Websites using Kenyan hosting startup angani.co have recently been experiencing downtime due to internal wrangles. According to Kenyan tech insiders, there were two founders originally; Phares Kariuki and Brian Muita. They brought in a third co-founder, MIT alum Riyaz Bachani, who is one of the most experienced Kenyans in matters of the cloud. Two camps have formed. In one corner is the original co-founders, who contend that they have the original vision, and in the other corner is Riyaz and the investors, who prefer Riyaz with all his experience be the one to steer the ship. Now they are locked in a battle for credentials to the angani systems. As of now, Brian holds all the passwords. Pesapal founder Agosta Liko tried to mediate an amicable solution between the two sides, since he is a long time friend of all the angani founders and a big client, but they all hardlined. So Riyaz tried to do a brute force hack to retrieve the logins, but it resulted in system failure, which brought down the websites that were hosted by angani, and now the whole issue has come out in the open.
Kenyan startup Pesatalk was similarly brought down by investor-founder wrangles. Will angani survive? Let’s wait and see. Anon out.
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@MistaMajani have you been experiencing downtime?
If this is true, this is so sad. Understand founders frustration but often experience is required for ones dream to become an institution. You may not like it but that’s how the world works and most of all - letting this spill over to clients? That’s terrible. It would have been better if they had sought a small exit and left the company. Founders innovation and energy and brains is a renewable resource. They can do better than angani if they want.
So sad!
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And this is the guy the investors wanna place their faith in?
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I hadn’t yet moved. You know how enterprise buying can be a slow process. Here the slowness saved me big time. I would have fought someone by now if I was hosted at angani in this messy situation.
This is so unfortunate. However, it should serve as a lesson for founders to carefully choose their investors. It makes no sense for you to carefully choose a co-founder and then rush (without due diligence) to accept money from the first investor who shows up in front of your door.
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From my sources all the CTO wanted was to have a formal handover. He requested that the company should be given the passwords after a formal document stating that he would no longer be responsible for the platform. The company decided to sue him instead and bring in hackers to change the passwords. All he did was look out for the interests of the customers. Once the platform went down he could no longer assist because he was now locked out of the platform as well. The rest of this has been done by the hackers brought in to prove that the company could work without the CTO.
Brian has nothing to do with this situation. They brought in hackers into a sensitive production platform with sensitive customer data to prove a point to Brian which is both reckless and dangerous. They have been unable to bring up the platform since and customers are now caught up in their efforts to prove that Brian did not add value to the company.
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