Richard Ruoro

I got my first computer in 1989, an Amiga 500. I started in graphic design, with Photoshop and CorelDraw, and moved into web development around 2002. The design habit never left: I still do the brand and the interface before I write the first line of a product.

My career began in the foundational layers of digital infrastructure and telecommunications. Sasanet's free-SMS platform sent about a million messages a month from 2006. The Committee of Experts constitutional-education campaign reached Kenyans nationwide during the Katiba referendum. Bulk-SMS routing at Global Message Company carried enterprise traffic across African telco networks.

From there the work moved up the stack: portals, marketplaces and member platforms in the 2010s; cloud-native systems and mobile-first products in the late 2010s; and now AI-native products built on vector search, embeddings and agentic workflows.

Unlike specialists who focus on one discipline, I operate across three connected domains: infrastructure, product innovation and technology strategy. That lets me see technology from the technical, operational, commercial and regulatory viewpoints at once, and it is why clients who come to me for a website usually leave with a product.