The engine of an entrepreneurial journey rarely starts with a grand speech or glamour. Sometimes it starts with the smell of meat patties in a Kampala school hallway and a 14-year-old realising his classmates were hungry for something the canteen was not providing.
Before the algorithms, the AI, and the Toronto skyline, there was the hustle. It was a local, tactile, and deeply Ugandan kind of ambition, the kind that would eventually lead me from organising basketball games in Kampala to building software for traders.
The hustle in the hallway
At 14, I was not dreaming of “market gaps.” I was just looking at my peers and seeing a demand for noodles and patties that wasn’t being met. I started small, by selling snacks between classes. It was not only about the pocket money, but also the quiet satisfaction of seeing a need and filling it.
By 16, that instinct had grown. I took the capital from the food sales and pivoted into experiences. I organised a pool party at a local cabana, which felt massive at the time. One day, I was managing inventory for noodles. Next, I was managing the logistics of a teenage social scene.
Through my late teens, I was a serial experimenter. I sold custom t-shirts, printed wristbands, and basketball gear to my teammates. Each venture was a small business education. I learned that if you serve the community that you are already part of, they will tell you exactly what they need. You just have to listen.
The rise of Game Down
The turning point came at 17, during my Senior 5 holiday. Alongside some friends, we launched Game Down, a basketball league in Kampala. The first season was a grind, and I still remember the weight of that first $1,000 we made. It felt like a fortune because it was earned through sweat and determination.
By the third season, Game Down was the largest privately organised basketball league in Uganda. We had built something that lived and breathed on its own. When the time came for me to step away, I transferred ownership of the league so it could keep running, and I took the lessons with me into a much harder arena: financial markets.
From the court to the markets
Forex was my entry point into global capital — the kind of market that does not care where you came from or what you studied. It pulled me into market structure, risk management, and eventually a trade desk. Markets humbled me in ways basketball never did. That is also where I started to notice a gap.
The serious analytical tools, the kind that help a trader understand risk before placing a position, were either expensive, fragmented across half a dozen platforms, or written in a language that only people already inside the industry could read.
Coming from a place where I had to learn everything from scratch, that gap stuck with me. I moved to Toronto to be closer to the people building the next generation of those tools, and to start building my own.
Enter OptionBuddy
That gap is why I started OptionBuddy. Together with my co-founder, Sam, a Canadian engineer, we are building a trading intelligence platform, with an AI analyst at the centre of it called Bud.
The idea is simple. You ask Bud a question about a position or a market condition in plain English, and it runs the kind of risk analysis that used to require a small team and an expensive terminal.
We are still early. The product is heading toward its first public version, and we are working with a small group of traders and partners to shape it. The long-term ambition is bigger: to become the analytical layer that more advanced traders, and eventually institutions, can build on. However, the why has not changed since the pattie and the pool parties. Find a real need, fill it well and make the complex simple.
From a boy selling noodles to building for the world
Sometimes I think about that 14-year-old in the school hallway, counting coins from a tray of patties. But the instinct was already there, and it is the same instinct driving the company today. Build something useful for the people around you. Then build it for everyone else.
manstephenson@gmail.com
The writer is a Ugandan based in Toronto, Canada.