On turning 39, and the beauty entrepreneurship has actually given me
I’ve caught myself, over the last while, writing mostly about the weight of this journey — the challenges, the grind, the gloom that comes with building something out of nothing in this part of the world. All of it true. None of it the whole story. Today, on my birthday, I want to write the other half.
First, because the engineer in me can’t resist a clean equation: the arithmetic of today. I was born on 9/9 — a double nine, and 9 is 3 squared, tidy as anything. Today that day rolls over into 39, which factors as 3 × 13 — so the day I was born and the age I’ve become are both, in their own quiet way, built out of threes. Do the fuller arithmetic and it gets better: from 9 September 1987 to today is exactly 14,245 sunrises — thirty-nine years’ worth of days, plus ten bonus leap-year mornings thrown in for free. Thirty-nine on its own isn’t an exotic milestone; no one writes songs about it the way they do 21 or 40. But paired with 9/9, and turned over a few times in the quiet of the morning, it feels complete. Fitting, maybe, for a birthday where I’m trying to see more in the ordinary than I usually let myself.
Because the truth is, this entrepreneurship journey has been wildly, almost unreasonably successful, and I don’t say that often enough out loud.
The personal ledger
I have built wealth. It has bought my family a genuinely good, peaceful life, and on this birthday, I refuse to reflexively downplay that the way I usually do. We live in a neighbourhood that only a small number of Kenyans could ever afford to call home.
My children go to schools where a single term’s fees costs more than my entire education did — nursery, primary, and secondary, all the way through that five-year degree at JKUAT. (Granted, I was a regular student on a GoK scholarship and loan — I paid KSh 16,000 a semester, and my high school fees were under KSh 10,000 a year :-).) I own good things: clothes, shoes, a car I like driving.
And I take holidays. Can you believe that — me, taking holidays regularly, sometimes to places I had no idea existed, let alone that I’d ever get to visit. None of that is possible without this journey.
I don’t need to shout about these things from the rooftops, but at thirty-nine, I am also done pretending they aren’t real. It’s a quiet dignity I spent years working toward, and today, I simply allow myself to be grateful for it.
What the country gained alongside me
Beyond my own household, there’s a ledger I think about less often but is arguably the more important one. I have created employment that would simply not exist if I hadn’t started this. People — myself included — have pensions, and healthy ones. Around that core business, an entire constellation of other livelihoods now exists because we exist: our pension provider, our health insurer, the lunch vendors who feed our teams every day, the stewards and support staff who keep the lights on. We pay millions of shillings in taxes in Kenya every single year — enough that we have a dedicated KRA account manager, a team lead, and a sector manager who know us by name, and who call us directly if a month’s PAYE or VAT payment is even a little late. And we generate real foreign exchange for this country: close to 40% of our revenue now comes from outside Kenya. That is a scale of impact I genuinely would not have dared to imagine for myself when I started.
The professional thread
Further back, in the earliest days, there was a different kind of impact — the digital footprint I left across university campuses, where for a while it felt like almost everyone knew my name for what we were building. What means more now, with distance, is what came after: the number of engineers who passed through what we built and went on to genuinely thrive elsewhere. Every time I hear about one of them succeeding, there’s a small, private flicker of pride I don’t always say out loud. I’ll say it today: I am proud of that.
The partner who made all of it possible
If I’m honest with myself, stating all of this plainly and without bragging, none of it would have gone the way it did without one person: Beryl Samba — my day-one partner, my wife, my co-founder from the very beginning, and, these days, my boss. There was a point where I was carrying the organisation I’d built and was, frankly, weighed down, tired, worn thin in a way I didn’t fully admit at the time. I think often of General Haraka in Meja Mwangi’s Carcase for Hounds — waiting, and quietly tearing himself apart, for the other generals he’d been told could still reinforce him. Had they come, he would not have been defeated. They didn’t, and he was: a carcase for hounds. I got luckier. My reinforcement actually arrived. Beryl walked away from her job at Coca-Cola to come lead it instead. I don’t think I could have built this better with anyone else standing next to me from day one.
Full circle
I named my own son after Ken Saro-Wiwa, so his words have stayed with me: Africa Kills Her Sun, a title I’ve always found devastating in what it assumes about this continent and the people who try to rise on it. I don’t accept that assumption for myself, and I said as much to myself earlier today: Africa did not kill her sun. Africa brightened her sun. Whatever clouds have hovered — and they have hovered — I have shone, and shone brighter than anything I could have fathomed for myself when this started.
It reminds me a little of Xuma, in Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy — an outsider who arrives with nothing, works his way into the mine, and slowly becomes someone his fellow workers can actually stand behind, to the point of leading them when it mattered most. That arc — showing up, doing the unglamorous work, and eventually becoming someone worth following — is the one I recognise most in my own last decade and a half.
Thirty-nine years old today. 14,245 sunrises in. Still building, still grateful, and — for once — saying so plainly.
Oscar Limoke is the co-founder of Pawa IT Solutions and Konversations. He writes about technology, leadership, and what it actually costs to build something in Africa.