There is a version of my story that fits neatly into a headline. It has a villain. A scandal. A one-line verdict. It is the version that travels fastest, indexes highest, and says least about what actually happened — and nothing at all about what I spent a decade building before it.
This is not that version.
The Build
In 2013, I co-founded Pawa IT Solutions with nothing except a conviction that African enterprises deserved world-class technology — and the stubbornness to prove it without waiting for someone else’s money.
No venture capital. No diaspora cheque. No government grant. We bootstrapped every shilling, signed every client with a handshake first and a contract second, and built the company on a simple, unglamorous bet: that if we were genuinely good at what we did, the market would reward us.
It did. By the time we had thirty employees, we were delivering cloud migrations, IT infrastructure, and Google Workspace transformations to some of not only Kenya’s most consequential organizations, but Africa’s. We were a premier Google Cloud partner. We were doing work that, frankly, firms ten times our size struggled to execute.
I had come through Google. I had seen what institutional rigour, engineering culture, and genuine product obsession looked like from the inside. I wanted to bring that standard home. That ambition was real. It still is. But ambition, I have learned, is not the same as wisdom. And building fast is not the same as building right.
The Culture Problem No One Talks About
There is a particular kind of danger that comes with being a founder-CEO in a small, fast-growing company. You set the culture by default. Every joke you make, every boundary you cross, every time you mistake informality for intimacy — it becomes the standard. Because you are not just a colleague. You are the company.
I built Pawa IT with a culture of openness. I communicated informally. I shared broadly — articles, ideas, humour, the random things I found interesting. It was, I genuinely believed, part of building a team where people felt comfortable and connected. In many ways it was. In at least one crucial way, it was not.
In 2023, an employment case brought by a former colleague brought me face-to-face with a question I had not been honest enough with myself to ask: does the culture I have built make every person on my team feel safe? Not just valued. Not just engaged. Safe.
The answer, for at least one person, was no.
I want to be precise about what I am saying here, because precision matters. The legal case was a civil employment dispute, decided on a civil standard of probability. An independent investigation conducted by an external law firm reached different conclusions on the core allegations, and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ultimately declined to pursue any criminal charges based on a total lack of evidence. I paid the full court award. The Court of Appeal later confirmed the matter was closed.
But facts do not tell the whole story. The deeper truth is this: regardless of where any specific legal line was drawn, I had created a workplace where the boundaries between founder and friend, between CEO and colleague, were blurrier than they should have been. That had consequences. And I am accountable for those consequences.
What Falling Teaches You
When you are building a company, you think about everything except how it will fall apart. You think about the product, the clients, the next hire, the next contract. You do not think about the governance structures you have not built, the HR manual you have not written, the independent voices you have not added to your board.
I have thought about little else since 2023.
Pawa IT has spent the past two years doing the unglamorous work of building institutional muscle. A proper HR framework. A formal grievance policy. Independent oversight. The kind of structural accountability that big companies have by default but that founder-led startups treat as a bureaucratic luxury they will get to eventually.
We never got to it. Until we had to.
I have also done the personal work — the harder, quieter kind. Understanding what it means to hold power in an organisation. Understanding that informal warmth, in the hands of someone with authority, can easily become something else entirely without ever intending it to. Understanding that intent and impact are not the same thing, and that accountability does not require you to have been a villain.
None of this is comfortable to write. It would be easier to hide behind the legal record. But I have built my career on the idea that honest, direct communication is the foundation of good work. I am not going to abandon that principle when applying it is hardest.
The Road Ahead
Kenya’s tech ecosystem is extraordinary. What founders here are building — with the constraints we face, the infrastructure gaps we navigate, the funding deserts we cross — is genuinely world-class. But we are at a moment where the sector’s growth is outpacing its maturity. We are building fast and governing slowly. And the gap between those two speeds is where most of the damage happens — to companies, to employees, and to founders.
I am not going anywhere. Pawa IT is not going anywhere. The work of bringing enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to African organisations is not finished — it has barely begun.
This commitment to structure and rigour is now the bedrock of my current work at Konversations. AI is arriving, and Africa is not ready. At Konversations, we are leveraging conversational AI to help African enterprises bridge the digital transformation gap, but we are doing it on a foundation of “Governance 2.0.”
I am building differently now. With more structure. More accountability. More awareness of the human systems that underpin every technical system. A company is not its code or its cloud contracts. It is its people — and the culture that shapes how those people experience every single day of work.
A company is not its code. It is its people—and the culture that protects them. That is the lesson. Expensive. Late. Entirely mine.