A Start Up Life

When someone cancels a meeting at the last minute and I find myself with an unallocated hour, I’m like

runningastartup:

Long Overdue

I’ve been in Nairobi for nearly two months now and I’m incredibly surprised that I haven’t written, especially considering the steep life changes and lack of sleep over the past few weeks thanks to the complete depletion of my supply of Ambien and an overload of work. At the end of February, my business partner and I made the final decision that I would come back to Nairobi to oversee the disbursal of our first loans. We bought the one-way ticket, I preemptively started packing three weeks in advance out of pure elation that I was finally headed back, and I made up my mind that I was going to stay indefinitely. 

My life had reached a point at which I had been stationed in North Carolina for four and a half years and it created a tension between what I imagined myself to be doing with my life and what I was actually doing with my life. I made a promise to myself when I was an angsty adolescent that I would never stay in one place for too long and even applied that to my college career, transferring from NYU to UNC after just one year. Maybe it’s my addiction to new beginnings or perhaps my affinity for a constantly changing scenery, but whatever the case, I was quickly approaching a certainty that I would have a quarter life crisis if I didn’t leave.

And yet, despite my distaste for commitment, I had a bigger vision, audacious goals, and  a deep love and an intense passion for our business. After years of papers, internships, travels, and pondering the complexity of the world’s problems, my interests had finally gestated an idea worthy of execution, and I had found someone who was crazy enough to take the plunge with me. My nomad desires became subordinate to taking the steps necessary to build this thing that, if done correctly, would become bigger than myself. And so, even thought it would mean planting myself in North Carolina for a while longer, I was too in love to leave. 

In the true spirit of honesty, I should take a brief moment to mention that there was a lag time between graduating from UNC and creating the business (about a year). My boyfriend at the time asked me to stay — and being the girl who was head-over-heels for someone I thought I knew — I moved in with him. During this time of limbo in which I had the luxury of student loan grace periods, I did a few odd jobs and worked at a technology start-up incubator in Durham as the directors’ mignon. Orchestrating flawless catered events and rebooting wireless modems became my fortes, but I also had the privilege of witnessing the intense experiences of seven start ups. I learned how resilient and certifiably insane a person must be to start a business that depended on eventual user volume and market dominance. I was sure I had the crazy part down. 

Long story short, the breakup that I now see was unavoidable happened, I met my business partner, and after a few bottles of wine (as any good idea is conceived) we decided to quit our jobs and move to Nairobi for a few months to see if we could make this happen. 

And now, I’m moving into my own apartment after being a seemingly permanent house guest at my friend’s place, we’ve disbursed our first loan and raised the rest of our seed round, and I’ve been working harder than ever before. 

At the end of the day, I suppose I’ve finally reached a point of maturity in which my long-term potential means more to me than instant gratification and acting upon immediate desires. Even if it means staying in one place and working my ass off for a while. And who knows… maybe I’ve even found a home in Nairobi.