At home, they called me Mr Yale. My father pronounced it "Mr Yali."

The bowl, the bucket and the stick

The toilet bowl held three days' worth of accumulation.

I stood several feet away, gripping a metre-long stick that I had wrapped in newspaper and plastic to create a makeshift plunger. In my other hand was a bucket of water. I pushed open the door with my elbow and stared at what waited inside.

"Don't think too much about it," a friend called from behind me. "Pour the water in first so it softens. Then push it down. Do it fast."

I covered my nose, threw the water from a safe distance and drove the stick into the centre of the pile. A few strikes. More water. More strikes. Eventually, mercifully, something moved in the drainage.

I cried afterward. I could not eat for the rest of the day. For several days, I was convinced the smell had followed me everywhere.

I was fourteen years old.

I had grown up in a modest home in Kalulushi, a mining town on Zambia's Copperbelt. After primary school, my parents sent me hundreds of kilometres away to a Catholic boarding school in Mansa, in Zambia's Luapula Province — the kind of institution that builds character, mostly by force.

Every Wednesday and Saturday, junior students were assigned to clean the dormitory toilets. They were not modern, flushable toilets. Each was essentially a bowl holding several days of waste. The task was usually referred to as toyota.

As I stood there on that first day, I considered my options. I could invent a reason to return home to Kalulushi and never come back. Or I could remain at school and find a way never to clean those toilets again.

So I did what any enterprising and rational fourteen-year-old would do. I engineered an escape.

The best hiding place in the school

During orientation, the library captain had shown me around the school library. He was a friend from my part of the country; we had shared a seat on the bus journey to school. He pointed out the shelves, the study tables and the small corners where a student could disappear when he needed to cram for an examination.

"You can spend as much time here as you like," he told me.

I took him literally.

On Wednesdays and Saturdays, while other junior students reported for toilet duty, I slipped into the library and hid in one of its corners. It was an excellent hiding place. It was also, though I did not know it then, the place where the direction of my life would begin to change.

The corner was filled with university brochures from the United Kingdom and the United States. With nothing else to occupy me, I began flipping through the pages. There was Harvard in autumn. Yale in spring. Students wearing T-shirts with the names of their universities printed on the front sat on impossibly green lawns surrounded by red, orange and yellow leaves. The buildings looked ancient and important. The students looked as though they belonged to a world governed by ideas rather than toilet rosters.

I was mesmerised.

I wondered what it took to reach a place like that. I also wondered what sin I had committed for the gods to decide that cleaning other people's waste was the character-building experience I required at such a young age.

During the school holidays, I wrote to some of the universities whose names I remembered. Harvard. Yale. Duke. George Washington. Others, too. Obtaining application materials cost money I did not have, so I quietly helped myself to some of my mother's.

Sorry, Mum.

Months later, letters began arriving at P.O. Box 260033, Kalulushi. Yale wrote back. Harvard wrote back. The letters contained information about their universities and advice on what I would need to become a competitive applicant once I finished secondary school.

I had not been admitted. I was nowhere close. But that hardly mattered. Two of the most famous universities in the world knew my name and had sent letters to my home in Kalulushi.

My family gave me a new nickname: Mr Yale. My beloved father pronounced it "Mr Yali."

The brochures planted a conviction in me that has never disappeared: environment is one of the crucial ingredients of success. The places we occupy matter. The people we meet matter. The friends we keep, the books we encounter and even the strangers beside whom we happen to sit can alter the direction of a life. Talent matters, certainly. But talent does not develop in isolation. It responds to exposure, encouragement and possibility.

Somewhere between the smell of those American brochures and the images of students beneath autumn trees, I began to believe that if I attended one of those universities, I might one day do something significant — that I could build enough success and influence to become a force for good in the world.

I did not yet know what that would look like. I still don't.

But Mr Yali had been born.

No job? Fine — I'll make one

The journey to America did not follow a straight line.

I completed my undergraduate degree at the Zambia Catholic University in 2012 and entered a job market that appeared to have no particular interest in me. My older brother Angelo graduated that same year at the top of his banking and finance class. The job market had no particular interest in him either.

Angelo responded in a way that would become familiar in our family. Without informing our parents, he took the money intended for his final year's tuition, combined it with an equity investment from our brother Ingwe and purchased an unfinished building. Together, they completed the property and converted it into a block of three shops.

In December 2012, I left Kalulushi to join Angelo as the business operations manager. We leased two of the shops and operated the third as a barbershop. My responsibilities ranged from handling the accounts and managing the business to cutting customers' hair when necessary. The business evolved over the years. Today, it is wholly owned and operated by Angelo and our younger brother, Chimbala.

That experience established a pattern in my life. Whenever I have looked for employment and found nothing within a reasonable amount of time, I ask myself a simple question: What happens if the job never comes? The answer is usually the same. Create one.

I have created work for myself and, on occasion, for others — directly or indirectly. Much of my founder journey has not begun with a grand vision or a carefully designed entrepreneurial plan. It has begun with necessity. Necessity forces clarity. It makes you look at the resources available to you, the people around you and the problems no one else appears willing to solve. And you try to solve them.

Over time, I have become drawn to systems: how technology, institutions and people interact, where they fail and how they might work differently. I have developed a habit of questioning conclusions that appear too easy and looking for alternatives where others see inevitability.

But the dream born in the library has remained.

In 2022, a decade after graduating from university, I was admitted to Cornell University's SC Johnson College of Business. I received a partial scholarship to pursue the one-year MBA at Cornell Tech in New York City. The remaining funding gap was more than $100,000. I could not close it in time.

For a moment, the dream appeared to have arrived only to move beyond my reach. But Mr Yali had waited too long to surrender quietly. I spent the next year figuring out how to raise the money. Then I applied again, was admitted again and joined the Class of 2024.

More than two decades after hiding among brochures in a Zambian boarding-school library, I arrived at an Ivy League university in New York.

Mr Yali had made it — a decade or two late, one Ivy over and entirely on schedule, as far as I was concerned.

2,000 applications and one dinner bill

Arriving in America and truly landing in America are two different experiences.

My first professional role in the United States took more than a year and over 2,000 job applications to secure. Two thousand. Every application required a small act of optimism: adjust the résumé, write the cover letter, press submit and imagine that somewhere inside a company, a person might see more than an unfamiliar name, a foreign work history or an immigration question.

Eventually, I joined a hedge fund. The job was short-lived. It nevertheless taught me a great deal — about work, leadership, resilience and the difference between securing an opportunity and finding the right one.

The long search also gave me time to return to a problem I had encountered almost immediately after arriving in the United States.

During my first weeks at Cornell, I went to dinner with a group of classmates. When the bill arrived, one person paid and the rest began settling their shares through Venmo.

I could not.

I had my savings. I had a bank account and cards from home. What I did not yet have was the local financial identity the application expected — a US bank account, a US telephone number and an established place inside the country's payment system. I had crossed an ocean, entered one of the world's most advanced economies and discovered that reimbursing a friend for dinner could still require a trip to an ATM.

The problem stayed with me. Globally mobile people arrive in new countries carrying bank accounts, cards, financial histories and trusted relationships from home. Yet the moment they cross a border, much of that financial identity becomes unusable. The systems that make everyday payments effortless for local residents often become walls for everyone else.

I began thinking about how those walls might be removed. Between job applications, interviews and rejections, I worked on the idea intermittently. Over time, it became Ping: a cross-border peer-to-peer payment platform for globally mobile people — travellers, international students, immigrants and expatriates.

Today, Ping is my full-time work. It has never felt more relevant. Every day, somewhere in the world, someone is struggling with a payment that should have been simple.

Building Ping. Backing Africa.

When I am not building Ping, I am working on a question I have carried with me from Zambia to New York: How can I help direct more investment — particularly patient, long-term capital — toward African entrepreneurs and businesses?

Africa is rich in talent, resources and ambition. Its young people are building companies, adopting new technologies and imagining futures that are more expansive than the opportunities currently available to them. But too many promising businesses remain starved of the capital, networks and institutional support required to grow.

The gap is not simply one of money. It is also a gap of trust, information and access. Talented founders may never reach the investors capable of backing them. Investors may never encounter the entrepreneurs best positioned to build in their markets. I want to help narrow that distance.

Through my work, relationships and networks, I hope to connect credible African businesses with investors who understand that lasting growth takes time. I hope to support founders whose ambitions exceed the resources around them and to become, eventually, the kind of investor I once needed.

The boy hiding in the library wanted to become part of something great. That remains the mission. The toilets are no longer part of the arrangement. But the fire to succeed burns more brightly than ever, as does my commitment to becoming a catalyst for young African entrepreneurs.

The university brochures taught me that an environment can enlarge a child's imagination. New York taught me that reaching the place you imagined is not the end of the journey. It is where the real work begins.

Mr Yali made it to New York. Now he has something to build.