In October 2022, at the height of a well-established career, I got restless.
You have met this restlessness before in this series. It is the same one that compressed a degree into three years and put me on a plane to Maryland. Restlessness, for me, has never meant something is wrong. It means something is calling.
This time, the call sounded like: start something.
I envied startup founders. Openly, unashamedly. While I sat in the structured world of employment, they were out there building from nothing: naming things, breaking things, betting on themselves. I had spent years working near innovation, around innovation, on innovation. I wanted to be in it, with my own hands, with my own risk on the table.
Then something interesting happened, and I want you to watch how oddly the door opened.
A random person found me on LinkedIn. He ran a venture fund. When we started talking, it turned out he had actually been seeking an appointment with our CEO.
He got me instead.
Now, a different person might have politely redirected him and moved on. But we got talking, and somewhere in that conversation I mentioned that I was keen to start something myself. And then, because closed mouths do not get funded, I asked him directly: could his fund back my venture?
He said no. His fund was for people in the UK.
But.
He pointed me to a company right here in Kenya that existed for people exactly like me: people who want to start a business but have not quite formed the idea yet. A place where would-be founders go to become founders.
A stranger who was looking for someone else entirely, telling me about a door I did not know existed. Life is genuinely this strange.
So I did the thing.
I left employment. Let me write that again, slowly, for the people who know how much security means to a Kenyan professional with responsibilities: I. Left. Employment. Walked away from the salary, the title, the structure, and went to join a founder programme, to chase a business idea I did not even have yet.
And it was a rich, rich experience.
We formed a team. We attempted to build a startup. We researched ideas, properly researched, the way you never have time to inside employment. We pitched to rooms of people trained to find the holes in your thinking. We built prototypes with our own hands. This is the chapter where Jirani was born: my own venture, my own name on the thing.
And somewhere in the middle of that founder season came a moment I could not have scripted: I was invited to the World Government Summit in Dubai. One month you are a founder-in-training sketching prototypes in Nairobi. The next you are in Dubai, in rooms where the future of governments and technology is being discussed. The startup path, I learned, does not move in straight lines. It moves in surprises.
The quiet girl who once made a Wang machine play music was finally, fully, doing the thing she had announced at eighteen: building.
It did not work out.
I want to write that sentence plainly, without cushioning it, because founders deserve honesty about this. The startup did not become the next big thing. There was no triumphant exit, no unicorn, no headline.
And yet I count that season among the most valuable of my career. Because here is what I carried out of it: I know what it costs to build from zero. I know how ideas are actually formed, tested, killed, and reborn. I know what it feels like to pitch your own thing and watch faces in the room. Everything I have done since, every venture I have assessed, every builder I have sat across from, I understand differently because I stopped watching the arena and stepped into it.
Some educations you pay for with school fees. This one, I paid for with a salary I walked away from. It was expensive. It was worth it.
The lesson of Day 35 is for everyone sitting in a stable job, envying founders, wondering.
First: say the thing out loud. My pivot began because I told a stranger, a wrong-number stranger, essentially, what I wanted. Opportunities cannot find a desire you keep hidden. Speak it, even to unlikely people. Especially to unlikely people.
Second: redefine what “working out” means before you start. If success only means the venture succeeds, most founders have failed. But if success means you go, you build, you learn what can only be learned by doing, then my startup chapter was a resounding success that simply did not produce a company.
The dream did not die, by the way. You already know this about me and dreams.
They wait.
Come back tomorrow for Day 34: the hardest season.
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