[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":971},["ShallowReactive",2],{"post-the-conversations-youre-not-having":3,"series-The Leap":186},{"_path":4,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":8,"description":9,"slug":10,"date":11,"readTime":12,"series":13,"location":14,"draft":6,"body":15,"_type":180,"_id":181,"_source":182,"_file":183,"_stem":184,"_extension":185},"\u002Fposts\u002Fthe-conversations-youre-not-having","posts",false,"","The Conversations You're Not Having","I walked past a job fair in Toronto and thought about the internships my sister and I never heard about. Opportunity moves through conversations. The barrier is rarely ability. It is usually permission.","the-conversations-youre-not-having","2026-09-07","5 min read","The Leap","YYZ",{"type":16,"children":17,"toc":177},"root",[18,26,31,36,41,46,51,56,61,77,82,87,92,97,102,107,112,117,122,127,132,137,142,147,152,157,162,167,172],{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":21,"children":22},"element","p",{},[23],{"type":24,"value":25},"text","I walked past a job fair on the University of Toronto campus last week. Banners, folding tables, students in blazers clutching CVs. Companies with clipboards looking for interns.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":27,"children":28},{},[29],{"type":24,"value":30},"I didn't stop. But I slowed down.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":32,"children":33},{},[34],{"type":24,"value":35},"Because I kept looking at the students who glanced in, did a quick mental audit of their qualifications, and kept walking. Not because the opportunity wasn't for them. Because nobody had told them it was.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":37,"children":38},{},[39],{"type":24,"value":40},"A few days earlier my sister and I had been talking about university. About how, when we were students, there were internships and schemes and open doors we simply never heard about. It wasn't that we weren't qualified. We didn't know they existed. And other people, sitting in the same lecture halls, clearly did. They arrived already knowing which companies came recruiting, which programmes to apply to, when the deadlines fell. The information reached them and it never reached us.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":42,"children":43},{},[44],{"type":24,"value":45},"I used to call that bad luck. I don't anymore.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":47,"children":48},{},[49],{"type":24,"value":50},"A lot of opportunity moves through people, not systems. Job boards are the official record. The real thing tends to travel through conversation. The internship that turns into a job. The project that turns into a company. The introduction that changes what you thought was possible. It moves when someone says \"I know someone,\" or \"you should meet,\" or \"have you thought about.\"",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":52,"children":53},{},[54],{"type":24,"value":55},"The question is whether you're in those conversations at all.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":57,"children":58},{},[59],{"type":24,"value":60},"I've been thinking about how I got into them. It wasn't sudden, and it didn't come naturally. It's a practice I built slowly. Through the years after university. Through a long stretch in a job where I was quietly certain I would be found out. Through a lot of travelling. Somewhere across all of that I started talking to strangers, and kept at it until it stopped being something I had to steel myself for.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":62,"children":63},{},[64,66,75],{"type":24,"value":65},"There was David, an investor I met at a climbing wall in Nairobi. We got talking between climbs, and I was candid about what I was chasing, even though I couldn't yet name it. He owed me nothing. But over the following weeks he made introduction after introduction, to founders I had no other way of reaching. One stranger on a wall, and a whole city opened up. I've written about where that went in ",{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":68,"children":72},"a",{"href":69,"rel":70},"https:\u002F\u002Ftobynwuba.com\u002Fposts\u002Fthe-stumble",[71],"nofollow",[73],{"type":24,"value":74},"The Stumble",{"type":24,"value":76},".",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":78,"children":79},{},[80],{"type":24,"value":81},"There was Ashish Sood, who I met over coffee at Sokkool, a co-working space in Bali. We fell into conversation one morning as strangers, and I had no idea he ran a venture fund until we were well past small talk. Then he introduced me to a collective of creators and builders I hadn't known existed. A whole world that had been invisible to me an hour earlier.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":83,"children":84},{},[85],{"type":24,"value":86},"And there was Yelena, and her friend Mahmoud, who I met by chance in a shopping mall in Beijing. I don't remember exactly how it started. I think one of them asked about something I was carrying. We ended up talking for an hour.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":88,"children":89},{},[90],{"type":24,"value":91},"Three countries. Three completely different rooms. The same small impulse underneath each one, and each one opened a door I didn't know was there.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":93,"children":94},{},[95],{"type":24,"value":96},"Most people who hear this assume I find it easy. I don't.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":98,"children":99},{},[100],{"type":24,"value":101},"I have a stutter. It's always there somewhere in the background. In the half-second before I speak. In the moment I choose a word because it's easier to say than the one I actually wanted. It makes starting a conversation carry extra weight. Not impossible. Just heavier than it looks from the outside.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":103,"children":104},{},[105],{"type":24,"value":106},"What I have instead is curiosity. Real curiosity about people. Where they're from, what they're building, what they think about. And I've found that curiosity, when it's genuine, does most of the work. People can feel the difference between someone who wants to talk to them and someone who wants something from them.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":108,"children":109},{},[110],{"type":24,"value":111},"But here's what I've learned from doing this across enough countries and enough rooms. The willingness to start a conversation is not evenly distributed. And it isn't about personality.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":113,"children":114},{},[115],{"type":24,"value":116},"It's about permission.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":118,"children":119},{},[120],{"type":24,"value":121},"Some people grow up in environments where talking to strangers is just what you do. Where curiosity across social lines is normal, modelled, unremarkable. Where they watch the people around them move through the world as if the room belongs to them.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":123,"children":124},{},[125],{"type":24,"value":126},"Others grow up learning the opposite. That deference is appropriate. That unsolicited conversation is an imposition. That the person on the other side of the room, the senior one, the one who seems to already know everyone, is not someone you approach.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":128,"children":129},{},[130],{"type":24,"value":131},"Culture shapes this. Class shapes this. Race shapes this. Whether you went to a school that surfaced certain opportunities and not others shapes this. Whether you grew up watching people who looked like you walk into rooms with ease shapes this.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":133,"children":134},{},[135],{"type":24,"value":136},"The effect is that some people never try to start the conversation. Not because they can't. Because the idea that they should never occurred to them.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":138,"children":139},{},[140],{"type":24,"value":141},"And the cost is invisible, precisely because the conversation that didn't happen leaves no trace.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":143,"children":144},{},[145],{"type":24,"value":146},"I'm not going to pretend the fix is simple. \"Just talk to people\" is the self-help flattening of a structural problem. Access is real. Networks get built early, and often inherited.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":148,"children":149},{},[150],{"type":24,"value":151},"But there is something worth saying to the person standing outside the room, capable, unsure whether they're allowed in.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":153,"children":154},{},[155],{"type":24,"value":156},"You are. The conversation doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't need a brilliant opening line. Curiosity is enough. Most people, when someone is genuinely interested in them, will meet you more than halfway. The ones who don't were never going to be worth the weight you'd have given them.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":158,"children":159},{},[160],{"type":24,"value":161},"And there's a harder thing to say to the rest of us, the ones already in the room. If you're the person others come to for an introduction, some of this is yours to carry too. The conversation that never happens isn't only theirs to begin. You can be the one who notices someone at the edge and says the name. It usually costs you nothing. Now and then it changes everything for them.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":163,"children":164},{},[165],{"type":24,"value":166},"I walked past that job fair and thought about a younger version of myself. Less sure. Less practised. Convinced that confidence was something other people had been handed and I hadn't. I don't know exactly when that changed. It wasn't a single moment. It was slow, and it took years, and a climbing wall in Nairobi, a coffee in Bali, and an hour in a mall in China were only the most recent proof of it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":168,"children":169},{},[170],{"type":24,"value":171},"I also thought about my sister, and the internships neither of us heard about. We weren't unqualified. We just weren't in the conversation.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":173,"children":174},{},[175],{"type":24,"value":176},"So start it. Not because it's easy. Because the ones you don't start are the ones that haunt you.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":178,"depth":178,"links":179},2,[],"markdown","content:posts:the-conversations-youre-not-having.md","content","posts\u002Fthe-conversations-youre-not-having.md","posts\u002Fthe-conversations-youre-not-having","md",[187,367,504,747,844],{"_path":188,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":189,"description":190,"slug":191,"date":192,"readTime":193,"series":13,"location":194,"draft":6,"body":195,"_type":180,"_id":364,"_source":182,"_file":365,"_stem":366,"_extension":185},"\u002Fposts\u002Fwhy-i-quit-my-job","Why I Quit My Job","How I saved for a year, packed up my life in London, and boarded a flight to Kenya","why-i-quit-my-job","2025-05-01","4 min read","LDN",{"type":16,"children":196,"toc":357},[197,202,207,212,217,224,229,234,240,245,250,255,261,266,271,276,282,287,292,297,302,307,312,317,347,352],{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":198,"children":199},{},[200],{"type":24,"value":201},"For years, the idea of quitting lingered in the background.\nIt started quietly, thoughts that showed up between meetings, on walks, during holidays when I finally felt like myself again.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":203,"children":204},{},[205],{"type":24,"value":206},"At my job, I’d grown a lot, technically and as a leader but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was meant to be building something I believed in. Something that felt like mine.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":208,"children":209},{},[210],{"type":24,"value":211},"I didn’t have a product yet. Or a cofounder. But I had the belief that if I gave myself space, I’d find it. And that was enough to get serious about planning my exit.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":213,"children":214},{},[215],{"type":24,"value":216},"And so I began saving intentionally.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":219,"children":221},"h3",{"id":220},"saving-for-the-unknown",[222],{"type":24,"value":223},"Saving for the Unknown",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":225,"children":226},{},[227],{"type":24,"value":228},"Roughly two years before I left, I got serious about saving. I tracked my monthly spending and created a budget that assumed I’d still be paying rent and living as comfortably as I had been. I didn’t want my freedom to feel like scarcity.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":230,"children":231},{},[232],{"type":24,"value":233},"My goal was at least twelve months of runway. Not just survival money, but a realistic budget for travel, creativity, and exploration without needing to earn right away.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":235,"children":237},{"id":236},"priming-nigerian-parents-a-masterclass-in-messaging",[238],{"type":24,"value":239},"Priming Nigerian Parents: A Masterclass in Messaging",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":241,"children":242},{},[243],{"type":24,"value":244},"You can’t just tell Nigerian parents you’re quitting your job “to find yourself.”",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":246,"children":247},{},[248],{"type":24,"value":249},"So I eased them into it.\nTalked about burnout. Framed it as a strategic break. Highlighted my financial plan. Introduced the idea of starting something new.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":251,"children":252},{},[253],{"type":24,"value":254},"They didn’t fully understand the decision, but they saw that I had a plan. And they trusted me enough to let me try.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":256,"children":258},{"id":257},"packing-the-pause",[259],{"type":24,"value":260},"Packing the Pause",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":262,"children":263},{},[264],{"type":24,"value":265},"Breaking my tenancy was the turning point.\nI ended the lease, stopped paying rent, and boxed up my life.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":267,"children":268},{},[269],{"type":24,"value":270},"That’s when it hit me: I had so much stuff.\nBoxes of tech, clothes, random things hadn’t touched in years. It was physical proof of how much I’d been carrying.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":272,"children":273},{},[274],{"type":24,"value":275},"Friends helped. Some things went into storage.\nMy Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster stayed with my friend Tofunmi, another person who gave me a soft place to land during the transition.\nAnd my KEF LSX speakers? They’re  with Andrew, the one who first introduced me to HiFi.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":277,"children":279},{"id":278},"the-plan-loosely-speaking",[280],{"type":24,"value":281},"The Plan (Loosely Speaking)",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":283,"children":284},{},[285],{"type":24,"value":286},"This wasn’t a one-way trip.\nI planned to spend six weeks in Nairobi, timed around a friend’s wedding in Uganda—and my 30th birthday. I’d heard great things about the startup scene and wanted to experience it for myself.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":288,"children":289},{},[290],{"type":24,"value":291},"After Kenya, the plan was Jamaica, another month away, this time hoping my naturalisation would be sorted by then. And then Paris for another friend’s wedding.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":293,"children":294},{},[295],{"type":24,"value":296},"There were multiple anchors, but also space in between. Space to wander. To reset.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":298,"children":299},{},[300],{"type":24,"value":301},"It wasn’t a perfect itinerary. But it was enough to move forward.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":303,"children":304},{},[305],{"type":24,"value":306},"This Series: What to Expect",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":308,"children":309},{},[310],{"type":24,"value":311},"This post kicks off a new thread on this Substack.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":313,"children":314},{},[315],{"type":24,"value":316},"The Leap is about:",{"type":19,"tag":318,"props":319,"children":320},"ul",{},[321,327,332,337,342],{"type":19,"tag":322,"props":323,"children":324},"li",{},[325],{"type":24,"value":326},"What it means to leave a stable path",{"type":19,"tag":322,"props":328,"children":329},{},[330],{"type":24,"value":331},"Resting with intention",{"type":19,"tag":322,"props":333,"children":334},{},[335],{"type":24,"value":336},"Startup exploration in East Africa and the Caribbean",{"type":19,"tag":322,"props":338,"children":339},{},[340],{"type":24,"value":341},"Life between airports, weddings, and weird WiFi",{"type":19,"tag":322,"props":343,"children":344},{},[345],{"type":24,"value":346},"The people who soften your landing",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":348,"children":349},{},[350],{"type":24,"value":351},"And the rediscovery that happens in the pause",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":353,"children":354},{},[355],{"type":24,"value":356},"Thanks for being here.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":178,"depth":178,"links":358},[359,361,362,363],{"id":220,"depth":360,"text":223},3,{"id":236,"depth":360,"text":239},{"id":257,"depth":360,"text":260},{"id":278,"depth":360,"text":281},"content:posts:why-i-quit-my-job.md","posts\u002Fwhy-i-quit-my-job.md","posts\u002Fwhy-i-quit-my-job",{"_path":368,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":369,"description":370,"slug":371,"date":372,"readTime":12,"series":13,"location":373,"draft":6,"body":374,"_type":180,"_id":501,"_source":182,"_file":502,"_stem":503,"_extension":185},"\u002Fposts\u002Fleaving-in-the-dark","Leaving in the dark","A reflective piece about leaving London in the dark, finding stillness in an airport lounge at sunrise, and beginning a new chapter with more movement than certainty.","leaving-in-the-dark","2025-06-01","NBO",{"type":16,"children":375,"toc":495},[376,382,387,392,397,402,407,413,418,423,428,433,438,443,449,454,459,464,470,475,480,485,490],{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":377,"children":379},{"id":378},"the-night-before",[380],{"type":24,"value":381},"The Night Before",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":383,"children":384},{},[385],{"type":24,"value":386},"There’s something surreal about leaving a life behind in the dark.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":388,"children":389},{},[390],{"type":24,"value":391},"No final sunrise. No long goodbye. Just bags, tired eyes, and the quiet feeling that something had ended before I’d fully caught up to it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":393,"children":394},{},[395],{"type":24,"value":396},"The night before I left, a friend made Jollof rice. We ate, laughed, drank wine, and stayed up longer than we meant to. Neither of us made it a big deal. Maybe that was the point.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":398,"children":399},{},[400],{"type":24,"value":401},"By the time I got home, it was already late. I packed the last few things in a rush, zipped up my suitcase, and headed straight to the airport without sleeping.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":403,"children":404},{},[405],{"type":24,"value":406},"The weeks leading up to it had been nothing but movement: ending my tenancy, putting things into storage, wrapping up loose ends, leaving a job and a version of life that had given me structure for years. By the time I got into the cab, there was no grand cinematic moment. Just momentum.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":408,"children":410},{"id":409},"a-soft-landing-before-takeoff",[411],{"type":24,"value":412},"A Soft Landing Before Takeoff",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":414,"children":415},{},[416],{"type":24,"value":417},"I’d booked a Business Class ticket using a mix of credit card points and airline vouchers. I wouldn't usually pay for that kind of comfort. But this wasn’t a holiday squeezed between meetings or a quick reset before going back to the same routine. It felt like a real departure, and I wanted to mark it as one.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":419,"children":420},{},[421],{"type":24,"value":422},"What that meant, I wasn’t entirely sure. But I think it started with not rushing.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":424,"children":425},{},[426],{"type":24,"value":427},"The lounge gave me something I hadn’t had in weeks: stillness.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":429,"children":430},{},[431],{"type":24,"value":432},"I got there three hours early, not because I needed to, but because I could. I sat there at 6am eating eggs and toast, running on adrenaline and no sleep, watching the sun rise through the glass. It was quiet. And for the first time in a long time, I was too.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":434,"children":435},{},[436],{"type":24,"value":437},"I kept thinking about what I was actually moving toward. Not the itinerary. I knew that part. But the version of myself I was hoping to find on the other side of all this space. I was thirty in a few months. I had savings, a loose plan, and a deep suspicion that if I didn’t go now, I never would. That felt like enough. Just about.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":439,"children":440},{},[441],{"type":24,"value":442},"That moment stayed with me because it was the first time leaving felt real. Behind me was the chaos of packing up my life. Ahead of me was something I couldn’t fully name yet.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":444,"children":446},{"id":445},"the-shape-of-the-trip",[447],{"type":24,"value":448},"The Shape of the Trip",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":450,"children":451},{},[452],{"type":24,"value":453},"I had the outline of a plan: a few solo days in Nairobi, a safari with friends from London, Uganda for a wedding, then the coast, and eventually my 30th birthday with my sister. Not mapped out to the hour, but intentional enough.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":455,"children":456},{},[457],{"type":24,"value":458},"I also had a friend in Kenya who made the transition softer than I expected. She spoke Swahili to locals on my behalf, helped me get better rates, and pointed me to restaurants I never would have found on my own. She knew the city in the way that only comes from living it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":460,"children":461},{},[462],{"type":24,"value":463},"By the end of the trip I was dropping “sasa” and “sawa sawa” into conversation like I’d been there for years. That kind of grounding made a bigger difference than I realised at the time. It’s easy to underestimate what it means to have someone who already knows the place.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":465,"children":467},{"id":466},"the-beginning-of-motion",[468],{"type":24,"value":469},"The Beginning of Motion",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":471,"children":472},{},[473],{"type":24,"value":474},"Leaving London didn’t feel like an ending.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":476,"children":477},{},[478],{"type":24,"value":479},"Not yet.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":481,"children":482},{},[483],{"type":24,"value":484},"It felt like movement. Like I had stepped out of a life I had been outgrowing. Into one I didn’t understand yet. I didn’t know what Nairobi, Uganda, the coast, or the months ahead would unlock. I just knew I needed distance from everything familiar.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":486,"children":487},{},[488],{"type":24,"value":489},"Sometimes that’s all you get at the start.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":491,"children":492},{},[493],{"type":24,"value":494},"Not certainty. Not clarity. Just the decision to go.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":178,"depth":178,"links":496},[497,498,499,500],{"id":378,"depth":360,"text":381},{"id":409,"depth":360,"text":412},{"id":445,"depth":360,"text":448},{"id":466,"depth":360,"text":469},"content:posts:leaving-in-the-dark.md","posts\u002Fleaving-in-the-dark.md","posts\u002Fleaving-in-the-dark",{"_path":505,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":74,"description":506,"slug":507,"date":508,"readTime":12,"series":13,"location":373,"draft":6,"body":509,"_type":180,"_id":744,"_source":182,"_file":745,"_stem":746,"_extension":185},"\u002Fposts\u002Fthe-stumble","I landed in Nairobi knowing almost no one. A games night, a walk through Kibera, and a man with a WhatsApp thread full of trades showed me a problem I had never thought to look for.","the-stumble","2026-07-21",{"type":16,"children":510,"toc":736},[511,521,526,531,536,541,551,556,561,566,571,581,586,591,596,601,606,611,621,626,631,636,641,646,656,661,666,671,676,681,686,691,696,706,711,716,721,726,731],{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":512,"children":514},{"id":513},"a-thin-thread-of-names",[515],{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":516,"children":518},{"href":517},"#a-thin-thread-of-names",[519],{"type":24,"value":520},"A thin thread of names",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":522,"children":523},{},[524],{"type":24,"value":525},"I touched down in Nairobi knowing almost no one.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":527,"children":528},{},[529],{"type":24,"value":530},"That should have unsettled me more than it did. But by then I had learned something about travelling without a plan: you are rarely as alone as the map makes you feel. You arrive holding a thin thread of names, and if you are willing to pull on it, the thread holds.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":532,"children":533},{},[534],{"type":24,"value":535},"Before I left, Fauzi, a friend and old colleague from Goldman, said the words every solo traveller wants to hear. \"I know someone there.\" He had gone to university with a guy called Vlad who had moved to Nairobi and started a company. One introduction, sent before I had even finished packing, and the city was no longer entirely strange.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":537,"children":538},{},[539],{"type":24,"value":540},"It was the same kind of soft landing I wrote about in the last post. Someone, somewhere, quietly making the unfamiliar a little less so.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":542,"children":544},{"id":543},"saying-it-out-loud",[545],{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":546,"children":548},{"href":547},"#saying-it-out-loud",[549],{"type":24,"value":550},"Saying it out loud",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":552,"children":553},{},[554],{"type":24,"value":555},"The next set of introductions came from a climbing wall.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":557,"children":558},{},[559],{"type":24,"value":560},"Climbing gyms are the same everywhere. You end up talking to strangers between attempts, hands chalked, forearms wrecked, with nothing to do but wait for your grip to come back. That is how I met David Huan, an investor. We got to talking, and I did the thing I had started doing in every city I landed in. I told him the truth about why I was there. That I had left my job. That I was looking for a problem worth building on. That I did not know what it was yet, but I had a feeling I would know it when I saw it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":562,"children":563},{},[564],{"type":24,"value":565},"People respond to that kind of honesty. David did. Over the following weeks he introduced me to Cynthia Wandia at Kwara, and to Tarig Hilal, a cofounder of Moja.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":567,"children":568},{},[569],{"type":24,"value":570},"I want to be honest about what I was doing in those rooms, because it would be easy to make it sound more strategic than it was. I was not pitching. I had nothing to pitch. I was mostly listening. Asking what was hard, what was broken, what people kept running into. Travelling had been teaching me, slowly, that the most interesting thing in any room is usually the thing someone else knows that you do not. The only way to reach it is to stop performing and start paying attention.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":572,"children":574},{"id":573},"a-games-night",[575],{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":576,"children":578},{"href":577},"#a-games-night",[579],{"type":24,"value":580},"A games night",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":582,"children":583},{},[584],{"type":24,"value":585},"The stumble itself was an accident.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":587,"children":588},{},[589],{"type":24,"value":590},"Ines, a friend from London, happened to be in Nairobi for a few days visiting a friend of her own. She invited me along to a games night, a potluck at a guy called Jodom's apartment. She brought Cameroonian grilled fish, which disappeared in about four minutes. I brought two bottles of Primitivo, which is my answer to most invitations. Nothing about the evening announced itself as important. We played. We talked over each other the way you do when the room is full and the wine is open.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":592,"children":593},{},[594],{"type":24,"value":595},"At some point I fell into conversation with Jodom, and he told me about Kibera.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":597,"children":598},{},[599],{"type":24,"value":600},"An organisation called AfriBit Africa had spent years building a circular economy around Bitcoin there. Not Bitcoin as an investment, not as a bet on a number going up. Bitcoin as money. People earning it, spending it, in small amounts, on ordinary things.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":602,"children":603},{},[604],{"type":24,"value":605},"I had read about Bitcoin for years, in the way most people in finance read about it. As an asset. A chart. An argument at dinner. What he was describing did not match any of it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":607,"children":608},{},[609],{"type":24,"value":610},"So we went to see it.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":612,"children":614},{"id":613},"kibera",[615],{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":616,"children":618},{"href":617},"#kibera",[619],{"type":24,"value":620},"Kibera",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":622,"children":623},{},[624],{"type":24,"value":625},"Being told about something and standing in it are not the same, and I do not think I understood that properly until that day.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":627,"children":628},{},[629],{"type":24,"value":630},"It blew my mind. People were spending Bitcoin the way you and I spend cash. Stalls taking it for vegetables. A phone held up, a QR code scanned, done. No ceremony around it, no ideology in the air. It was just what you used.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":632,"children":633},{},[634],{"type":24,"value":635},"I watched refuse collectors get paid in sats for a morning's work. That was the part that stayed with me longest, because it answered the question I had not thought to ask. Value was not arriving from outside as charity or as a grant. It was entering the community through labour, and then circulating, which is the only reason any of the rest of it worked.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":637,"children":638},{},[639],{"type":24,"value":640},"None of it was spontaneous either. AfriBit had been at this for years before I turned up, running training, onboarding merchants one at a time, building the thing patiently in both directions at once. What looked from the outside like a happy accident was a long deliberate build by people who live there.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":642,"children":643},{},[644],{"type":24,"value":645},"The gap between how Bitcoin gets discussed in London and how it was being used on those streets was so wide it reorganised something in my head. Everything I thought I knew about it had been formed in rooms where nobody actually needed it.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":647,"children":649},{"id":648},"ronnie",[650],{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":651,"children":653},{"href":652},"#ronnie",[654],{"type":24,"value":655},"Ronnie",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":657,"children":658},{},[659],{"type":24,"value":660},"At the centre of it was Ronnie Mdawida, who co-founded AfriBit.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":662,"children":663},{},[664],{"type":24,"value":665},"Ronnie is a social worker by background, and it shows. Kind, softly spoken, quick to smile, the kind of person a room settles around without him raising his voice. He has been doing community work in Kibera far longer than he has been doing anything with Bitcoin, and the second thing grew out of the first rather than the other way around.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":667,"children":668},{},[669],{"type":24,"value":670},"He also carried something the write-ups tend not to mention. When people needed to move between shillings and sats, in either direction, they went to him. He was the bridge. If someone needed to cash out before rent, or cash in after getting paid, Ronnie made it happen.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":672,"children":673},{},[674],{"type":24,"value":675},"I asked him how he actually ran it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":677,"children":678},{},[679],{"type":24,"value":680},"He showed me his phone.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":682,"children":683},{},[684],{"type":24,"value":685},"WhatsApp. All of it. Threads of messages, requests coming in, trades being agreed, balances held in his head and in the scroll. He was running an entire local exchange on a chat app and on his own reputation, and he was running it well. The community trusted him completely, and that trust was doing the work that infrastructure does everywhere else in the world.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":687,"children":688},{},[689],{"type":24,"value":690},"There is a version of this story where I tell you that was the problem. It is not quite right. Nothing was failing. The system worked, and it worked because of years of work by people who live there. They understood what their community needed in a way I never will, and the trust behind it is not something anyone can engineer or arrive with.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":692,"children":693},{},[694],{"type":24,"value":695},"What struck me, standing there looking at that screen, was how much weight one person was carrying and how little there was underneath him. No view of his own position beyond memory. No margin when something went wrong. Nothing between him and a bad actor except his own judgement, which was excellent, and which should not have to be the only safeguard.",{"type":19,"tag":218,"props":697,"children":699},{"id":698},"the-thing-i-could-not-put-down",[700],{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":701,"children":703},{"href":702},"#the-thing-i-could-not-put-down",[704],{"type":24,"value":705},"The thing I could not put down",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":707,"children":708},{},[709],{"type":24,"value":710},"I spent seven years at Goldman on problems that were genuinely hard. Systems that had to be right, at scale, where being wrong was expensive and public. I am proud of that work, and most of what I know how to do I learned there.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":712,"children":713},{},[714],{"type":24,"value":715},"But the problems arrived already defined. Someone had done the work of deciding what mattered before it reached me, and by the time it did, the question was how rather than whether. I got very good at how. I had never once had to go out and find the question.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":717,"children":718},{},[719],{"type":24,"value":720},"I would never have found this one from a desk in London. It is invisible from the outside. Bitcoin exists, exchanges exist, so where is the gap? The gap is that the last mile is a person with a phone and a reputation, and nobody builds for that person because from far enough away it looks like it is already solved.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":722,"children":723},{},[724],{"type":24,"value":725},"I left Kibera and carried it with me. To Uganda, to the coast, onto the flight after that. I kept turning it over when I should have been switching off.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":727,"children":728},{},[729],{"type":24,"value":730},"Mostly I kept thinking about the phone. An entire local economy held together in a scroll of messages, by one man's memory and one man's word. It works. It works because Ronnie is who he is.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":732,"children":733},{},[734],{"type":24,"value":735},"I have not stopped thinking about what it would take to put something underneath him.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":178,"depth":178,"links":737},[738,739,740,741,742,743],{"id":513,"depth":360,"text":520},{"id":543,"depth":360,"text":550},{"id":573,"depth":360,"text":580},{"id":613,"depth":360,"text":620},{"id":648,"depth":360,"text":655},{"id":698,"depth":360,"text":705},"content:posts:the-stumble.md","posts\u002Fthe-stumble.md","posts\u002Fthe-stumble",{"_path":748,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":749,"description":750,"slug":751,"date":752,"readTime":193,"series":13,"location":753,"draft":6,"body":754,"_type":180,"_id":841,"_source":182,"_file":842,"_stem":843,"_extension":185},"\u002Fposts\u002Fthe-idea-that-wasnt-one","The Idea That Wasn't One","For the better part of a year I went looking for the idea that would justify leaving my job. The most useful thing I did in that time was build a Raspberry Pi cluster I was certain would never matter.","the-idea-that-wasnt-one","2026-08-26","LON",{"type":16,"children":755,"toc":839},[756,761,774,779,784,789,794,799,804,809,814,819,824,829,834],{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":757,"children":758},{},[759],{"type":24,"value":760},"For the better part of a year near the end of my time at Goldman, I thought my real job, the one that would actually decide my future, was to find the idea. This was the work underneath the work, the thing I did in the evenings and on weekends and quietly told myself was the point.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":762,"children":763},{},[764,766,772],{"type":24,"value":765},"Not just any idea. ",{"type":19,"tag":767,"props":768,"children":769},"em",{},[770],{"type":24,"value":771},"The",{"type":24,"value":773}," idea. The kind an investor would recognise immediately, the kind that justified walking away from seven years of a career I was already preparing to leave. I carried a notebook everywhere. I filled it with half-formed businesses I never built and never will.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":775,"children":776},{},[777],{"type":24,"value":778},"Most of what I wrote in that notebook was rubbish, but I did not know that yet. I just knew it did not feel like anything.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":780,"children":781},{},[782],{"type":24,"value":783},"I remember sitting in a co-working space in London with my friend Nkechi. She was in the middle of leaving banking for software, teaching herself by building small things, little projects with no reason to exist except that building them taught her the work. I was doing the opposite. I was staring at a spreadsheet of \"market opportunities\" I had built to convince myself I was making progress. I was not making progress. I was performing the shape of it.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":785,"children":786},{},[787],{"type":24,"value":788},"Watching her build for the sake of building unsettled something in me. She was not waiting for permission, or for the perfect idea, or for a career to reorganise itself around her first. She just wanted to be good at it, so she built her way there. It reminded me, a little uncomfortably, that I used to be like that too. That I actually liked this, and would be doing it whether or not anyone was paying me to.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":790,"children":791},{},[792],{"type":24,"value":793},"At some point I closed the spreadsheet and said something like: I don't want to think about billion-dollar ideas today. I want to build a Kubernetes cluster.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":795,"children":796},{},[797],{"type":24,"value":798},"It was not a strategic statement. It was the opposite of one. Kubernetes had nothing to do with fintech, nothing to do with Africa, nothing to do with anything my next company was supposed to be about. I just found it interesting, and after months of trying to want the right things, wanting the wrong thing felt like relief.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":800,"children":801},{},[802],{"type":24,"value":803},"So I bought a stack of Raspberry Pis and built a cluster.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":805,"children":806},{},[807],{"type":24,"value":808},"It went badly at first, in the ordinary way these things go badly. Nodes that would not join. Networking I did not understand well enough to debug, so I had to go and actually learn it. Not just enough to make the error go away, but enough to know what was happening underneath. I set up ZeroTier so I could reach the cluster from anywhere without opening my home network to the internet. I put a Cloudflare tunnel in front of it so I could expose a service without ever exposing the box itself. Then, because I had gone that far already, I 3D-printed a case for it. There was no reason to. It just felt like the kind of thing you finish properly or not at all.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":810,"children":811},{},[812],{"type":24,"value":813},"My notebook was full of businesses that had never made a single mistake, because not one of them had ever been built. The cluster made mistakes constantly. That was the whole difference.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":815,"children":816},{},[817],{"type":24,"value":818},"None of this was going to be a business. I was fairly sure of that at the time, and I was right. That was never the point.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":820,"children":821},{},[822],{"type":24,"value":823},"The skills, though, were real. Networking that does not fall over. Infrastructure you can trust because you built it yourself and know exactly where the weak points are. The instinct to expose a service safely rather than carelessly, which turns out to matter enormously when the thing you are eventually moving across borders is other people's money.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":825,"children":826},{},[827],{"type":24,"value":828},"I wasn't building for what came next when I made that cluster. It didn't exist yet. But the muscle I built that year was a specific one: the comfort with infrastructure, the refusal to ship something whose internals I did not understand. It is the same muscle I lean on now, building things that have to work in places where the network is the least reliable part of the stack.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":830,"children":831},{},[832],{"type":24,"value":833},"The cluster is still running. It lives under my desk, three Raspberry Pi nodes, and I still call it cutiePi. I think of it as the home lab where ideas get proven before they earn a domain, which is a slightly grand way of saying: this is where I try things before I trust them anywhere else. Right now it is running Hermes, an agent orchestrator I built, mostly because I wanted to see what it could do without paying for cloud compute to find out.",{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":835,"children":836},{},[837],{"type":24,"value":838},"I do not think there is a clean lesson here, and I am suspicious of posts that insist there is one. But if I am honest, the most useful thing I did in that whole year of hunting for the idea was the one thing that was never meant to be an idea at all. Not because it produced a business. It did not. It produced a person who was slightly harder to fool with infrastructure that only looks like it works. And maybe with a few other things too.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":178,"depth":178,"links":840},[],"content:posts:the-idea-that-wasnt-one.md","posts\u002Fthe-idea-that-wasnt-one.md","posts\u002Fthe-idea-that-wasnt-one",{"_path":4,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":8,"description":9,"slug":10,"date":11,"readTime":12,"series":13,"location":14,"draft":6,"body":845,"_type":180,"_id":181,"_source":182,"_file":183,"_stem":184,"_extension":185},{"type":16,"children":846,"toc":969},[847,851,855,859,863,867,871,875,879,889,893,897,901,905,909,913,917,921,925,929,933,937,941,945,949,953,957,961,965],{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":848,"children":849},{},[850],{"type":24,"value":25},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":852,"children":853},{},[854],{"type":24,"value":30},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":856,"children":857},{},[858],{"type":24,"value":35},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":860,"children":861},{},[862],{"type":24,"value":40},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":864,"children":865},{},[866],{"type":24,"value":45},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":868,"children":869},{},[870],{"type":24,"value":50},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":872,"children":873},{},[874],{"type":24,"value":55},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":876,"children":877},{},[878],{"type":24,"value":60},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":880,"children":881},{},[882,883,888],{"type":24,"value":65},{"type":19,"tag":67,"props":884,"children":886},{"href":69,"rel":885},[71],[887],{"type":24,"value":74},{"type":24,"value":76},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":890,"children":891},{},[892],{"type":24,"value":81},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":894,"children":895},{},[896],{"type":24,"value":86},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":898,"children":899},{},[900],{"type":24,"value":91},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":902,"children":903},{},[904],{"type":24,"value":96},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":906,"children":907},{},[908],{"type":24,"value":101},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":910,"children":911},{},[912],{"type":24,"value":106},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":914,"children":915},{},[916],{"type":24,"value":111},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":918,"children":919},{},[920],{"type":24,"value":116},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":922,"children":923},{},[924],{"type":24,"value":121},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":926,"children":927},{},[928],{"type":24,"value":126},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":930,"children":931},{},[932],{"type":24,"value":131},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":934,"children":935},{},[936],{"type":24,"value":136},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":938,"children":939},{},[940],{"type":24,"value":141},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":942,"children":943},{},[944],{"type":24,"value":146},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":946,"children":947},{},[948],{"type":24,"value":151},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":950,"children":951},{},[952],{"type":24,"value":156},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":954,"children":955},{},[956],{"type":24,"value":161},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":958,"children":959},{},[960],{"type":24,"value":166},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":962,"children":963},{},[964],{"type":24,"value":171},{"type":19,"tag":20,"props":966,"children":967},{},[968],{"type":24,"value":176},{"title":7,"searchDepth":178,"depth":178,"links":970},[],1788793614475]