Every invention begins with a story.

I had just finished high school and, with plenty of free time on my hands, I spent much of it helping my dad with his mechanical work in our home garage. I loved watching him build mechanical structures from the ground up. To me, the man was a legend.

Some of the machines he built seemed far ahead of their time. Yet he had been born and raised in a community that often could not afford some of his most brilliant inventions. So he made a living where he could—building and selling simpler machines such as wood splitters, fabricating doors, and doing metalwork for people constructing homes. Then, in 2007, everything changed. The country was going through a period of political unrest when burglars attacked our home late one night. There were about five of them.

In the chaos, my mother and father were badly beaten and left with serious wounds. I was injured too. My left hand was severely damaged. Several metacarpal bones were broken, and my ulnar artery was cut and exposed. How we survived that night still feels like a miracle.

I joined university after being placed by the Joint Admissions Board to pursue a degree in Information Science. It wasn’t what I had originally wanted. I wanted to become a surgeon—a neurosurgeon, specifically. But after the injuries to my hand, that dream suddenly seemed complicated. I remember wondering how I would hold a scalpel and perform delicate procedures when I could no longer use my hand the way I once had.

So I accepted what fate seemed to have placed in front of me and pursued Information Science. Then something strangely repetitive began happening. My laptops kept getting stolen. I lost about three of them during this period. Some were borrowed. Others I had taken loans to purchase.

Eventually, frustration turned into a question:

That question became a project. I called it The Matrix Blackbox.

After university, I began focusing seriously on the Blackbox project.

I travelled far and wide trying to understand the semiconductor industry and the technologies required to turn the idea into something real. Eventually, I succeeded in developing the prototype and selling it to customers in more than 52 countries. Looking back, something about that period fascinates me. The trauma of the past had transformed into an extraordinary level of focus.

I was building the Blackbox partly because I never wanted to experience that kind of loss again. And I didn’t want other people to experience it either. In the information age, losing a laptop or computer you have worked hard to acquire can mean much more than losing a physical object. For many people, that machine contains their work, ideas, records, memories, income, and access to the digital world.

It can feel like losing the very tool you use to participate in modern life. But my story with loss wasn’t finished.

Around this period, I met someone who would eventually become a business partner. His name was Richard. Interestingly, we shared a similar experience: he had also lost a laptop. In his case, the irony was almost unbelievable.

Richard was a cybersecurity expert, and his laptop was stolen while he was attending a cybersecurity conference where he was teaching. We met for coffee after he discovered my YouTube channel, where I had been explaining the Blackbox project. We talked. We compared experiences.

And, in a strange way, we bonded over loss.

With his help, we continued developing the technology. Then life introduced another problem. Richard’s father suffered a stroke and developed dementia. At times, he would wander away and forget where he was. That experience introduced another set of questions:

And beneath that was an even larger question:

These were some of the founding questions we began asking at the time. And then another disaster arrived.

The aftermath of 2019 was a wild roller coaster. During that period, our systems were hit by ransomware. Our computers were encrypted, and we lost a significant amount of data, including financial records. Not long afterward, Richard’s father passed away. Then came the end of 2019 and, shortly afterward, the COVID era.

It felt as though life itself had pressed a giant reset button. Richard was also hit by a stroke during the same period. At first, he lost his voice because the stroke affected the part of his brain involved in speech production. This greatly affected his primary means of earning a living. He was a teacher, and speaking was central to almost everything his career demanded. Later, his condition progressed to a heart attack.

He died. His property succession became another difficult matter for his immediate and extended family to deal with. By then, it felt as though I was starting from zero. I decided to take a sabbatical.

I went to therapy. I spent time meditating on my life and everything that had transpired. I began taking account of the journey—where I had started, what I had built, what I had lost, and the trajectory my life seemed to be following.