Why I said yes to Nairobi

August 1, 2025

I get asked this. Why leave Tamara — a well-funded BNPL unicorn in Dubai — for Cashia, a smaller fintech headquartered in Nairobi?

The honest answer: it was exactly the kind of irrational, right-feeling decision that has shaped my career.

The Setup

Two years at Tamara. Good work. Good team. Good compensation. The kind of role you could stay in for a long time and be comfortable.

I was getting comfortable.

When the Cashia opportunity came up, the role was Lead Mobile Engineer — technically lateral. Earlier stage company. KMM stack, which I’d evaluated at Delivery Hero but never shipped in production. Remote-first, with the core team in Nairobi.

On paper, the sensible move was to stay.

Why I Said Yes

Three things.

The problem felt real in a way that BNPL doesn’t.

BNPL is a useful product. But it’s a product for people who already have access to finance — people with smartphones, data plans, purchasing power. It makes buying things slightly more convenient.

Cashia is building payments infrastructure for markets where meaningful portions of the population are unbanked. The problem isn’t “make shopping more convenient.” It’s “enable people to transact at all.” That’s a different category of problem.

I found I cared about the second category more than I’d realised.

The KMM bet.

I’d spent months at Delivery Hero evaluating KMM. I believed in the direction. But I’d never shipped it in a production app that real users depended on. Cashia was running KMM in production. Joining was a chance to learn from reality, not theory.

When the technical decision you’ve been thinking about theoretically is being stress-tested in production somewhere — go work there.

Early-stage is different.

At Delivery Hero and Tamara, I was one engineer among many. Impact was real but diffuse. At Cashia, I’d shape the platform from a much earlier point. Higher risk. Higher learning rate. Higher leverage.

What Happened

I joined in July 2025. The team was building toward first public launch. No feature flag framework. No forced update mechanism. No mocking layer.

I built all three in the first two months.

Then: card top-up across mobile, backend, and payments. M-PESA cash-out. Request Money. A company-wide tech demo. A flight to Nairobi.

Seven months later, I was promoted to Engineering Manager.

The Nairobi Part

When I told people I was joining a company based in Nairobi, some said: “Oh, remote from Dubai?” As if Nairobi was an abstraction.

I flew to Nairobi. Worked on-site with the team. Went to Nairobi National Park on a weekend and watched giraffes walk against the city skyline.

The engineers I worked with had the same arguments I have everywhere. Which state management pattern is better. Whether to abstract early or wait for duplication. How much technical debt is acceptable pre-launch.

The same arguments. The same craft. Different context — one that mattered.

That shift changed something in how I think about what we’re building.

What I’d Tell Someone in the Same Position

If you’re choosing between comfortable and interesting: choose interesting. Every time.

The career lessons that actually change you come from decisions that were slightly too big to feel comfortable at the time.

Comfortable is safe. Safe is slow.