College was teaching me how to analyze music that already existed in archives. I wanted to create the archives. There's a gap between academic study and actual preservation work. Professors were writing papers about endangered musical traditions while those traditions were literally dying with the elders who knew them.

I realized: We don't need more analysis of what we've lost. We need action to preserve what we still have. And action doesn't wait for degrees. Music certainly doesn't.

It gives me an ear for what matters. When you're recording in a village, you need to understand not just the notes, but the spaces between them. The silence is as important as the sound. The breath before the phrase. The community's energy.

Most tech people approach this as a data problem. It's not. It's a feeling problem. You can't algorithmically determine which recording has soul. But if you've spent your life playing music, you know it when you hear it. That's the edge I bring—I can hear what's worth preserving.

It starts with listening—not just to music, but to communities. I travel with a simple setup: good mics, portable recorders, and an open mind. No agenda except to capture what's authentic.

The key is earning trust. You don't walk into a community and start recording. You sit. You listen to stories. You might play something yourself first. You show respect. The music comes when the people are ready to share it.

Sometimes the most important recordings happen unexpectedly. A grandmother starts humming while cooking. Kids create a new rhythm playing with stones. That's the raw material of culture.

It's a constant dance. The musician in me wants to capture the feeling. The builder in me knows we need systems, metadata, backups, accessibility.

Here's where having "an edge for great ideas" helps: I see connections others miss. Like how blockchain can solve royalty distribution for artists who've never had bank accounts. Or how machine learning can help identify musical patterns across different cultures.

But the music always comes first. If a technical solution doesn't serve the music, we don't use it. Simple rule.

People doubting the vision because it doesn't fit their boxes. Investors want metrics that don't apply to cultural preservation. How do you measure the value of a recording that saves a musical tradition from extinction?

Also, building a team when you don't have the "right" credentials. I've learned to look for people who care about the mission more than my resume. The best engineers and ethnomusicologists we have joined because they believed in what we're doing, not because of my educational background.

But honestly, the music speaks for itself. When people hear what we're preserving, they get it. The proof is in the recordings.

It varies wildly. Some days I'm in a remote village, recording sunrise ceremonies. Other days I'm in Nairobi, meeting with our tech team about server architecture.

But there's always music. Every day starts and ends with listening to something new from our archives or something old that inspires me. I might spend the morning transcribing a complex rhythm from Mali, then the afternoon coding a feature for our platform.

The through-line is preservation. Whether I'm holding a microphone or writing code, it's all about saving sounds that matter.

From paying attention. Great ideas are everywhere—in a conversation at a bus stop, in the way market women call to each other, in children's games, in the patterns of bird calls at dusk.

Being a musician helps because you're trained to listen for patterns, for harmony, for what works together. Building a platform like Mziki Africa is just another kind of composition. You're arranging elements—technology, community, music, storytelling—into something that hopefully creates beauty and meaning.

The dropout thing? That just means I learned to trust my own listening over textbooks.

I want it to become the default place where Africa's musical memory lives. Not just for researchers or musicologists, but for everyone. For the kid in Lagos who wants to hear what her great-grandmother sang. For the producer in Johannesburg looking for authentic samples. For the diaspora wanting to reconnect.

More than that, I want to change how we think about preservation. It's not about locking music away in archives. It's about keeping it alive, letting it evolve, making sure future generations have the raw materials to create their own sounds.

And personally? I just want to keep listening. Keep learning. Keep finding those moments where technology and tradition create something new. The ideas haven't stopped coming yet.