George Gachui: Showman gets a life after gigs

George Gachui ‘Porgie’ Mookh Africa co-founder during an interview at Village Creative, Lavington on October 25, 2023. PHOTO | WILFRED NYANGARESI | NMG

When you go to meet George Gachui you will end up meeting two men. There is George, trained in finance and information systems but a creative entrepreneur with 16 years of experience in brand development and event management. Mr Gachui is the co-founder of Mookh Africa, a social commerce platform serving the growing creative economy in East Africa. It has more than 1,000 small to medium merchants in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. He is pragmatic and sees around bends.

Then there is Porgie, him of the nursery rhyme, the boy who loved his sugar. “A chubby boy who fitted more and more into his round shape,” he says. Porgie is the pulse of a party, the one who handles the barbeque. One is a businessman, the other is a gregarious showman. People are moths and Porgie’s the flame.

How did all these start?

I started as a talent manager straight out of university. DJ Styles and Madtrax were our family friends, we grew up together. So that’s where I started. They went by the name Code Red. The plan was to brand Code Red as a corporate outfit from a bunch of deejays.

Then we did the transition of Madtrax from a DJ to an artiste and I managed him for a while. I discovered that I was good at translating talent to businesses. I ended up consulting for people like Sony who brought me on board to help manage some of those artistes.

I toured Africa with guys like Ali Kiba but the music industry was looking rotten at that time. You could tell there was money but having been in it for like seven years, I was like this thing doesn’t have a structure that’s supporting our guys. So even when the labels come in, there’s very little benefit we’re getting. At the end of 2012, I quit the entertainment scene to re-figure my life. Around that time I met my business partner, Eric Thimba who together we set up a company called Ideas Company to pitch ideas to agencies and brands.

Did that for three years and we came up with an idea to sell on Facebook. The challenge was how to collect the money from sales. Nobody in 2013 had a way to collect M-Pesa on the Internet so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the Muk, the Mukwanja.

So in South C, we used to call money Mukwanja (chuckles). So every time we’d sit I’d ask him, have we cracked how to collect that Muk and when the time came to scale it we just named it Mookh. Meeting Andrew White who understood our vision took us to the next level because no one would give us money to develop this platform out of Facebook but he did because investors were like, who are these two Kenyan boys and why would you be the guys to build something like that? Andrew was equally crazy, he saw it.

He invested in it and also gave us space and we moved from a mom-and-pop with one developer to a team of 14 people building the tech at scale. We were doing great. We had built a machine that could support ticketing. By December 2019 we had gotten into the e-book programme of the Nairobi Securities Exchange and so we were going to break even in 2021 and then go public in 2022 and give the artists and all these creatives a chance to own this platform locally. And then the pandemic came.

How was that for you guys?

The first three months were like a bad dream. It’s like drowning, trying to grab everything. We were scrambling, building solutions for live streaming for this new world. Three months later, we realised that the sign was asking us to stop. In October 2020, we turned the whole thing off. We were not making any money.

Describe those years after shutting down the business.

I grew an Afro. Imagine an Afro with a bald head. My business partner, Thimba, who had studied theology in university, opened an online church called Adulam. It’s still ongoing. I gradually went to corporate culture work to make sense of this new work structure that companies had found themselves in. I’m good with people so I trained people who deal with people for a great brand experience. Never forget about Mookh, who was our baby, always thinking about its reinvention even when the pandemic seemed relentless.

What was your state of mind during the pandemic?

There was a feeling of extreme failure. Because this is the first time you’ve done something that people are like, this guy’s doing it.

Then now you wake up and you have nowhere to go, right? So you start to ask yourself, is it a flaw in how we thought about this platform? Should we have listened to so-and-so? Were events not in the right direction? Had we missed some signs from God? But surprisingly it’s also during the pandemic that I found peace of mind.

For the first time, I sat down with myself in silence, something I hadn’t done. When you work in the events industry and entertainment, you’re either out at night or you’re asleep, right? And so this was the first time I got to introspect quite a bit and become comfortable with the idea that success is not measured by how many gigs you have out there. That the bank account can’t be the thing that determines how you live, right?

I also learned to shut off. Now at 6pm, I will shut off. In 2019, if we had downtime for five minutes, I’d be panicking, making calls. If clients can’t buy things for an hour, the world won’t end. We will fix it. Losing all we had was life-changing, seeing Porgie moving back to George.

How did you get the name Porgie anyway?

That’s my entertainment monicker. In the university hostel where I stayed in USIU-A, there were five Georges so it was very chaotic.

There was George Kariuki and Mureithi and so they decided to call me George Porgie because I was a chubby guy and the girls were always happy to see me [chuckles]. So, I was Georgie Porgie and eventually dropped the Georgie and people just call me Porgie now.

During the pandemic I was like, there needs to be a point where now Porgie rests and we can bring George back. George was the guy who was starting businesses. My strength was not the finance or information systems I had learned, it was my ability to build very good networks. So I have trusted networks across the entertainment scene in Africa.

I could pick up the phone and get anyone in the entertainment industry on the line. So Porgie was the face, the fun face of things, the party master. But now George was this personality that was battling with the business in a pandemic.

George Gachui ‘Porgie’ Mookh Africa co-founder during an interview at Village Creative, Lavington on October 25, 2023. PHOTO | WILFRED NYANGARESI | NMG

So, what conversations did George have with Porgie during that time and what scars did you carry from the pandemic?

I shut off from work now, right? So my work is not everything anymore. I am not here to build, you know, you will not find me at a startup conference trying to pitch.

My priorities in life have changed. I also don’t like to negotiate, and these are things I’ve learned from Andrew. I’m not in the business of that. I have a product, it has a price tag and it works.

I discovered during that time that I struggle with association. I have worked in the entertainment industry since I was 18. I’m 37 years old now. People still see me as Porgie, not as a businessman.

Someone recently sent me a WhatsApp saying, “Porgie I have a deal to plan a ka-party, I need you onboard” [horrified face]. That guy who did parties? That guy died. I mean, you can’t be calling me here to help you organise a party for your cousins. I’m no longer the party guy. Come, there is a lot more we can do, more to offer. I wanted to shed that image off but many people have told me not to, that’s your strength, that’s what people know you from, capitalise on that.

But I feel like I have a lot more to offer than that. It was a great place to meet people, but just like the guys who partied 20 years ago with me are now sitting in serious positions at all these banks and I don’t want to talk to them about their company party.

I want to talk about how their business can transform and support the creative or the industries around us. You are now dealing with George.

During my therapy and meditation, I discovered that I’m a people pleaser. I didn’t know that but I was like that makes sense. That’s why they love me so much. But everything I do is to make them happy regardless of what it does to me.

So I started to question things — do they really like me or was I just kissing ass? I had been in a relationship for like five years and it fell apart during that time when I was discovering myself.

So finding myself was a very painful process. And so what I had to do was restart. Completely. And I’m a big fan of those. I restarted life anew and that’s the path I’m on.

What do you do when not working?

I barbecue. It’s always been my thing. During the pandemic, I told my partner at the time that this is the thing I want to bring back in my life. I did that a lot, hosting a small number of people. And so it’s something I still do today. I also like to sit a lot with young creatives. So you’ll find me in the shopping mall, in the basement in some studio with some new kids who are figuring out an EP. I find a lot of joy in that, in staying close to the creators.

How difficult is it to find somebody to be within the entertainment industry? It must be very hectic, like the eye of the storm.

It’s chaotic and loud and you’re exposed to all the madness that is out there. So it takes a lot of intention. You’ll find a lot of people in the industry will end up getting married to other people in the industry so that they understand your problems more closely.

For me, I struggled. I struggled a lot. And so it’s only two years ago that I’ve gotten into a relationship that I can say is stable. And I think it was mostly because I realised that this person I was in that industry was not a great person to be with. So it’s been crazy. I think that’s the part that many people won’t talk about but that’s a tough part. There are a lot of engagements and relationships but finding that true meaning and partnership is tough in this industry.

What’s the story of your tattoos?

When I was in university, I had a freak accident that changed me. I fell off of a bus and the bus ran over my feet. The nerves on my right leg are completely dead. I don’t feel any sensation on this leg. So I did five tattoos to feel that my leg was more useful, and then I did four more.

All my tattoos are on the right side of the body. On my arm is the Mookh QQ Code, I’m hoping to one day reverse-engineer that. I have King of Hearts because I’m a lover of love. I have a Morse code tattoo. I have a tattoo of a pulse, or music Africa, of that African Amandla fist. I have prayer beads, of the map of Africa with a Kenyan flag on it.

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