Despite his relatively young age, Kimanthi has started a company which he believes will grow into a big brand as an online marketing solution built by Africans for Africans. Already, he has expanded to Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and next year he hopes to get into Nigeria, South Africa and Ethiopia if possible.
Kimanthi started his company after a short stint at Google and IBM, where he learnt the skills and knowledge that he is using in his own small firm. At Google, he says, he witnessed first-hand how data mining was done.
Selling software at IBM also exposed him to a century-old company transforming from a hardware seller to a software seller and he believed he could make money from fusing technology with marketing.
In the second year of starting his company in 2013, Kimanthi came face to face with the challenges of an election. He lacked the knowledge to have predicted how adversely Kenyan
politics affected businesses. It is from this near-death experience surviving by the bootstraps that he believed he drew ambition to diversify both presence and product.
The 31-year-old who drops quotes and analogies from inspirational books as cues for his speech says he has a theory on how Kenyans start and go about their businesses, you may either be in the ‘Me Too’ copycat space, the ‘Me Better’ where you add value or ‘Me Only’ where you are the trailblazer.
-Otiato Guguyu