 Welcome back to Why in the Morning. Special thanks to Alex for that informative and amazing interview. We appreciate the guys who come to Why in the Morning so much and the innovators in this country. So right about now we have another one who is a graduate from Kenyatta University. He is a graduate of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, but he started his own business in software development. He goes by the name Isaac Karibusana. It's been a long time coming. I read about you and I was really looking forward to meeting you Isaac. But before we talk about everything, your camera is number four. I'll just introduce yourself in case you missed anything. Thank you. My name is Isaac Nyabuto. I'm a tech prenewer. I'm also an engineer. I graduated from Kenyatta University. I graduated last year in 2018 and right now I'm doing a tech business. I'm in the tech business. I'm a software developer. I've developed many software for companies, for both small and big companies. And I'm glad to be here today. Karibusana Isaac. And that was quite a brave move. Deciding to open and run your own business in software which is not so common around here. It's relatively present out there but not so many people are starting businesses in this world. I'd like to take you back to college. You're studying electrical and electronic engineering. Traditionally, software development is part of this course as a whole. When we were in second year, we were introduced to programming in our second year. But it was not that intense. So I took the initiative to learn software development on YouTube on myself. I was inspired by the videos I was quoting online, entrepreneurship videos such as the Shark Tank. I'm sure you know about the Shark Tank. Yeah, I've watched Shark Tank. So that's what inspired me to learn software development and later on, when I was in my third year second semester, I made a project and I took it to the Chandaria Business Center. These are an innovation center in Kiyu, Kenyatta University. And then, unfortunately, the project was rejected. That's what gave me an inspiration that I myself can be able to put these projects which I make out there to the world. Bring them to life. What was your project about, the one that was rejected? So I made an automated system whereby, let's say in high school, when a teacher enters marks online on the database, there is an automatic system that detects that marks have been entered online and sends an automatic message to their parents so that they can be able to monitor the everyday performance of their children. From assignments to cuts to the main examination. Yeah, everything that happens. Monitor across, not just wait for the reports at the end of the time. Yeah, even kukarutu activities can be recorded. They can monitor them from home. So I took that project to the Chandaria Innovation Center and fortunately, at that moment, we didn't have much content on that project and it was rejected. So after registering my company, I made that project better and commercialized it. What is the name of the company right now? My company is called the City Cloud Company. The City Cloud Company. Alright, cloud I can tell because it involves a lot of software and programming. You need the cloud obviously to support these systems. Why city? Actually, I can say most of my inspiration comes from the shows which I watched. So there was a certain show, a certain texture which I was watching and there was this billionaire entrepreneur who had a company called City Capital. City Capital. So I figured out and then decided to name mine City Cloud. So it was just an inspiration. It was really well. There's the CC city in cloud, both of the cities and it will give the graphic designer easy time designing the logo. Yeah, sure. In fact, you can check our website online. Just share with them the website so they can check it out while we have this conversation. Okay, if you want to check our website online, you can go to www.citycloudtech.com. We have a lot of stuff there. We even have free games for kids. You can go there and download free games for your kids. You can go there and download free templates for your websites. You can go there and order software for your companies. And you can go there and also learn code for free. We teach code for free. It's our way of giving back to the community. So we inspire young people who want to become programmers. We teach them code for free online. We guide them and when they have problems in learning code, we give them, we get them every time. They ask for solutions. I feel that. Thank you very much. I've seen kids learn programming. I've seen from five-year-old kids programming to very senior people. So I want to ask what is the right age to start learning programming? I'll ask, is there something like it's too late to learn programming for somebody? It's never too late. As long as you have the passion to learn programming, everything is possible. Like me, I started learning programming when I was in my form 2. When I was in form 2, when I was introduced to computer, then I started, that's when I started learning programming. Then later on, then I can say right now I've become perfect as a result of the practice which I've been doing all those years. But it's never too late to start learning. You can start at any age and you can become as good as someone who started long time ago. So it's all upon you and your dedication? Yes, as long as you have the passion to do it, everything is possible. So as a trained electrical and electronic engineer, do you still practice? I have the certificate. You have the certificate. Which leads to our next question. So many people that have had on this show end up practicing what they did in study in school. What do you attribute to this? Because it's very common in Kenya as we speak. I can say, in my case, let me start from my case. In my case, they both technology-based practices. Yeah, because electrical engineering has part of programming in it. So I cannot say that I have diverged from my main course. But for other cases, other people, most of the people discover their passion late. You can go through four years learning something which you're not passionate about. And because your parents push you to learn that thing, you just finish, give them the certificates and then go back to your passion. What is the solution to this? So I think the new system which the government has come up with is one of the solutions to this problem. Is the step in the right direction? Yeah, because it inspires someone to become what they are passionate about. It starts from early. It starts making you what you want to become from an early age. I like that. In a business like yours, how much investment do I need to start for start? You just need your brain. It's all about software. So you just buy a computer, you get the passion, you must have the passion. You cannot see it behind a computer many hours a day just writing code and you're not passionate about it. You must have the passion. So the passion is number one. Number two is a computer. You must have the computer of course. You need to exercise it as always. You need to sharpen it and you need to load it with a lot of knowledge. And you must work hard. There's a lot of work when developing a software. You must do a lot of research. So you must be ready to work very hard. And have some sleepless nights as well. Of course. That is what it takes to be a coder out there. Another thing that is happening in the current market is that we are seeing a lot of startups failing or crashing before even their second birthday. Alright. How old is your company? My company started in 2015. 2015. When I was in third year. So it's like roughly now almost four years. Almost four years. So you've broken the curse of startups. Unfortunately I can say this. You've broken the curse of startups. Alright. So you are four years into this. What are some of the things you've learned as a business owner or as a startup or as a tech entrepreneur? When you want to be an entrepreneur you should not have a faint heart. You know there are so many challenges in entrepreneurship. You can start with a big morale. Then because of the many challenges sometimes you tend to have that motive. You start developing the motive to give up. But you must inspire yourself. Always. Because there are so many difficulties from financial difficulties. Some government regulations sometimes they do not favor the small businesses. So it's all about the power to persist and believe in yourself, believe in your dream. Persist and fight hard. That's how you make it to four years. Because it's been four years now. Persistence and hard work for sure. Be sure to check the website for software solutions. We are going to be sharing the website with you in a few. So you have developed systems for different fields. There are vast number of fields from hospitality to schools, to hospitals. I like to talk about the system that you developed for a hospital. What is this one in particular? We have a hospital system. The hospital system basically has all the components of a hospital. All the activities that happen in a hospital environment. So we have captured all the activities that happened there and we have made everything automated. We have made everything easy from booking, getting into the hospital and requesting for medicine, requesting for a doctor. We can even request for a doctor online. There are so many components in that system that make the hospital industry to work in a seamless way. In a seamless way. I'm trying to imagine this system right here. Is it custom made or is it a general system like Facebook where all doctors can come in or hospitals can come in or is it customized? This one is for this particular hospital. They have their patients and patients monitored from the system. So for our company, our policies, we develop our prototype. We have a prototype system and when a certain hospital requests for our product, they come with their own requirements. Then from there we can be able to customize our prototype to fit their needs. So you not only have one hospital as a client, but you have so far we have four hospitals but most of them are back in the village. Back in the village. This is how startups become prominent. You start from the grassroots. You start from the grassroots. And you learn in the process. I'd like to know about the system that you've developed for the schools. The school management system. That is the one we were talking about before. In fact it's called the smart school management system. So when I developed this system the decision which I made first was to donate it to my village school where I learnt my primary school. So I gave them the system for free. I tested it there and it worked very well. That's when I commercialized it from there. So I started by giving back to my school where I learnt in my primary school. So from there I can say that we have sold 10 units of the system. 10 units of the system. From 2016 that's when we developed the system. Does it have a fixed price or every custom made system has its own weakness? It depends on the requirements. You know there are some schools which require many factors to be put on the system. It all depends on the individual clients. But there's a minimum pay for it. I'd like to focus on the creative process now where the ideas flow and ideas come. How many are you in the organization so far by the way? So far we have four. Two developers. We have a secretary and we have a media guy who markets our company. But we also have affiliates because we also do architectural designs. So we have guys who are professionals in that field. So when we get clients who want textural designs that's when we call our affiliates to do the designs for us. So it's a support system and this is an ecosystem where startups thrive when you work together. You must find affiliates because you cannot be able to employ like 20 people a go. So you must. It's very expensive. You can do. Then when you get clients you can be able to outsource the jobs to other people. Then in that way you will be able to develop. Wonderful. Take me through the creative process. Before you guys decide we are going to develop something that is going to make teachers work easier. Do you guys sit down and say let's come up with something today or how does it work? It's a creative process because every day I analyze the things which I go through life then I look at them from the technology perspective from what system can I develop to make this easier. Even when I came here I looked at the systems here then there are some ideas which I got which we can develop to make things to learn more seamlessly. It starts with the problem you identify the problem try to come up with a solution and then technify. Then implement. Where you bring technology into it and this is a continuous process. It happens every day. The systems that never come to life the systems that will come to life and the system you are still holding for a moment now. You must also be ready to learn from other people. This is a site we are talking about. This is a site we are talking about. This is our site. The city cloud company site. Our official website. Just hold the mic steady here. This is our official website. It has all the products which we sell and our recent projects which we have done and you can see there it is telling the users for those who want to learn code they can register. We call it online free we do it for free. Those are some of the things we should do from software development, mobile applications that's our vision and vision. So those are what we do. All the information is on the website. To say I need services from you guys when I get to the website what do I do? I get the phone number and call you. We have automated the website in a way that you can be able to request for service on the website but alternatively if you want to call us you can always contact us. If you feel it's urgent you can contact us. You can always contact but everything is on the website. Everything is on the website. Things that we can get from the website. The most interesting one for me is that you are giving back to the community. People can learn coding. Anybody can learn coding on their site? Anybody who can read it right? Anybody who has a passion. Anybody who has a passion. You're insisting on the passion aspect. Because I know most of the people who start learning coding they give up on the way. Because they do not have a passion. It's a lot of stuff you do so you must have the passion to learn. It's a lot of stress along the way. It's very engaging. It's very engaging. It brings about a lot of gray hair. We have had this conversation for a while in this country where we see the government is trying to build a tech city like Silicon Valley the one we have in the U.S. So the government has been trying to develop this city. I think it's tattoo city if I'm not wrong. What do you think is this practical? It's very practical. Because technology is all about what's in the mind. When we talk about the government wanting to develop a Silicon Valley city it's not all about the buildings you see in the U.S. It's all about we have the brain capacity. For example from where we are located at Kilimani we have so many tech companies our competitors. These guys are very smart. They have come up with so many innovations. They can do things just as well as those tech people in the U.S. So we have the as long as we have the brain smartness we have the capacity to develop this idea to make it practical for a country. It's a step towards the right direction as well. Invest in the brains invest in the minds as much as we are investing in the buildings and the infrastructure. I would like a situation whereby the government organizes tech conferences for our high schools we have the science conferences. Most of them do not focus on computers and tech. So the government should focus on computers and tech programming. As early as high school. You can start even from class 8 as early as you can. Alright. Kenya is ranked number 4 in Africa internet presence. This is a good thing or a bad thing first. It's a good thing. But we cannot be only consumers of technology. We must be the innovators of technology as well. Alright. But this makes it conducive for an innovator in Kenya because if we have online presence like this Kenya is one of the countries where software developers can be able to develop themselves real fast because we have the consumers who are ready. We have people who can access the internet very fast. People have smartphones even back in the villages. So when you create a product and put it online, you are sure that you are going to have that audience. There are people who are going to check out your product and there is a probability that you are going to get customers. All these worldwide sites that are used across the world like Google and Facebook and the rest of them they have one thing in common. They are all based in America somewhere. Do you think there is a day we might see a Kenyan site having that worldwide consumption or worldwide presence or worldwide subscriptions? I think in the future there is going to be such a system. As much as these big companies have dominated the market we are going to have, we start from Africa we can develop a system which can dominate Africa. We can start from our own continent. We start from our own continent. When we dominate Africa then we can be able to conquer the rest of the world. So solve an African problem and probably it's going to be a world problem and we are going to solve it. You can check out our website our company website www.citycloudtechnologytech.com From there you can be able to check our products. You can be able to learn code online and you can be able to reach us. If you want to call us you can call us then we will be able to solve your tech problems. It's time for a question of the day and this is the question we posted on Facebook. It falls right in place because I know for a startup you have goals and they are timed goals obviously. So where do you see yourself in the next 5 years? That is a question of Facebook and if you are watching us from home also you are free to answer. So in the next 5 years you just talked about developing a product which is consumed by the whole world. I think I see my company in that position we will produce a product that will have such kind of usability in the whole world. So that's why I want to see my company and I would like to see my company sell more and more of our products and to be able to develop in a way that we can be able to create employment for more and more people because employment is becoming a problem in this company. Most of my friends who we graduated are complaining every day about employment. So when I solve a problem even for one person I think that would add an addition to our company. That's a positive way. That's a plus for the country and your company as well. So the goal is to have that worldwide presence compete globally and another goal is to provide employment for Kenya youth in five years then. Thank you very much for coming through to Waian the Morning. Thank you for hosting me. Yes, we appreciate you Mr. City City Cloud Company the CEO and founder of City Cloud Company is here with us Mr. Isaac Graduate from Kenyatta University but he runs his own thing. Please check out citycloud. www.citycloudtech.com www.citycloudtech.com check them out to learn some coding to request for their services or just do whatever if you're interested in tech and you'd like to get some help or you'd like to help develop something head straight to their website so you guys can communicate about that. We still have a lot lined up for you on this particular entrepreneurship Tuesday. Don't go nowhere, don't hide that out.