Eric Asuma on childhood, ambition, and refusing to sell Kenyan Wall Street

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.

The future, he says, looks promising. But like many founders, he seems less interested in the destination than in the work of building.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What experiences from your childhood shaped the way you think about money, opportunity, and economic mobility today?

It mostly comes down to upbringing. I grew up in a household where entrepreneurship wasn’t an abstract idea; it was daily life. My parents ran small businesses, and I watched closely how those businesses were started, sustained, and sometimes rebuilt after setbacks. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was formative.

That environment shapes your thinking. You learn early that resources are limited, but imagination is not. You also learn that effort compounds slowly, often invisibly, before it produces any meaningful outcome. My parents didn’t frame this as a philosophy; it was simply how they lived. You start something small, you keep going, you adjust, you try again.

What stayed with me most was the discipline behind entrepreneurship. Nothing was wasted—not time, not opportunity, not effort. That mindset creates a respect for work itself, regardless of scale.

We came from a very humble background, so economic mobility was never assumed. It was something you had to actively work toward. But my parents instilled a belief: if you put in the work and stay persistent, opportunities eventually show up. Not always in predictable ways, but they do arrive. That belief has influenced how I think about building businesses and approaching setbacks. Even today, I return to that early conditioning: start small, stay consistent, and trust that compounding will eventually do its work.

Before the Kenyan Wall Street existed, what did you believe was missing from Africa’s financial and business information ecosystem?

It was less a grand idea and more an observation that accumulated over time. I was working at the stock exchange, with a front-row seat to how information moved—or didn’t move—through the system. What struck me was how fragmented and manual it all was.

Africa’s markets had returns, activity, and real economic significance, but the information infrastructure lagged far behind more developed markets. Data wasn’t always accessible in real time. Sometimes it wasn’t structured at all. Even basic market functions—bond pricing, yields, calculations—were often handled through separate spreadsheets maintained by different institutions. There was no unified system of truth.

Yet fixed income dominates African capital markets, accounting for more than 70% of activity in some markets. While global attention often gravitates toward equities, the real engine of the system was happening in a relatively opaque corner of finance. Institutions were making multi-million-dollar decisions with limited automation and inconsistent data pipelines. It was not a lack of intelligence; it was a lack of infrastructure.

This shaped the direction of what we eventually built at the intersection of capital markets intelligence, financial media, and institutional tools. The thinking evolved from a media-first approach into something broader: you cannot build effective markets without first building the information layer that supports them.

What problem were you trying to solve when you launched The Kenyan Wall Street, and how has that vision evolved into Wall Street Africa?

When I started what later became The Kenyan Wall Street around 2014, it wasn’t originally a business idea, more a side project. I was working at the stock exchange, and friends constantly asked how they could access market information. That question kept coming up, and it exposed a gap I had taken for granted while inside the system.

Inside the exchange, I also noticed something unusual: information flow was not automated. In more developed markets, announcements move through tightly integrated systems; everyone receives them simultaneously. In our case, information could physically arrive at the exchange and sit at reception for hours or even days before reaching the broader market. That delay, in finance, is not just inefficient; it is material.

I started casually sharing snippets of information online. At first, it was curiosity-driven. I didn’t think of it as a product. But something interesting happened: the audience expanded quickly. I began receiving messages from investors—some in Dubai, others in Europe—asking for deeper insights into specific companies. These were not casual readers; they were institutional actors making real allocation decisions.

I resisted the idea that this could become a formal business. I wasn’t trained as an analyst. But demand kept growing, and the feedback became consistent: build a platform where this information can live properly. That was the early seed. Over time, the media layer gave rise to data infrastructure and tools. The broader ambition became building the information infrastructure for African markets at scale.

Was there a defining moment when you realised you weren’t simply building a media platform, but a broader financial information company?