Back in 2013, our co-founder Kenneth Chepkwony was a student at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture & Technology in Juja. One sunny afternoon, he hopped on a matatu to Thika Town and walked into a hardware store to buy his very first bicycle. What he hadn’t quite worked out was how to get it home.
With no plan and no backup, he did the only thing he could: he rode. The full 13 kilometres back to Juja — a gruelling four-hour ordeal, made harder by knowing nothing about cadence, pacing, or hydrating on the go. He made it. And somewhere on that long, slow road home, something stuck.
What started as a way to get around became a way of life.
Over the years, Kenneth’s bicycle stopped being just transport. It became his source of endorphins, his way of staying fit, and — most importantly — how he made some of his best friends. (To this day, he still rides his bike to the barbershop.) Cycling wasn’t a hobby he picked up. It was a community he rode into.
The complaint that started a company.
One day, Kenneth was talking with longtime friend and co-founder Ronald Diang’a — a die-hard tennis and football player — and found himself complaining about something he couldn’t shake: Nairobi had no businesses built for cyclists. He kept returning to the same handful of coffee shops not for their prices, but because they were the ones that didn’t make him negotiate to park his treasured bike where he could see it. That was the whole problem, said out loud. And in that conversation, CycleBrew was born.