Little is known about the man who contributed immensely the success of the late Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.
According to the information Crandle website, Collymore was raised by his grandparents in Guyana for 12 years and when he was 16 his mother, who had moved to the UK, brought him to join her in London.
After school, he had to forgo a place at Warwick University because he was not eligible for funding.
“I wanted to go to university and I disliked not having gone and for some years after I wished I’d gone,” he once said.
Unable to pursue a degree, Bob Collymore spent his time filling forms as a junior underwriter and working as a train announcer while pursuing his passion for “surrealist stuff”.
Were it not for grandfather and his mother, he might still be selling his oil paintings along the railings of Hyde Park.
He started earning money when he was 12-years-old by selling art pieces from plasticine molds.
Bob Collymore career took off when he joined the UK’s Cellnet in 1993, just as the corporate world was starting to venture into mobile telephony.
“I was walking down a path no one else had walked and I thought, ‘this is good because the rules aren’t written and I’m just going to make the rules up as I go’,” he says. “We took some risks. This change thing – it is actually quite exciting, it’s good, and you will make mistakes and you will stumble and fall and that’s quite neat.”Collymore was once quoted saying.
