Kenneth Kinyanjui

🏊🏿‍♂️ , 🏃🏿‍♂️, 🚴🏿 and proudly 🇰🇪 | Reimagining public transport in Africa through @exodusmobility | @Included_VC 2021 | @GoogleDevExpert Cloud

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

"Don't fall in love with the tech, fall in love with the business model" - @asemota .

I woke up thinking about a conversation I had with him and these words kept coming back to me.

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@JasonNjoku He has DT Swiss Carbon Wheels !!! Yo !!! I hope he is giving that bike the justice it deserves 😂

[Google for Startups @GoogleStartups]

🇿🇦 Meet the 15 startups joining the 2026 Google for Startups Accelerator: South Africa cohort.

They’re building what’s next for South African innovation, backed by mentorship from experts at @Google, specialized AI infrastructure, global networks and R15M in equity-free funding.

Meet the cohort: https://t.co/OkMREhD5o9

[Tim Messerschmidt @SeraAndroid]

I’m very proud of the team and the countless hours that went into carefully selecting these startups for the program!

So much cool AI innovation is coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa, so this one is a cohort to follow closely.

[Evan Boyle @_Evan_Boyle]

I've managed fully remote engineering teams for ~7 years, from small teams to rapidly growing orgs spanning 10+ countries.

I've developed some pretty strong opinions about what makes remote work actually work:

<rant>

1. YOU MUST GET "THE TEAM" TOGETHER ONCE A QUARTER, NO EXCEPTIONS. The faster the team/company is growing, the more critical this is. If you follow no other piece of advice follow this one. Remote work is built on a foundation of trust which for most humans can only be built in person. Think about a person you know well who has extremely dry humor. Would you be able to detect that characteristic if you met them for the first time over SMS or slack? Bonds are built over dinner, a beer, an in person hackathon. And those bonds carry forward to the rest of the time spent remote. **for some definition of "the team" - can be a mix of immediate team, org, company-wide, all are useful at different cadences.

2. Managers must be pros and must be highly technical. Many non-technical managers rely on lazy half-ass signals like "who left the office last". As a remote manager you literally have no option other than to inspect the concrete outputs to understand what is going on. This tip is also very useful to non-remote teams 🙂

3. No juniors except for exception cases. Exceptional cases are obviously exceptional. Gotta build the muscle before you play on hard mode - for mere mortals at least. Don't expect someone to learn "how to remote" and "how to engineer" simultaneously. It is too much.

4. Establish a physical center of gravity, ideally 20-30% of staff. Company can still be fully remote and have "an office" where company events are held, some fraction of local employees cowork once a week even if on different teams.

5. Regardless of critical mass, all meetings must be remote first. None of this conference room with 10 people dialing into a zoom meeting with 3 other people nonsense. 100ms latency of conversation is real and you are at a disadvantage if you are trying to interject remotely into a room of in person attendees.

6. Hire managers into the critical mass (or who are willing to travel a lot). There will be lots of good reasons for the manager to make their way in on occasion (once a week, twice a month) to the home of critical mass for one reason or another

7. Onboard senior hires and leaders in person. I have seen new leaders, ICs, managers, design/pm/marketing leaders crash and burn over lack of building good relationships in the first 3 months. If you're bringing on a new leader for god's sake make sure they spend a few days in person with the other leaders they have to collaborate with.

8. Hire within a deliberate, manageable timezone range!!! This becomes more important the more varied the experience level is within your team. Is it possible with absolute engineering pros and remote veterans? Yes! But you need to ask yourself if your team is ready to coordinate work across Australia, UK, NYC, SF, Japan, and India timezones. Think hard about this one. My team is US west coast through Czech Republic. Teammates spanning every part of the US, Brazil, UK, Portugal, Denmark, and more.

8.a. Have a clearly established schedule for "time the whole team must be online". For us this is 8:30 - 10:00am Pacific, but many Europeans choose to work shifted schedules to have more overlap with their peers. I advertise this upfront in every hiring manager screen. Make expectations clear and let people decide. We're all adults and we're more likely to commit and make things work when we make a decision with complete information.

9. Onsite time is precious. Don't waste it on ordinary meetings. Use it for strategic conversations, solving hard problems together, hackathons, and high-bandwidth planning. This is where you build the relationships that make the next three months of remote work successful. For fuck's sake please do not fill a week making people stare at a projector while you read powerpoints!!!

Take the advice or don't.

</rant>

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@asemota 😅😅😅

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@asemota I spent close to an year in Marseille and I survived with my English. Translate really helped me cope otherwise the only option would have been to learn.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

My nephew is representing Ghana at Karting Africa in Angola. This boy is a generational talent. His mother hates that he does this but his Dad and I are fully in support. Our next F1 champ from Africa will be a Fanti boy!! 😂😂🤣

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@mansaplus Kibera Hill is brutal even on a road bike - Yo !!!

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@IanECox what proof do you have that it was @lookie63ke ? Btw is this is false - @lookie63ke please teach this one a lesson .

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@asemota This must have been a Launchpad build event. I was in Marseille at the time.

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

2:01:08 Unofficial time -Amos Kipruto win at th #chicagomarathon

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

Talk about a decisive move. Amos Kipruto just put the hammer down at th #chicagomarathon. First WMM win in the horizon .

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

@LDAraba Jio in India seemed like a bad idea at first but now, everyone is rushing to India after the hard work has been done. Ambani took risks.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

@LDAraba Those past errors were engineered by information asymmetry. People underdeveloped us deliberately to their advantage.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

After listening to my wife’s panel on African due diligence, a panelist mentioned that one of the best ways to mitigate negative African risk perception is heavy investment in technology.

Two questions from that.

1. Why is Africa perceived as having higher investment risk?

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

It is funny that it is friends who know that I would jump up and chat with them and help them move mountains free of charge, yet they still pay and book time to talk to me on @calendly. I appreciate them all. 🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@roomthinker @ntsa_kenya They are now installing the speed cameras so it will be permanently enforced.

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

@Dev_Manuell @vercel @brimblehq Thanks but no thanks

[Kenneth Kinyanjui @kenju254]

Does @vercel have an avenue to contact support because our company account was suspended and no way of unblocking that which means service is down