The offices of Craydel, a Kenyan edtech connecting African students to global universities, occupy a glass-partitioned floor at The Pavilion on Lower Kabete Road, away from Nairobi’s perpetual traffic and construction noise. Through the transparent walls, almost nothing is hidden. Student counsellors are fielding anxious calls from parents and students, while product managers huddle over laptops.
Manish Sardana’s office sits in the middle of it all, deliberately so. On one side is the operations team; on the other, the engineers building the artificial intelligence (AI) engine that powers Craydel’s study abroad matchmaking tool. There is no imposing corner office separating the co-founder and CEO from the very people helping him build the company.
He asks whether I would like tea. He orders coffee for himself.
Sardana has the calm confidence of someone comfortable with uncertainty. He says he has spent his life restless, suspicious of comfort, and constantly searching for purpose. Raised in a modest household in India, he abandoned a place at the prestigious Delhi School of Economics before, over a decade later, walking away from a high-flying career at WPP Scangroup, a marketing and communications company, to build Craydel from scratch.
