Winds of Change

And we continue where we left last time. The winds of change continued to blow. Even with the intransigent character of The Kenya Posts and telecommunications Corporation (KPTC), commercial ISPs kept springing up ( Shem Ochuodho had his ARCC along Ngong Road but was largely non profit driven). First came Formnet (now Kenyaweb), then Africa Online of Ayisi Makatiani , NairobiNet of Sammy Buruchara and his brother Robin Buruchara , Iconnect of Tejpal Bedi and where Joseph Mucheru was webmaster and CTO before he, and Njeri Rionge Order of Melchizedek launched Wananchi Online later on, and the list kept growing. At Swift Global, we continued pushing the Store and Forward fax service as the cash cow and set up an Internet wing. To head the Internet wing came Sammy Kimathi or as we commonly called him @Kimathi Mbaya (bad ass) and @Eric Njama aka Eric Plot. Peter Matayo and Reginald Tole also kept growing their technical and support department to be able to support this growth of the business.

At the global level, the Yugoslav crisis was raging on and the effect of that was that some good technical brains from there found their way into Kenya. As part of expanding the Swift Global ecosystem, Richard together with Dejan set up a Software company housed in the same offices along Mombasa Road. And that is where Peter Waa spent all his time through his thick glasses trying to write code. When he was not writing code, he was driving some high-class VW beetle. As I had mentioned in earlier stories, I sold many beetles before, but I don’t remember any of them coming close to Peter Waa’s beetle. While still at beetles, I will one day write an article exclusively about beetles, and one Cromwell Kedemi and his KKT will feature there very prominently. Back to Swift Global, as the Internet side expanded, we had more Yugoslavs join (up to this point, it was a company made up of only Kenyan and British nationals). We had Dragan Dincic join and later became CTO, Tassa and Tanya with their own ecosystems that included a computer hardware dealer called Dragan who later went back home, and became a tycoon.

The Internet at that time was not anything close to what we have today. In fact, when I tell my son Jamie O. that I was in the Internet business before Google, he wonders what I am talking about. Sammy Kimathi and Peter Waa became experts of Eudora and Netscape Navigator and anyone who joined the company had to pass through them to be taught what those things were and how to use them. You see during those days, to set up an ISP, you needed several lines from KPTC to connect to a bank of modems known as a portmaster (not the cheapest unit those days). The lines were all copper lines, so some little indiscipline with your cabling and your server room would look like a spaghetti dump. The highest speeds you could get from those copper lines was 14.4kbps if they came from a digital exchange. A lot of exchanges in Industrial Area, Upper Hill and CBD were still using pulse signaling and that was a nightmare to users and service providers especially when it rained. It was also not easy to get many lines dedicated to one ISP, so it was important that each ISP had a permanent employee hired just to manage the KPTC relationship. Making sure incoming lines were promptly fixed whenever they went down, or additional lines easily procured whenever they got congested from increased customer uptake. Besides the Portmaster and lines, you needed servers. At least a mail server and a web server, router and something called a DTU to connect you to your Internet leased line. This leased line had also moved from speeds of 9.6kbps to 64kbps (Kenstream) which was the fastest link you could get in the whole of the Republic of Kenya. At KPTC, there was a cool gentleman now known as Prof. Thomas Senaji, PhD., Pr. Eng. in whose hands the success or failure of ISPs lay. Thank God he was good at his job and was willing to go to great lengths to provide help under very difficult conditions. All these items became factors of competition. If you had a good portmaster with faster modems, your customers would enjoy better services, cleaner lines from KPTC, a stable server etc. If you had a SUN server as Africa Online had, you had the right go thumping your chest in the market that your service was provided on a stable platform. On the user side, operating systems were moving from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 which at that time had lots of bugs and provided a lot of challenge to technicians when it came to configuring dial up networking to dial out and connect to the ISP modems to provide the Internet service. The Common error, those days was that ‘Dial up Networking could not negotiate a set of compatible protocols’ a phrase we used in social circles to refer to a situation where a lady refused to take your stories or ‘kuingia box’ as it would be said today.

In the market, nothing could still beat the Swift Global Commission structure. In short, I was no longer that inexperienced and struggling entrepreneur and had a few coins in my pocket and so could afford to live on my own. I moved out of my brother Larry’s house and joined up with a son of a Moi University professor called Kris Senanu who had recently joined our Sales team and we rented a two-bedroom flat in Nairobi West. Kris later enticed a few USIU graduates to join the company which significantly changed the complexion of the company. As I mentioned in an earlier story, the customer paid Kshs. 29,500 + VAT for the Black box, the company took 9500/- and the salesperson kept 20,000 on each sale, and from Kshs. 12,500 for a Cover Page, the company took 1500/- and the salesperson kept 11,000/-. Commissions were paid twice a month, meaning as a salesperson cash checked into your bank account every two weeks. And our philosophy to the team was that we try to make three sales per day per person and if we fail we make at least one per person. So, one afternoon Kris Senanu with his wheeler dealing, brought a very clean Nissan B12 to sell to Annah Njaimwe . A sale that seemed very straight forward yet Annah still refused to buy. Later she came to my desk and the Kikuyu in her told me, ‘Owino, there is no way I am going to buy a car before I bought a matatu’. I asked her to pull a chair and listen very attentively. Those days, revenue from a Nissan matatu was about Kshs. 3,500 per day. This was before the driver, the conductor, makanga and traffic cops were paid. If you just sold one Cover Page per day, your income will be equal to someone with three matatus and no drivers, conductors, and traffic cops to be paid. I then asked her to look around the office and see that those with their own cars were earning much more than those who depended on pooled company transport. This talk changed her perspective and those who know her, know how formidable and passionate she can be and how many properties she has since acquired in Runda and many places around East Africa and the type of cars she drives.

In the next article I will tell you about some point in time when Richard Bell got tired of too much vernacular in the office and restricted its use and how this affected sales performance and so had to be reversed. I will also talk about the launch of Swift Mombasa, OperatorMSA and a gentleman called Oloo who used to introduce himself as Zero One Hundred. Have a good week.