Ian Kipkemboi

It is in me,and so it shall come out

[Dr Ruby (she/her) jaboukies everything @PaperWhispers]

Dear Black people, stop telling your story like this, the exceptionalist narrative serves eugenics. Please foreground your work, your ambitions and your future. You really cannot be 43 and still looking in the rear view mirror to 12, when there is 53, 63, 73, 83 to come.

[Vionna @Kurlycheeks]

My fave Kenyanism word: Rada? Depending on the context it could mean WTF? It could mean “seriously?”. It could mean “what’s up?”. It could mean “the hell’s wrong with you?” And you can understand it by the tone someone uses when saying it, and I find it so beautiful.

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

Anthropic has dove an unreal job at papering the earth with enterprise contracts; every company I walk into *just* went “all in on Claude” about to onboard hundreds or thousands of employees while every cutting edge builder I know has moved to codex.

Speed of adoption compounds both ways, if you’re just catching up that cc and opus 4.6 are great, and have decided you’re decided, you’ll be even slower to see the frontier because you’re locked in to one provider’s view of the world.

If you’re always one fragile step into the future, bop around models, know how codex and cowork and ai studio are all going to intersect, etc etc etc you’ll widen the gap of adoption, and adoption > impact.

To the fast & flexible go the spoils.

(But gg Claude!)

[Tushar Mehta @tushaarmehtaa]

anthropic might be building the greatest “individual contributor” team in tech history.

i mean just look at this lineup:

> andrej karpathy (god himself)
> mike krieger (instagram cofounder/cto)
> jarred sumner (bun)
> peter bailis (workday cto)
> bryan mccann (you com cto)
> niki parmar (adept ai cto)
> henry shi (super com cto)

and and and

most of them just become “MTS” at anthropic 😭

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if infrastructure like this 👇 gets blown up, as of this moment it will take at least a decade to recover from this war - and the truth is that the world's energy picture is probably changed forever.

This single facility 👇produced roughly 20% of global LNG supply (https://t.co/76QERytREH) and, as of 2011, had taken $70 billion to build (https://t.co/iZvv2SvxBe).

What makes this even worse is that Iran's strike on this was retaliation after Israel attacked their South Pars gas field which draws from the same natural gas reservoir, which is the world's largest by far (9,700 km² - about the size of Qatar itself).

Heck, on the list of the 25 largest natural gas fields (https://t.co/m5TmQ2Zkc8) this single reservoir holds roughly 40% of their combined recoverable reserves - and is nearly 6 times bigger than the 2nd biggest field in the world. And, unlike many of the others on the list, it's only at 10% depletion (meaning 90% of the gas is still there).

Which means that, probably for many years, a huge share of the gas from the world's largest reservoir simply won't be extractable, as infrastructure on both sides - Qatar's and Iran's - has now been blown up.

From a global energy supply perspective, we're deep into worst-case scenario territory.

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

the people who built Africa's fintech layer weren't the most technical in the room.
they just understood the market in a way no outsider could.
AI is the same moment. wrote about the three positions you're already in.
https://t.co/SOqlTxsMnt

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

This week's musing is all about risks that AI poses in hiring candidate fraud,the extent of it all and what can be done to mitigate this.Lets discuss below https://t.co/OF0rJPZrir

[dax @thdxr]

a lot of companies have this one very smart engineer that everyone respects and is legendary and has a ton of influence

and often times the company should actually fire this person because they cap the entire org to a certain ceiling

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

@LeeRussian @ZeddyShizzle let's discuss...

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

Getting back to technical writing.See my thoughts on Claude CoWork and possible ramifications for HRTech https://t.co/BjDTWsQrYA

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

High love and high structure.

I grew up in a home that was high structure but low love. My father's rules were absolute, enforced by the threat of conflict, but there wasn't warmth underneath. When I started building teams, I instinctively swung the other way: high love, low structure. I wanted everyone to feel supported. I avoided setting hard expectations because I didn't want to be my dad. It didn't work. People didn't know where they stood. Standards were fuzzy. The team drifted. What I eventually learned is that the optimal isn't one or the other — it's both. Genuine care for people combined with clear expectations and real accountability. Most people need structure to thrive. They want to know what's expected, how they're doing, and where the boundaries are. That's not mean. That's respectful. High love without high structure is actually a form of neglect.

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

Got my writing mood back....

[Ty Ngachira @anto_ty]

After being out in the streets, I couldn't help but think. Eventually, like all movements born of urgency and discontent, the "Gen Z" uprising will have to grow up. And by growing up, I do not mean losing its fire , but rather finding a form. The kind of form that history demands of all resistance: organisation, structure, coherence. It is not enough to feel deeply or to shout loudly. One must decide what to do with that feeling, where to place that shout.

And soon, the question will no longer be what are we fighting against? but what are we building instead?

That is when the divergence will come.

There will be the moderates , intelligent, well-intentioned, perhaps more patient. They will speak of institutions, political parties, ballots, and courtrooms. They will name people like Omtatah, like Maraga people who believe that change can be negotiated within the existing architecture. They will be dismissed by some as naive, as too comfortable, too careful.

And there will be the revolutionaries no less intelligent, but shaped by a different kind of urgency. They will speak not of reform but of rupture. They will see the system as inherently broken, perhaps even illegitimate. They will not want to wait for laws to catch up with justice. Their voices will be louder, angrier, and more poetic in their dissatisfaction.

This division , because it will be a division , is not new. It is the story of every freedom movement. And it is rarely tidy.

But what matters, what will always matter, is how this moment is remembered. Whether it becomes just another swell of discontent that flattens under the weight of its own contradictions or whether it becomes a reckoning that dares to hold both rage and imagination.

The danger is not in disagreement. The danger is in forgetting that the other side, too, wants to matter. That both the moderate and the radical are trying, in their own way, to build a world where dignity is not a privilege but a given.

There will be no perfect path. There never is. But perhaps the work now is to learn to argue without fracturing. To lead without condescension. To dream without erasure.

And to remember that all movements ,like all people ,are at their most powerful not when they are certain, but when they are honest.

[Droid @droid254]

Kenyans are really the greatest 😂

#SiriNiNumbers

[Imade. @ImadeIyamu]

The way developed countries are worried about AI replacing entry level/white collar jobs is the way developing countries should be concerned about it replacing remote/offshored work because that will likely happen first.

[🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo]

I think we're heading for a complete reimagining of white collar work, not just automation of existing roles. Within five years, I'd estimate 30-40% of current white collar tasks will be fully automated, but that understates the disruption because entire workflows will be reconstructed around AI capabilities.

Take law firms: AI won't just replace junior associates doing document review. It'll handle most contract drafting, case research, and even strategic analysis. Partners will shift from managing armies of associates to directing AI systems. A team of 50 might do the work of 500. Similar compression will hit consulting, accounting, financial analysis, marketing agencies.

The psychological impact will be brutal. White collar workers built their identities around expertise and cognitive skill - exactly what AI targets. Unlike factory automation, this hits the professional class that thought they were safe. We'll see a crisis of professional identity unlike anything since industrialization.

Some coping mechanisms I expect to emerge:

New hybrid roles - "AI orchestrators" who manage multiple AI systems, "judgment specialists" who make final calls on AI recommendations, "context translators" who bridge AI outputs and human needs. But these roles will require maybe 20% of current headcount.

Time redistribution - Some organizations will embrace radical work reduction (20-hour weeks) to spread available work. Others will push humans toward relationship-heavy roles - client management, team building, creative direction.

Geographic arbitrage collapse. When AI can do the work, outsourcing to cheaper labor markets loses its appeal. Paradoxically, this might benefit some developed economies.

The real test: can we detach income from work fast enough? If not, we'll see professional class protests that make current labor movements look quaint. The social contract that traded education for economic security will shatter.

Most unsettling part? This might happen smoothly in some places and catastrophically in others, creating massive inequality between regions that adapt and those that don't.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I just read this WSJ article on why Europe's tech scene is so much smaller than the US's and China's.

I'm afraid that, like most articles on this topic, it largely misses the mark.

Which in itself illustrates a key reason why Europe is lagging behind: when you fail to understand the root causes of an issue, you have zero chance to solve it.

What makes me competent to speak on this topic?

Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I founded and led HouseTrip which at the time was one of Europe's top startups. We were the first historical startup in which all top 3 VC investors in Europe invested.

So I have a pretty intimate knowledge of the European entrepreneurship ecosystem and what it takes to create and grow a tech company in Europe.

We were pretty promising as a startup. In fact as promising as it can possibly get.

We had a similar concept to Airbnb (with some notable differences I won't bore you with), except we created the company 1 year before they did. Which means we were the first-mover - globally - with a multi-billion-euro concept, strong financial backing by the 3 top investors in Europe and, at some point, a team of 250 people with some of the brightest minds in tech in Europe. Everything we needed to succeed.

And yet we didn't succeed: ultimately we were essentially crushed by our American competitor Airbnb in our home turf - Europe - and we had no choice but to sell ourselves to another American company, Tripadvisor.

Believe me, I've reflected long and hard on how that could have happened. In fact after I left the company in 2015 I even spent 3 months in isolation in the Annapurna mountains in Nepal to reflect full time on exactly that 😅

And I then moved to China, where I spent the next 8 years and where I had the chance to study their ecosystem to understand why they're successful and Europe isn't.

So all in all, I think I have some degree of legitimacy to comment on this topic.

The WSJ article says that Europe lags behind due to the usual suspects, the reasons you constantly hear about: too much regulation, fragmented European markets, limited access to financing, a culture that isn't conducive to the startup grind, etc.

Some of those are true, but imho all are secondary.

Take excessive regulations for instance, which gets mentioned all the time. If they were such a hindrance to startups, why would American startups succeed in Europe - like Airbnb in our case - and European startups not? We all face the same regulations 🤷

Or take fragmented markets. Same question: how could US startups successfully conquer these fragmented EU markets when European startups can't?

Because that's the real elephant in the room, and really the story of the European tech scene since the advent of the internet: US startups have shown a remarkable ability to capture European markets despite the supposed barriers, making many of the "usual suspects" explanations for Europe's tech struggles very unconvincing.

In other words, logically, any explanation where both US and European startups face identical barriers fails to address the fundamental difference in outcomes we consistently observe.

Based on my experience, the key problem faced by European startups can be summarized in one word: patriotism.

There is virtually none in Europe, and more than anything that's what's killing EU startups, or preventing them from developing.

It used to drive me absolutely nuts at HouseTrip. What a startup needs first and foremost, especially a consumer-facing startup like we were, is marketing, to become famous.

At first, when I created the company and before Airbnb was even a thing, I used to pitch the company to the media and the general response I would get was almost one of contempt, as in "why would I belittle myself to write about your startup? And furthermore, who would be stupid enough to stay in an apartment when there are hotels? You guys have no future..."

And then Airbnb got launched and the American media started their thing, hyping the company like it was the greatest innovation since sliced bread, like they were national heroes, giving them hundreds of millions in free publicity.

That's when European media started to take notice. Not of us, god forbid, but of Airbnb. The concept was promoted by Silicon Valley, see... so now it was valid.

So I went back to pitch HouseTrip to European media. This time around I was met with a different kind of contempt: "So you guys are like Airbnb? Why would we cover a European copycat when we can just write about the real American original?" Luckily I'm not violent but lets say those moments really tested my civility 😅

All in all, we arrived in the absolutely grotesque situation where, despite Airbnb not having yet set foot in Europe, they were already a cultural phenomenon there, promoted by European media, for free, when the European original - yours truly - had to spend millions on paid marketing (mostly to Google and Facebook, American companies) to achieve a small fraction of the brand recognition.

Which means that, insanely, Airbnb was probably doing more business in Europe than we did before even opening an office there, simply on the back of the free publicity they were getting. How on earth can you even compete with that?

This dynamic was at play with general European elites too. I remember very clearly having dinner next to a legendary European entrepreneur and investor - who I won't name, a man who supposedly, on paper, is dedicating his life to furthering the European tech ecosystem. We naturally got to talk about HouseTrip and he literally told me, and this is an exact quote: "you know I don't really like copycats, they really hurt the European ecosystem." Another big test for my civility that night...

And even if we had been a copycat, so what? That's how China got started, there's nothing to be ashamed of. You need to learn to walk before you can run.

In fact if you study the history of innovation you'll find that every major tech power, including the US, started by imitating and adapting others' innovations before developing their own.

Speaking of China, again a country that I know in depth for having lived there for 8 years after HouseTrip, I've come to the conclusion that patriotism, a deeply rooted mindset of sovereignty, is truly the magic ingredient behind their success.

Contrary to popular belief, they don't do it in a stupid way by just banning competition. Those cases are actually very rare and only occur if the companies in question violate Chinese law in pretty egregious ways.

Most of the time it's the exact contrary: they welcome foreign companies and competition, but create conditions where local alternatives can thrive alongside them, giving Chinese users and businesses legitimate options to choose domestic champions.

Which means you end up with, for instance, Apple doing well in China but simultaneously allowing the rise of Huawei or Xiaomi. Or Tesla doing well in China but simultaneously allowing the rise of BYD or Nio. Etc.

And China is, interestingly, more comparable to the EU than most people realize. It is, again contrary to popular belief, extremely decentralized when it comes to doing business, with various provinces competing against each other much the same way EU countries compete against each other.

But they do it in such a way where, again, the overarching sense of Chinese sovereignty never gets sacrificed at the altar of provincial competition. And where the ultimate goal is to develop Chinese champions which can successfully compete on the global stage.

So there you have it, the dirty little secret behind Europe's lag. We're essentially witnessing a "colonization of the minds" whereby Europe has structurally internalized its technological inferiority, celebrating American startups while dismissing its own homegrown companies.

Why does this barely ever get talked about? Think about it: do you seriously think that the Wall Street Journal would start advocating for, essentially, policies hostile to American tech dominance?

Much better to focus on the usual red herrings like too much regulation or fragmentation which, conveniently, would primarily result in clearing obstacles for American tech giants to dominate European markets even further, rather than nurturing homegrown competitors. This article is, in itself, an illustration of the "colonization of the minds".

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

@ZeddyShizzle @Batakenya 🤣🤣🤣🤣 umezidi sasa

[Ian Kipkemboi @_kembzzz_]

@Ryanair @ZeddyShizzle admin at it again 🤣🤣