The person
behind the work

Growing up, I was the kid who wanted to be an engineer. Science and maths came naturally, and I was genuinely curious about how things worked and how things were built. That curiosity never left.

After high school, I got my hands on a computer and became fascinated. So when I heard a radio ad one afternoon on a matatu ride home — Google was offering a free tool to build websites — I stopped at the nearest cyber café and tried it. Something clicked. That was my first encounter with design, though I didn't know it yet. I spent the next few years building websites for local businesses in my home town. No training, no portfolio. Just a rented computer and a need to make things.

At the University of Nairobi studying Geospatial Engineering, I found Nairobi's startup community and threw myself into it. I joined a series of early-stage startups, collaborating with ambitious young people trying to build something real. In every project, I noticed something: I was always the guy talking to users, sketching the experience, figuring out what the thing should feel like. I didn't know that was UX design. I just knew it was the part I cared about most.

After graduating, I joined Sendy, one of Kenya's leading tech startups at the time, as their first UX designer. They used to call me the startup guy because I was always thrown at new teams and hard problems. I loved that. Over five years, I worked on logistics challenges across multiple African markets, growing alongside a company that scaled from 15 people to over a hundred.

Then iKhokha in South Africa, where I worked on digital payment solutions for small-scale traders navigating a completely different market. And now, UNDP Somalia, designing AI tools for humanitarian workers operating in some of the world's most complex environments.

The throughline across all of it is simple: I love hard problems. I love being dropped into something ambitious and figuring it out. That hasn't changed since the cyber café.