From football star to startup CTO with Andrew Kirima | Humans of Ladder

Ladder is filled with thousands of students & new grads from all walks of life trying to navigate their careers together. To highlight the journeys of some of our users, we’re excited to share a new initiative we like to call Humans of Ladder, where we’ll highlight a member on the platform each week to share their story.

This week, we chatted with Andrew Kirima, a rising football star turned entrepreneur, who currently works as the Chief Technology Officer at Sencha Credit and is an active user of our product management, entrepreneurship, and venture capital communities!

So let’s start from the very beginning. What’s your origin story?

I was born in Kenya and moved to the US when I was two or three, so I’m technically an immigrant. I lived mostly in Washington until I graduated high school.

I really tried to do the whole football thing — I was pretty adamant about going and playing big-time sports, so early after high school I transferred to a junior college in Northern California. I played there for a couple of years until one day I was just over it. It’s a long story, but I basically woke up one morning for a 6 am workout, decided I was done with football, and didn’t even respond to my coach when he texted me asking where I was.

I wanted to enjoy myself while I was still young, and on top of that, I wanted to focus on engineering because deep down I knew that engineering was always my biggest thing — engineering and entrepreneurship.

After I got back from class that day, I sat down and applied to all the state schools I could on the West Coast. I ended up transferring to the University of Arizona — it was a big school, had a good engineering program, and best of all: it was under the sun. While I was there, I studied Systems Engineering and also decided to minor in Electrical & Computer Engineering.

That’s such a crazy story — takes a lot of guts to pivot just like that. While at Arizona, I bet your degree path helped with the engineering side of things, but how’d you get started in entrepreneurship?

During my senior design course, we were tasked with partnering alongside corporate companies that were sponsoring the program. My friends and I wanted to take a different approach though, so we started our own company and sponsored ourselves so that we could work on what we wanted. The company came to be Facade Technologies, and we basically built a framework to automate desktop applications.

Facade was great, but by August, we ended up dissolving since our CEO was too tied up with some personal stuff. We’re all still cool with each other, but everyone just went their own way. Personally, I started to get really interested in product management since I did some pretty similar stuff for Facade, and I began to explore a bunch of different opportunities to get into the space.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, I also had a bunch of ideas but no outlet to put them. I started to take up writing and published my own tech blog. I basically spent the next few months juggling between applications for product management positions and writing on the side — super fun, but a lot of work.

Eventually, I got an opportunity to be a product management intern with Open Water Accelerator, and I immediately took the offer and jumped into that experience. As an intern, I worked closely with this company called Sencha Credit, and I really resonated with the mission of the company. I was working a lot more than what was expected for the internship, but for all the right reasons.

After my time at Open Water, I ended up joining Sencha Credit full-time, but instead of just being a product manager, I took it up a notch, became the Head of Product, and then took it up another notch and took over as CTO. On the side, I was working for another startup called Nebula Consulting. They found me through Open Water after hearing about my writing, and I ended up being a product marketing manager for them.

That brings us to the current day. I left Nebula Consulting, still work at Sencha Credit, but am also looking into opportunities with venture capital groups.

I feel like a lot of people have been interested in a product management-style role like you were. After your experience, were there some hidden hardships that you didn’t expect?

Kind of expected, but it’s a lot of work and sometimes hard to see the immediate reward. There are a lot of days where you’ll work a ton on the back end, but on the frontend it may just look like you didn’t do much at all.

For instance, I’m currently working on a website, and a lot of people don’t understand that even the smallest UI/UX changes sometimes take days to develop. You need to be willing to accept that you won’t immediately see the fruits of your labor. At Sencha, it might look like things are stale from the front, but from the back, we’re doing so much — setting up all these meetings, training a bunch of people, and so much more. It’s nothing like my tech blog, where I can just push content out for readers whenever.

Another thing too — I was reading something yesterday and learned an important mantra that I don’t think a lot of people think of: great leaders make great leaders. You shouldn’t teach people to simply do a task; you should teach them in a way that they can teach someone else the exact same way you are.

100% agree. Before you were a leader though and were just starting your career, what resources did you use to get your foot in the door?

Ladder! I found Open Water Accelerator through Ladder, and if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be at Sencha Credit. I’ve also found many venture capital opportunities there and been a part of the various workshops/events held on the platform.

I think what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to go through the typical route anymore — there are so many ways to find people. If I went down the standard path, I would’ve just stayed on LinkedIn forever and kept on trying to build my network through there. But I didn’t — I went through Ladder and joined these various communities that I really love and can actually talk to. At the end of the day, everyone in these communities is humble and simply has a curiosity to learn, and that’s what makes them awesome.

After you found that role, what keeps you coming back to the platform?

I’ve been trying to promote Ladder to my other friends because of what I see in the community. I have a friend who started his own business around impact leaders and social entrepreneurship and I recommended he get plugged into the platform. It’s where I see people with ambitious mindsets come together. And that’s the one thing I love about Ladder: it just oozes the whole entrepreneurial spirit. To me, these are the people who want to get sh*t done. Who want to be successful and want to do more than just the regular person. That’s what I feel like when I go on Ladder.

Overall, what are some tips you can give to some of the newer members of Ladder on ways they can enrich their experience within the platform?

The first thing that comes to mind is to pay attention to the Ladder newsletter. I’m a huge proponent of newsletters in general because they’re the morning newspaper for our generation. Instead of going on Instagram for an hour before I get out of bed, I started reading these newsletters first, so that when I’m out of bed, I filled my brain with some useful information.

Secondly, don’t be scared to talk. It’s tough for sure — I’m in a few professional communities right now and it took almost six months to learn how to speak properly in a professional setting. I was in a lot of groups (Slack communities, Product Hunt, etc.) with a lot of seasoned vets prior and got intimidated pretty easily, but Ladder really helped me get over that.

Just start conversations — if somebody is talking crypto or climate or tech or an area of your interest, just go in and say something. Get good at continuing genuine conversations and create as many quality conversations as you can. It goes back to what I said earlier: don’t network with a trillion people at once, but actually try to build meaningful relationships with people. Quality over quantity.

Join Ladder for access to more opportunities to meet amazing students and recent graduates like Andrew!