CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Tesh Mbaabu

Former CEO & Co-Founder, MarketForce

Search every verified Tesh Mbaabu interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Tesh Mbaabu, co-founder and CEO of MarketForce and now CEO of Chpter, has spoken publicly about the challenges of scaling a startup)Skip. At the Inspire Africa Conference 2025, he said that inefficiencies scale with a company and that founders need to "build for future friction." He has also discussed the difficulties of fundraising as a Kenyan founder, recounting an experience where a local venture capitalist questioned who would give a "young Kenyan kid $2 million." Mbaabu has described the failure of MarketForce, stating that in April 2023 he had to tell investors and his team that the business was not going to work. He said the company made a mistake by living on hope that signed investment commitments would be wired, rather than cutting operations earlier. Mbaabu has also been promoting Cloud9, a new banking platform he is co-founding. He has said the platform is designed for "Africa's bold generation" and aims to address the exclusion of entrepreneurs and digital hustlers from traditional banking. He has described the goal as building a banking platform that listens to users and curates products for their needs, contrasting it with "rigid systems" where innovation is just a department within a bank. On mental resilience, Mbaabu has used a metaphor of a ship, stating that "ships cannot sink because of all the water and all the madness that is around them. They only sink when water gets into them."

Recent appearances

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →