His name is Lionel Masimba Siduna. And from the first day I met him, he baffled me.
I arrived at Midlands State University two or three weeks late for my first semester. Masimba arrived a month after that. While the rest of us had been fumbling through registration and trying to understand what computer science was, Masimba had been at an internet cafe in town, working, paying his own fees, and not attending a single lecture. He knew what he was doing. He just had a different relationship with schedules than most people.
The first day he appeared he introduced us to IDM — Internet Download Manager. While we had been fighting the slow campus WiFi, Masimba showed us how to multiply download speeds several times over. In five minutes he had changed how every person in that room used the internet. That was his introduction. Not a handshake. A solution.
Then he took us all to lunch. Seven of us. He paid for everyone without discussion or hesitation. He would do this again and again throughout our time together. No matter how many people showed up, Masimba paid.
The Partnership Nobody Announced
Masimba befriended me after it became clear I was the most talented programmer in our class. By second year I was building web applications — HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, AJAX, JavaScript, PHP. Masimba was finding the clients and handling the design. I was building the backend. Neither of us formally agreed to this arrangement. It just became what we did.
He introduced me to the word startup. He was probably the first person in my immediate circle who used that word seriously and meant it. He declared he would make his first million in his first year of college. I do not know if he still carries that dream. But the fact that he had it at all — that he said it out loud without embarrassment — changed something in how I thought about what was possible.
What He Gave Me That He Never Asked For Back
For every project that went sideways there was generosity running underneath everything that never stopped. He gave me projects and sometimes paid me and never asked for the work back. He shared skills — IDM in the first week, blockchain years later, ReactJS in a house in Victoria Falls — without attaching conditions.
When I was struggling through lockdown in 2020, barely feeding my family, he sent me twenty dollars for rent. At the time my rent was fourteen to sixteen dollars after bills. That twenty dollars covered everything.
When I had not spoken to my wife in months, he said: ask her to come to Victoria Falls. Four words that changed the trajectory of my family.
The Contradiction That Makes Him Human
Masimba is the most generous person I have ever met. He is also one of the most chaotic. He makes decisions at 4pm that have you on the road by 4pm with barely enough fuel. He takes deposits for projects he cannot always deliver. He oversells his abilities.
But I have never been able to separate the chaos from the generosity because they come from the same place. Masimba moves through the world as if resources are infinite and time is flexible. That belief is why he pays for everyone's lunch without calculating whether he can afford it. It is also why he sometimes promises more than he can deliver. It is the same engine running in two directions.
The best definition of entrepreneurship I have ever encountered comes from Howard Stevenson: the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently owned. That sentence is a portrait of how Masimba has lived his entire adult life. I became entrepreneurial by being around him.