Bet on Myself

Every year I set a theme. This year the theme was simple. Looking back, I think it has always been the theme. This is the story of how I learned that.

I. Invisible Workers

It was a Saturday morning. I was in my early twenties, working at a venture firm called Impact Africa Network, tasked with building a digital tipping platform. I needed to find out if the idea was viable, which meant going out and listening before building anything.

My girlfriend at the time came with me. She was frustrated that I kept disappearing into work, so we did the market research together — walking through the Westlands neighborhood, going door to door, restaurant to restaurant, asking managers and staff the same questions. We walked into Westgate Mall and found an Ocean Basket.

A waitress named Fenny was curious about what we were doing. We sat down with her, and she started talking.

She told us that her salary covered the big things: rent, her two younger sisters’ secondary school fees, their diplomas. Tips — the coins and bills that customers left — were what she used for daily survival. Food. Personal expenses. The things that fall through the cracks between paydays.

“We were blown away, me and my girlfriend. What do you mean? Is that even possible?”

I had seen my father tip at restaurants. Five hundred shillings, sometimes a thousand if the service was excellent. When I was a student, I would leave fifty shillings for a waiter I had particularly liked. I thought I understood tipping — a small gesture, a thank-you, a reward for good service.

Fenny taught me I had understood almost nothing. A tip was not a reward. For Fenny, and for millions of service workers like her across East Africa, a tip was the margin between surviving and going without. It was capital — small-scale, irregular, unpredictable, but real and necessary.

I walked out of Ocean Basket knowing something had shifted. The problem was not abstract anymore. It had a name. It had a face. And it was waiting for someone to take it seriously.

II. Building Someone Else’s Dream

I had come to Impact Africa Network through a fortunate accident. In my second year at Strathmore University, I was building a blockchain-based voting system for the student council — a personal project, not a school assignment. It was clunky, buggy, and crashed publicly during the presentation. But a classmate saw the ambition behind the failure. When he joined IAN after graduation, he recommended me.

My first impression of IAN was from Twitter: getting young people to participate in the digital transformation of Africa’s economy. I had been leading Enactus, a social entrepreneurship club, and I thought this was the work I had been looking for. I joined as a product development fellow. After six months on blockchain community work — learning sessions, a hackathon we actually raised prize money for — I was asked to lead a tipping product. That became Shukran.

We built it properly: customer discovery, user stories, prototype iterations, real conversations with real workers. The problem with the restaurant model, we eventually understood, was structural. In Kenya, service staff have high turnover — waiters move from one establishment to the next, many working as casuals rather than permanent employees. Management had no incentive to invest in their welfare. A tipping platform was a nice-to-have for operators who did not see their staff as long-term stakeholders.

We were still experimenting. One of the restaurants we had onboarded was Chez Sonia — a communal-tipping establishment whose proprietor was passionate about her staff’s financial wellbeing. Staff pooled tips and shared them equally. It was a small, early proof point.

III. Lightning in a Bottle

The sign was a woman who would not stop calling.

Her name was Chloe. She was the manager of Cabanas Lamu, a property on the island. She had been a guest at Chez Sonia, had seen our QR code in use, and loved what she saw. She tried to reach us. We did not pick up. She tried again. And again. She kept finding ways to reach us.

In hindsight, this was the market telling us something urgent. When a customer is that motivated to give you money, you have found something real. We flew to Lamu, walked through the property with Chloe and the staff, left a QR placement, and went home. A few weeks later, a message came through: a guest had tipped 70,000 Kenyan shillings. A single transaction.

Typically we’d see 100, 200 shillings. All of a sudden, a user came along and tipped seventy thousand. We took a photo. We started telling people this was real.

Cabanas Lamu then referred us to similar properties — lodges, camps, boutique hotels across the tourism belt. And that is when we understood something that had been invisible to us before. When Kenyans think about tipping, we think about restaurants in Nairobi. Not a lodge in Laikipia. Not a safari camp in the wilderness. There was an entire market of international tourism — guests from Europe, North America, Asia, paying by card, wanting to tip workers they would never see again — that we had never thought about. The infrastructure gap there was not just real. It was enormous, and almost nobody was working on it.

We had not pivoted strategically. We had stumbled into the actual market by following one persistent woman who would not let us ignore her.

We reached 13 properties by April 2024. By April 2025, we had 100.

IV. The Break

As the company grew, I started asking harder questions. I had turned 26. I had a relationship I was serious about. I had spent years refusing pay raises because I believed in the mission — pouring everything in, living the Silicon Valley dream of the dedicated early-stage builder. And I had begun to understand what I actually owned: approximately 5% of what I had helped create. Ten percent nominally, but half the shares were unissued and earmarked for future investors. On full dilution: five percent.

I raised the question with trusted people: my father, close advisors, and eventually the family members I was asked to bring on as investors. I presented to my uncle Charles, to a fintech contact called Nicholas, to a room of eight people at my father’s house — including my Auntie Shiro who had flown in from Cape Town. Every single one of them asked the same question: Why do you only have five percent?

I set up a meeting. I went in, and I cried. I said my family wanted to be involved. That we needed to involve a lawyer. That something needed to change. The next day, I was called into an office. Someone wrote on a whiteboard.

I brought one million dollars into this business. You brought nothing. You’re not even a classic founder. I don’t owe you anything. You’re just an employee.

I had endured difficult meetings. I had stayed through years of being shouted at, talked down to, treated as a subordinate while doing founder-level work. I had told myself this was the necessary cost of an extraordinary opportunity. In that moment, hearing those words, a door opened in my mind that had never been open before. For the first time, I genuinely wanted to leave.

I wrote my resignation letter. For weeks I carried it to meetings and could not give it. I sat across from him at a café one afternoon, the envelope in my bag, and broke down crying after he left. I was grieving something I had built and had not been allowed to own.

A week later, I handed it over. At the last all-hands meeting I would ever run, I stood at the front of the room and said nothing. I handed the presentation to my team. Someone said afterward: Shukran has done an incredible job under the leadership of Mathenge. I left without looking back.

V. Bungoma

I left in April 2025 with no savings, no job, and digital lenders charging interest at rates that compounded faster than I could pay. Two months of searching for product management work in Nairobi produced nothing. I tried Fiverr. I made plans to rebuild the product. But the truth was I was exhausted, and Nairobi — the city I had lived in my whole life — felt suffocating. The grief of leaving something I had built was too present in every familiar place.

A contact from university — Kago, who had founded Eneza Education, one of the first serious entrepreneurs I had ever met — connected me with a COO role at a company called Azizi in Bungoma. Western Kenya. Near the Ugandan border. I had never been to that side of the country.

I took the job for six months, not one year. I told them I had other plans.

Bungoma was foreign territory. I had grown up in Nairobi; my family’s roots went back to the highlands near Nyeri in the opposite direction. Western Kenya was a different Kenya entirely. I walked market floors in towns I had never visited. I rode matatus between Kakamega and Busia. I drove to Malaba and crossed into Uganda. I went deep into Tanzania — two days of driving — to buy twelve tons of yellow beans and green grams worth one and a half million shillings, then found a way to get them back across the border. I was living a life I had never lived.

I was starting to trust myself. Not to build a company — that had always felt possible in theory. To survive. To navigate. To figure it out without anyone watching.

During the day, I managed operations. From six in the evening until six in the morning, I built the product. I paid down debt as money came in. I incorporated the company.

Three months after leaving, I posted something on LinkedIn. It was a reflection on the lessons I had learned from building Shukran — not as a co-founder on paper, as it turned out, but as the person who had done the work. At the end of it I wrote: I have thirty years of building ahead of me, God willing. If I have those years, something will work. Something will be worth it. I wrote that from Bungoma, while I was still in debt, still rebuilding, still not certain of anything. I meant every word of it.

The name came on a walk. I was heading toward Shamba Coffee from the Loresho Shopping Centre, moving along the edge of a coffee plantation, running through possibilities: Santara, San Terra, variations on asante, variations on gratitude. Nothing landed. Then, mid-stride, it arrived.

Thenks.

T-H-E-N-K-S. The English word, spelled the way gratitude actually feels in Kenya — informal, warm, slightly off-center, immediately clear about what the company does. Globally recognizable. I did not need to explain it to anyone.

While I was still in Bungoma, the calls began. Former customers of Shukran — lodges, camps, properties we had onboarded — were calling me directly. Tips were being delayed. Communication had broken down. Money that should have reached service workers had not arrived.

I was in a tuk-tuk coming from Busia when an HR manager from one of the lodges called. Mathenge, we are so disappointed in your services at Shukran. I told her I had left three months earlier. She did not know.

That call changed the timeline. My reputation — the trust I had built with properties across the tourism belt — was being damaged by actions I had no control over. I stopped waiting to be ready. I started building at six in the evening and slept at six in the morning, sometimes longer. I incorporated in Kenya. I incorporated in the US. I started telling people the name.

VI. The Return

I came back to Nairobi and invited the former team members who had since resigned from Shukran. We met at King Post The Tavern on Rhapta Road — a restaurant with accommodation, the kind of establishment where deals get made in Nairobi without anyone making a fuss about it. I showed them what I had built. I told them what I intended to do. They said yes.

We agreed on three things: payouts on time, communication during problems, transparency about everything. These were the three specific failures customers kept describing when they talked about why they were leaving Shukran. We made them our operating principles.

Then we went lodge to lodge, camp to camp. The question we heard everywhere was the same: You’re the same person who pitched Shukran. Shukran failed us. Why should we trust you? I told each of them what I could demonstrate, not what I could promise: when I was running the company, things worked. After I left, they stopped. The three commitments were the ones I was making my name on now.

The first transaction under the Thenks name came from Borana. We were on our way out to visit and onboard their staff. Before we arrived, they had already requested the QR code PDF and received their first tip that morning. They were done waiting.

Five properties in the first month. Twenty in the second. \$41,000 processed by the beginning of January.

One of the customers during this period was a man named Christian. He called regularly — not just to check on his property, but to encourage me. He would tell me to keep going, introduce me to people who might invest, tell me he believed in what I could do. He was one of those people who appear at exactly the moment when you most need to hear from someone outside your own head that you are doing something real.

In December 2025, I boarded a bus from Bungoma to Nairobi for the last time. I was leaving for good — the Azizi chapter was done, Thenks was alive, and the life I was building was in Nairobi now. Somewhere along that journey, I posted on a Reddit thread asking what people were most proud of achieving that year. I wrote one line: Was betrayed by my business partner, left the company in debt and distressed, was unemployed, got a job, cleared my debts, rebuilt the platform, and took most of the customers back.

Someone replied: The GOAT!!!!!

I sat with that for a while. For the first time, looking back across everything that year had cost and everything it had produced, I understood that I had not just survived. I had come back. It was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, a proper comeback.

Thenks was real.

VII. The Trial

We had just finished breakfast.

The man who had invited us excused himself to check on his car.

Three minutes later he came back. He wasn’t alone.

Three men surrounded our table. One of them held up a police badge. He said: Come with us. We’re giving you a lift.

I saw the Subaru — the car that Kenyans know for all the wrong reasons. We got in.

They took my colleague’s phone immediately. I was the only one left with a way to reach anyone.

I pulled out my phone, sent one SOS to my family, and put it back in my pocket before they noticed.

Then I sat back and started making jokes.

We had been invited to meet a “hotel consultant” at La Paz in Lower Kabete, Nairobi. Something felt wrong from the beginning: people who work with luxury hospitality clients in Nairobi do not invite you to La Paz. They meet in Karen, in Westlands, at their own offices or their clients’ properties. This was the first signal we chose to ignore.

At the police station, they produced the charge: a former customer of Shukran had received a marketing email from Thenks and was complaining that her data had been shared without consent. This was the crime. I asked for my phone and called a lawyer.

The case was dragged for four months. A forensic audit found nothing. The case was eventually dropped. But bail had been set at 60,000 Kenyan shillings, and by the time the process ended, over 45,000 shillings had been absorbed in ways that are not unusual in these situations.

An email went out to every property in the East African hospitality market, insinuating that Thenks had been arrested by the DCI and that the authorities were handling it. Growth slowed. Leads went cold.

We kept going.

Antler Kenya accepted us into their accelerator program despite the ongoing investigation. After ten weeks, they did not invest. Market size, they said. A tipping platform that capped at \$10 million in annual recurring revenue was not a venture-scale return.

I told them I disagreed with the analysis. I was not particularly calm about it. You do not build something through what we had just been through and accept the designation “nice to have.”

I was right, and here is why: tipping is not the destination. It is the doorway.

What I am actually building is financial infrastructure for an industry that the formal financial system has never properly served. Tips are the initial transaction — the moment a tourist’s card payment meets a service worker’s mobile money wallet. But the data generated by that transaction is the foundation for something much larger: savings products built on tip history, affordable credit for casual workers with no formal employment record, FX management for properties receiving international payments, donation rails for conservation-minded guests who want to give to the local communities that make their experience possible. All of it sitting on top of the same platform.

The founders I admire most — Patrick and John Collison at Stripe, James Mwangi at Equity Bank, Ken Njoroge at Cellulant — did not build products. They built rails. They built the underlying infrastructure that allowed entire industries to function differently. That is what Thenks is building for African tourism. We started with tipping because tipping was the specific, legible, immediately solvable problem in front of us. The infrastructure opportunity is the next thirty years.

VIII. Bet on Yourself

We are now at 68 properties. We have processed over \$200,000. We have impacted approximately 1,500 workers directly — their tips arriving on time, transparently, with the certainty that the money someone wanted them to have will actually reach them. We are expanding into Tanzania and Uganda, with Zambia and South Africa on the horizon.

I set a theme word for myself at the beginning of this year. Not a goal. Not a KPI. A theme. Bet on myself. Looking back across everything that has happened — Fenny in Ocean Basket, the 70,000-shilling tip in Lamu, the meeting where someone wrote on a whiteboard that I had brought nothing, the walk toward Shamba Coffee when the name arrived, the tuk-tuk in Busia when a lodge called asking where her money was, the Subaru in Lower Kabete, the SOS I almost could not send — I realize the theme was not new. It was the whole story, named at last.

The mission was not something I found.

I was in a restaurant in Westlands on a Saturday morning with my girlfriend when a waitress named Fenny told me how she was putting her sisters through school. I was in a tuk-tuk crossing western Kenya when a customer called asking where her money was. I was on a walk through Loresho when a name arrived mid-stride and I knew it was the name. I was in the back of a police car, sending an SOS with the only phone I had left, and making jokes because I had already decided the story did not end there.

The problem found me. I did not find it. It found me, kept finding me, and every time I thought about walking away it found me again.

That is the only story I know how to tell. When I wrote that LinkedIn post from Bungoma in June 2025, I said I had thirty years. That post is now over a year old. Right now I have twenty-nine.

Mathenge Waweru is the founder and CEO of Thenks, a digital tipping and hospitality finance platform for Africa. Thenks has processed over \$500,000 across 80 properties, directly impacting 2,100 service workers. The company is expanding across the East and Southern African safari belt.

Fenny, the waitress from Ocean Basket who first made the problem real, is now working in the aviation industry.