Alum Moves From Football Star to Startup CTO

Systems engineering alum Andrew Kirima recently appeared in Humans of Ladder, a series highlighting the ambitious and diverse users of Ladder, a networking platform for professional communities. 

Kirima explained how he was born in Kenya, but moved to the United States at an early age. Originally focused on playing "big-time sports," he played football for multiple years before deciding he wanted to focus on engineering. 

"Deep down I knew that engineering was always my biggest thing — engineering and entrepreneurship," Kirima said in the interview. "During my senior design course, we were tasked with partnering alongside corporate companies that were sponsoring the program. My friends and I wanted to take a different approach though, so we started our own company and sponsored ourselves so that we could work on what we wanted. The company came to be Facade Technologies, and we basically built a framework to automate desktop applications." 

After moving beyond Facade, Kirima became interested in product management. At the beginning of the pandemic, he spent months juggling between applications for product management positions and writing a tech blog on the side, which was "super fun, but a lot of work."

"I ended up joining Sencha Credit full-time, but instead of just being a product manager, I took it up a notch, became the Head of Product, and then took it up another notch and took over as CTO," Kirima said.