Stephen Muchendu has watched founders stretch themselves thin, pouring their energy into operations while their digital presence withers, and he considers that imbalance not just inefficient but fundamentally unfair. In his view, AI should amplify truth rather than fabricate it, and technology should bend around human personality, never flatten it.Photo/ Zenith Intelligence
On a warm evening in Ruiru, a neighbourhood located some 24 kilometres from the Kenyan capital Nairobi, an 18-year-old with a startling sense of certainty sits behind his laptop, mapping work that he believes will outlive him.
His name is Stephen Muchendu, and for someone barely out of high school, he talks about Kenyan entrepreneurship the way an engineer talks about a failing machine, with clinical clarity, impatience, and a sense that someone ought to fix the system.
He remembers the moment it first bothered him: scrolling through Instagram and realizing that several once-vibrant Kenyan businesses had simply gone silent. No updates. No marketing. No presence. “I watched brilliant businesses vanish into silence because the founders were busy actually building,” he tells Impact AI News, lifting his hands in a gesture that mixes frustration with wonder. “Content isn’t a ‘nice to have’ anymore, it’s oxygen. If you’re not appearing daily, you don’t exist in the market. That felt criminal to me.”
What he means is that Kenya’s entrepreneurial culture, the relentless hustle, the long workdays, the multitasking, has created a paradox. Founders are too busy sustaining their businesses to communicate about them.
