Caroline Mutuku has always been precocious. Her story, by now, is byzantine: she was the top girl in the country’s 2006 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination, which meant she could have been a doctor. And precisely why she went to medical school.
But hazmat suits and scrubs didn’t tickle her fancy, so she quit. That’s how she became Country Manager of Glovo, the food delivery company.
She has grown it from 700 riders to about 3,000.
Well, not quite. First, she had to do her time in the trenches. She had to do her time in the trenches: banking, then McKinsey, where she rose to Engagement Manager, before a high-growth stint at Swvl.
"Speed is way more valuable than money. Having funding is great, but being able to act very fast is even more important."
“Speed,” she says, “is way more valuable than money. Having funding is great, but being able to act very fast is even more important.”
Switching from medical school to business turned a speed bump into a ramp, accelerating her into the murky waters of corporate leadership. “The dots always connect looking backwards,” she says, looking back at her path less taken.
Under her watch, Glovo Kenya transitioned from a ‘small’ to a ‘medium-sized’ market within the global network.
“In three and a half years, the business has grown 4X.”
But no iron can stab the heart with such force as the sting of success. For instance, at McKinsey, she travelled extensively.
“I was trying to make it all up the time during the December holidays. I missed a lot of my older daughter’s events, and she still remembers that. It left a core memory that I wasn’t there.”
She, however, refuses to drown herself in a pool of regret. “When I was moving from medical to business school, everyone would tell me I would be just a loan seller. I questioned myself a lot, just like I did when I was transitioning from consultancy to tech. It took me nine months to make that jump.”
“I look up to Dr James Mwangi of Equity Bank.” Dr Mwangi handed Mutuku her first break when they had only 25 Equity Bank branches, seeing in her what the world would later come to envy, someone who retains an uncanny ability to show up when it matters.
–Eddy Ashioya