawa IT Solutions, our P001 joined us in 2013 with no salary guarantee beyond a handshake. We shared a conviction: African enterprises deserved better, more reliable technology than they were getting, and we were the team to deliver it. That P001 was yours truly.
I had recently left Google. Not because things were going badly, but because my time there—deploying Google Apps for Education across universities in Kenya and Uganda—showed me exactly what was missing. I saw firsthand how the right infrastructure could transform institutions, but I also saw the vast gap between what African organizations needed and what was actually being built for them. That gap wasn’t a pitch deck or a financial model. It was a calling.
I co-founded Pawa IT on the simplest thesis in enterprise technology: be genuinely excellent at what you do, price it honestly, and the market will find you. No venture capital. No angel round. No safety net. Just the work.
The Unglamorous Gospel of Bootstrapping
The word “bootstrapping” is often used romantically by those who haven’t had to live it. Let me be open about what it actually costs.
It means that “Founder” is just a polite word for an entire organizational chart compressed into one severely under-slept human being. You are the CEO by midday, standing in front of a client or a team projecting unwavering visionary confidence. By 2 PM, you have quietly stripped off the visionary hat to become the VP of Sales, grinding through a brutal negotiation with a skeptical procurement officer because the pipeline demands to be fed. By late afternoon, you are the Head of HR mediating a team dispute, and the Marketing Director tweaking campaign copy just to keep the brand visible.
And just when the world clocks out and the day should be done, your second shift begins.
The office empties, but you are now the compliance officer wrestling with KRA tax portals in the quiet of the evening. By eleven on a Tuesday night, you are the CFO. Illuminated only by the harsh glow of a cash-flow spreadsheet, you are moving numbers around, agonizing over delayed receivables to guarantee that Friday’s payroll clears.
But the reality of those nights was far more vulnerable than just spreadsheets. It was the “daddy shift.” I spent countless nights acting as the midnight babysitter—pacing the floor, rocking my baby to sleep with one arm while my eyes stayed fixed on a glowing screen, watching deployment scripts run line by line in the terminal.
And in the quiet gaps between soothing a child and praying the code wouldn’t fail, my mind would be racing, planning the logistics of the next morning’s travel. I’d be calculating the distance and the matatus I’d need to take, and the hours it would take to get to a client in a remote town—whether it was Laikipia, Kisii, Meru, or Nyeri—before the sun came up.
There is a profound, aching loneliness in this kind of building. It is the specific isolation of feeling entirely alone even when you are standing in a crowded room of your own employees, carrying a weight you cannot safely share with them. It is a constant, low-humming anxiety. It is the bizarre physical sensation of being intensely, completely exhausted, yet too wired to sleep. It is the reality of being deeply hungry, but so knotted with stress that you are physically unable to eat a single bite.
You survive on a diet of relentless context-switching and adrenaline. And through every role, every hat, every midnight script, and every sunrise drive to a county far from home, the universal rule of the bootstrapped founder remains unbroken: you are always the last person to be paid, and sometimes, you are not paid at all.
Funded by Invoices of Hope and Despair
When people ask how we grew, what they usually mean is: who funded you? The punchy, sanitized answer is that we were funded by invoices.
The honest, far more painful truth is that an invoice is a cruel kind of currency. An invoice is not cash; it is merely a legally binding hope. We were funded by bonds and promises.
In the enterprise world, you close a massive deal, you deliver exceptional work, you send the invoice—and then, the waiting begins. And in that wait, time begins to warp. You watch the calendar inch toward the end of the month with a suffocating dread, watching thirty days turn into sixty, then ninety. You learn to interpret the terrifying nuance of a client saying, “Your payment is with finance” or “It will clear next week.”
You cannot pay your cloud providers with “next week.” You cannot buy your developers’ groceries with a signed LPO. You sit there, holding a contract from a massive, prestigious institution, yet you are entirely paralyzed by anxiety, quietly pleading with the universe that some faceless procurement officer presses the “approve” button before the bank closes on Friday. We survived on the agonizing tightrope of hoping that the money would land just hours before payroll was due. That is the despair they don’t put in pitch decks: the quiet, desperate fear of having built something brilliant, only to watch it potentially crumble because a payment is stuck in an inbox.
And yet, within that crucible of anxiety, we built.
Looking back twelve years later, the numbers might look like a neat, unbroken trajectory of success. Pawa IT has served over 450 customers across 25 African countries. We became a Premier Google Cloud Partner—one of a small handful on the continent. We deployed cloud infrastructure, managed IT services, and executed digital transformation programs for banks, telcos, government agencies, and universities across the region. Outwardly, we were titans of industry; inwardly, we were holding our breath.
In The Cockroach Dance, Meja Mwangi captures this relentless cycle perfectly: “Unexpected and unwelcome, tomorrow came every morning… dragging behind it more calamities. And every morning, we stood up to meet it.” In an enterprise market that has historically been oversold and under-delivered to, standing up to meet it meant one thing: consistent delivery. Even when our stomachs were in knots, even when we were operating on the sheer fumes of delayed promises, we woke up and we showed up. Every time we delivered exactly what we said we would, despite the financial terror happening behind the scenes, we were not just closing a deal. We were making the next deal possible, slowly turning those fragile promises into an unbreakable reputation.
The Crushing Weight of P001 to P113
Between 2013 and today, Pawa IT has employed 113 people.
I count them from P001 to P113 because every single number represents a human being. Each one is a person who left another job — or took their very first one — and trusted us with a meaningful piece of their professional life. That is not a headcount. That is 113 individual acts of faith placed in me, in this company, in a vision they could not yet fully see.
Every founder hears the advice: “Hire smarter than you.”
In principle, it is great counsel. In practice, it ignores the first law of talent economics: the best engineers in any market are already employed, already compensated, and already receiving counter-offers every quarter. They are at Microsoft. At Safaricom. At Google. They are earning exactly the premium salaries they deserve — and they should be. The supply-and-demand laws that govern talent work exactly as advertised.
When you are funded by delayed invoices — not venture capital, not a diaspora cheque, not a government grant — you cannot win that auction. The Silicon Savannah pundits who tell bootstrapped founders to simply “match top-market salaries” are giving advice that has no answer to the most obvious follow-up question: from which cheques?
So we competed on a completely different axis.
We hired for trajectory over credentials. We looked for raw hunger. We found engineers with immense potential. We made individual bets — one person at a time — that a person’s growth curve was worth more than their current market rate. P003 didn’t join us because we outbid anyone. They joined because they wanted to build something from the ground up. And we built it, together.
Then the inevitable happens.
That charming, sharp, dependable engineer — the one you trained from scratch, the one who grew from junior support into a senior solutions architect under your roof — walks into your office one afternoon with a particular kind of energy. You know it before they sit down. You have seen it before.
They hand you the letter. They are grateful. They are going to a bigger name, a bigger package, a bigger platform.
You stand up. You shake their hand. You smile — warm, genuine, congratulatory — because you mean it. You are proud of them. You should be proud of them. You built this person.
But behind the smile, your heart is palpitating. Because what they cannot see, what they will never fully know, is the quiet terror that arrives the moment the door closes behind them. The exhausting arithmetic that begins immediately: Who do we recruit now? How long will training take? Which client will feel the gap first?
And then you do it all over again. Recruit. Train. Mentor. Build. Lose. Repeat.
Over and over and over again.
The weight of this cycle is entirely unseen, and it is crushing. You have 113 people looking up to you, depending on you to make payroll, believing — because you project it, because you have to — that you are a visionary who has it all figured out. What they don’t see is that often, behind the calm and the clarity and the long-term thinking, you are utterly overwhelmed. You are figuring it out in real time, the same as everyone else. You are just not allowed to show it.
The Lion’s Own History
Chinua Achebe famously wrote that “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
He was talking about literature. But he was also talking about this.
But the hunter’s narrative always misses the mark. It fails entirely to capture the raw, unvarnished context of what it actually takes to build from the soil up.
When they write in the now, they miss the agonizing, silent middles: the days spent acting as CEO, CFO, and babysitter all at once. They completely miss the tears. No headline has ever captured the sheer terror of waking up at 3 AM, staring into the dark, and realizing you have to borrow money to pay your own rent just so your team can feed their families.
And when they write our epitaphs, they measure us by metrics that were never built for us. They tally our cap tables, but they ignore our character. They will judge a company by its funding rounds, but completely overlook the monumental, bone-crushing grit required to keep payroll unbroken for twelve years. They do not see the 113 lives transformed. They do not see the human infrastructure we built, layer by agonizing layer.
That is why I am writing this. This is the lion writing its own history.
It is a history of sweat, of palpitating hearts masked by reassuring smiles, of midnight deployment scripts, and of the profound, crushing loneliness of leadership. It is the story of how incredibly hard it is to build here, but also how much beauty there is in standing up every single morning to meet the challenge.
P001 believed in something they could not yet see. So did P013. So did P113.