There is a type of entrepreneurs who start a company because they have seen a gap in the market. Then there is the kind who start one because they are trying to make sense of the world around them. When I met Eric Asuma, founder of The Kenyan Wall Street, he struck me as belonging to the second group.
He grew up watching his parents run small businesses, where every shilling mattered, and every decision carried far-reaching consequences. Long before he became a founder, he had a front-row seat to the realities of building a company from scratch. He credits his parents with instilling the discipline and resilience that would later shape his own entrepreneurial journey.
In 2014, while working at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), he started The Kenyan Wall Street as a side project. At first, it was little more than a hobby—a platform to explain markets and provide investors with information that was often difficult to find or understand. More than a decade later, that hobby has evolved into Wall Street Africa, a financial intelligence business spanning media, data, and events, serving a growing community of investors across the continent.
Over a video call, we talked about growing up around entrepreneurs, the early days of building a financial media company when few believed there was a market for it, the evolution from content to intelligence, and why he believes Africa’s investment ecosystem still suffers from an information problem. We also discussed legacy. Asuma says he wants to be remembered not simply as the founder of a company, but as someone who built critical infrastructure that helped investors better understand markets.
