We don’t cry. We brace. We absorb. We carry on. And if we’re lucky—if we survive it—we live to tell the story. That’s how the first Founders’ Battlefield podcast unfolded. Not like a show. More like a confessional.
Four founders. One quiet room. Stories spoken aloud that most of us have carried in silence or whispered behind closed doors. Trust is gone. And it’s killing us.
Not with a bang—but in the slow, bleeding losses that don’t make the news: missed partnerships, collapsed deals, hollow handshakes, delayed payments, ghosted funders.
You won’t find it itemised in our pitch decks. But every founder in that room could trace a moment where a single broken promise triggered a chain of collapse—of confidence, of careers, of entire ecosystems.
Roy Gitahi, the creative force in the room, said it first: “In our space, a creative and a conman are sometimes the same word.”
He wasn’t being cynical. He was telling the truth. Because in his world, trust isn’t a default—it’s a mountain to climb. You sell visions, yet you’re met with suspicion. You craft value, yet you’re treated like a scam.
The irony? His work fuels dreams. But it’s the dream-seller that gets interrogated.
Then came Renee Ngamau. Calm, clear, cutting. In her world of healthcare, low trust doesn’t just hurt business—it kills people. Patients question medical advice. Families delay care. Hospitals demand deposits first, treatment later.
“Even when people are dying,” she said, “the system leans toward doubt—not care.”
Behind her measured words was heartbreak. “Trust,” she reminded us, “is the first casualty in poverty.”
Kevin Mutiso, from fintech, didn’t sugarcoat it: “This is an epidemic.”
“In this country, we punish entrepreneurs for trying. And we reward fraudsters who know how to navigate the loopholes.”
He laid bare the reality we all know too well—fundraising cycles that go on forever, due diligence that becomes a dance of delay, and silence that answers more often than ‘no.’
“And then they tell us to have faith,” he said. “In what?”
That silence said more than any keynote ever could. And then it was my turn. I told them about a contract. A government one—900 pages long. Fully signed. Fully delivered. Backed by global investors. Built on by local teams.
People had quit jobs to work on it. Suppliers had hired. Partners had scaled. And then—cancelled. No explanation. No accountability. Just silence.
That silence hit harder than betrayal. Because when trust dies in a founder, something else dies too: Belief in the rules. Appetite for the game.
But the loss wasn’t just mine. Millions in investor capital vanished. Careers were derailed. Suppliers’ dreams were smashed. Families were affected.
This wasn’t just one founder’s blow—it was a ripple effect across an entire ecosystem. And no one was held responsible. So, what now? We didn’t walk out of that room with a solution. But we walked out clearer. Low trust doesn’t just slow founders down—it distorts how we build. You end up with one hand on the dream, and the other tightening the emergency brake.
You over-document. You second-guess. You lose time defending your integrity. It’s not just inefficient ..it’s exhausting.
But in that moment, something else began to emerge. A new kind of trust. Not blind. Not naïve. But chosen. Among founders willing to be real with each other.
We started connecting dots not theories, but lived truths. We remembered the family businesses that honour their name. The religious groups that back each other with both prayer and capital.
The founder circles that share market intelligence, not just motivational quotes. In those small but resilient pockets, trust is not a luxury—it’s a competitive edge.
Founders’ Battlefield isn’t just a podcast. It’s a reckoning. And it started with four voices: Roy Gitahi, Renee Ngamau, Kevin Mutiso, and myself.
We were the first to say, “We’ll go first. We’ll speak.”Since then, many more have joined us. Founders across industries. Voices once quiet, now reclaiming power in their stories.
To be “in the arena” means you choose to show up, even after being bruised. You’re not guaranteed applause. But you earn your own clarity.
If you’re reading this, still licking wounds or walking wounded—I see you. You’re not broken. You’re navigating a battlefield that rewards silence and punishes integrity. But here’s what I know: Even in the lowest-trust markets, high-trust people still win. They build slower. They build with scars. But they build things that last.
We’re not asking for perfection. Just a little more truth. And enough courage to keep building—even after the promise is broken. Because real founders don’t just build businesses. They build back after betrayal. And that—that’s the part of the story we need to tell louder.
Michael Anthony Macharia is a serial entrepreneur, founder of Seven Seas Technologies and Ponea Health
