The Stumble

A thin thread of names

I touched down in Nairobi knowing almost no one.

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.

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.

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.

Saying it out loud

The next set of introductions came from a climbing wall.

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.

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.

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.

A games night

The stumble itself was an accident.

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.

At some point I fell into conversation with Jodom, and he told me about Kibera.

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.

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.

So we went to see it.

Kibera

Being told about something and standing in it are not the same, and I do not think I understood that properly until that day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ronnie

At the centre of it was Ronnie Mdawida, who co-founded AfriBit.

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.

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.

I asked him how he actually ran it.

He showed me his phone.

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.

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.

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.

The thing I could not put down

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have not stopped thinking about what it would take to put something underneath him.