I remember the exact moment I considered quitting.
It was past midnight. My roommates were asleep. The only light in the room was my laptop screen — and it was showing an error. Again. The same error I'd been staring at for three days. My data was almost gone. My eyes were burning. And somewhere in that exhaustion, a voice said: who do you think you are?
I'm not a computer science student. I'm an Education student at Karatina University — from Nyandarua, where the mornings are cold and the expectations are simple. Finish school. Get a job. Be responsible. Nobody in my world had a roadmap for "build an AI startup from a campus hostel."
But I had seen something I couldn't unsee.
Kenyan teachers — dedicated, underpaid, overworked — standing in front of sixty children with one piece of chalk and every intention in the world. And children in the back row who never quite caught up. Not because they weren't smart. Because there simply wasn't enough of the teacher to go around.
That image wouldn't leave me alone.
So I have built ScribAI. An AI teacher that writes on a chalkboard, speaks Kiswahili, and teaches CBC the way a patient human would. I have built it with borrowed Wi-Fi, a struggling laptop, and the kind of faith that has no evidence yet.
There are nights I have felt completely alone in it.
There is this one evening, a message came in from a parent I had never met. Her daughter had been struggling with science. She'd used ScribAI. "She understood it this time," the message said. "She actually understood."
I sat with that message for a long time.
I thought about the cold hostel nights. The errors. The doubt. The voice that asked who do you think you are.
And I finally had an answer.
Someone who refused to stop.
Aaron from Karatina