The Flight of the Builder: Why I Started Orb21

I remember the exact moment I decided to quit my job. It wasn't a dramatic scene from a movie. There was no flipping of tables, no storming out with a box of personal belongings. It was quiet. Terrifyingly quiet.

I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of a building in Westlands, Nairobi. The AC was humming that low, monotonous drone that seems to suck the soul right out of you. Across the table, a CEO—a man I actually liked, a man who paid me well—was explaining why we needed to "leverage AI to disrupt the paradigm."

He didn't know what AI was. He definitely didn't know what the paradigm was. And he certainly didn't know that the "disruption" he was so casually pitching would require three months of sleepless nights for my engineering team.

I looked at his hands. Clean, manicured, resting on a mahogany table. Then I looked at mine. I had a callous on my wrist from where it rests against my laptop. My eyes were burning from a 3 AM deployment the night before.

In that split second, the gap between us felt like a canyon. He was a beneficiary of innovation. I was a builder of it.

Use the shovel, or dig the ditch? We were digging ditches so he could build a castle.

That meeting wasn't unique. It's the standard operating procedure in our industry. We have built a tech ecosystem where the people who actually do the work—the engineers, the designers, the writers—are treated as resources to be mined. We are rows on a spreadsheet. "Engineering Headcount." "Burn Rate."

But we are not resources. We are the source.

The Builder's Dilemma

I walked out of that meeting and went to the stairwell. I needed to breathe real air, or at least air that hadn't been filtered through corporate compliance. I sat on the concrete steps and asked myself a question that had been haunting me for months:

"Is this it?"

Is this what I learned to code for? To build dashboards for KPIs I don't care about? To optimize click-through rates for products I would never use?

I realized I had a choice. I could continue to be a mercenary. I could be a "Senior Engineer" with a nice salary, good benefits, and a slow, comfortable death of my creativity. I could trade my time for a paycheck and build things that vanished into the void of enterprise software.

Or I could bet on myself.

That's where the idea for Orb21 came from. It didn't start as a business plan. It didn't start with a pitch deck or a market analysis. It started as a scream of frustration.

I wanted to create a space where the code wasn't just a means to an exit strategy. I wanted a place where the craft mattered. Where we could talk about the struggle of a 3 AM bug not as a failure of time management, but as a rite of passage. Where the person who architected the database had a seat at the table, not just a ticket in the backlog.

The Terror of Freedom

Quitting was the easy part. The next morning was hard.

When you have a job, your identity is given to you. "Hi, I'm Imran, I work at X." It's a shield. It protects you from the question of who you really are.

When you quit, the shield is gone. You are just you.

I remember staring at an empty IDE. No Jira tickets. No standup. No manager telling me what to do. Just a blinking cursor.

The silence was deafening. Imposter syndrome didn't just knock on the door; it kicked it down and moved in. "Who are you to build a platform?" it whispered. "You're just a coder. You don't know business. You don't know marketing. You're going to fail, and everyone is going to see it."

But then, I started to write code. Not for a client. Not for a boss. For the idea.

And something magic happened. The anxiety didn't disappear, but it changed. It transformed from the anxiety of helplessness (doing what you're told) to the anxiety of responsibility (doing what must be done).

I realized that builders are uniquely engaging with reality. We don't deal in bullsh*t. If your code is wrong, it doesn't compile. If your logic is flawed, the app crashes. You can't talk your way out of a syntax error.

This honesty is what I wanted to capture with Orb21.

Building for the Struggling

Too many platforms talk to the "Aspiring 7-Figure Entrepreneur." They sell the dream of passive income, dropshipping, and 4-hour workweeks. They show you the yacht, but they don't show you the storm.

I don't care about the yacht.

I care about the builder who is stuck in the storm. The one who is doubting their skills at 2 AM. The one who feels like an imposter because they didn't go to Stanford or MIT. The one who is trying to build something meaningful in a world that rewards superficiality.

Orb21 is for them. It's for us.

We are building a cooperative structure where value isn't extracted by the few, but shared by the many. A place where "innovation" isn't a buzzword used to sell stock, but a daily practice of solving hard problems together.

We are trying to change the incentives. In a traditional agency, the incentive is to bill hours. In a VC-backed startup, the incentive is to grow users. In Orb21, the incentive is to build good things.

It sounds simple, but it's radical.

The Road Ahead

It's a messy dream. We don't have VC funding. We don't have a roadmap carved in stone. We fix bugs in production sometimes. We argue about architecture. We get tired.

But we have something better: we have the truth.

And the truth is, building is hard. It breaks your heart. It eats your free time. It strains your relationships.

But it is also the only way to prove to yourself that you exist. That you can change reality. That you can take a thought in your head and turn it into a tool in someone's hand.

If you are a builder—whether you write code, design interfaces, or write prose—you know this feeling. The flight of the builder is not a straight line up. It's a turbulence. It's falling and catching yourself.

But at least we are flying with our own wings.