“We started StayBlocks because we knew that if we could get 100,000 people to believe in this vision, we could shatter the barriers in real estate and take over Web3.”
What if the way we think about wealth-building is all wrong? What if the doors to property ownership—the ultimate marker of economic security—aren’t actually closed, but just guarded by outdated systems that refuse to evolve? What if the power to change that is in the hands of ordinary people, coming together across borders, across cultures, across economic divides?
That is why I’m here. That is why StayBlocks exists. This is not just a business—it is a movement. In this journal entry, I share some of the experiences and personal realisations that have driven the creation of StayBlocks. I hope to reach the people who are meant to be part of this journey. Not just investors, but believers, everyday people looking for something different. Our goal? To connect with 100,000 early adopters—people who are ready to prove that the way we think about property, ownership, and wealth can be transformed from the ground up.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
“I watched Kedi build a property business from scratch, with his bare hands. And the system still tried to tell him he hadn’t created value.”
Hi, I’m Davina. I’m employed as a management consultant, and have just finished an advanced global business degree for senior executives at INSEAD (a top business school), and really, I'm at a crossroads.
We have a startup called StayBlocks, which is an innovation from the property business that my husband has built, and I didn't realise what he built until I started business school. My husband Kedi started a property company in 2020, and within 23 months, he established 22 rental units. But of course, it's really difficult to run as an entrepreneur and a founder. The startup journey is not easy, his company is a vertically integrated, micro-SME (small to medium enterprise) with revenues of about 15,000 pounds a month, but costs are very high, so it's still very, very tough. Sometimes the rental income doesn't come in because tenants don't always pay their rent. Sometimes tenants leave, and we don't know they've left until we realise the rent is not being paid - so, we have a vacancy rate to keep down. Sometimes tenants destroy the properties and then they have to be fixed. But thankfully, Kedi is formerly a construction director for major developers, so he has, and StayBlocks has, the capability in-house to refurbish. He has built houses from the ground up.
In 2023, he spotted a hidden gem—a tired, three-bedroom house sitting on a road in a North England suburb. It was priced at £49,000. It didn’t look like much at first, but we saw potential. Big potential. This property could be more than just a house; it could be a home for many and a valuable piece of the local community. Kedi had talent, vision and a bold idea: turn this modest three-bed into something extraordinary—a spacious six-bedroom, five-bathroom house designed to meet modern needs. Not just more rooms, but better rooms. He created a space that offered comfort, style, and practical living—all on a budget that made sense - £50,000.
On the way, Kedi faced dishonest and rogue traders who cut corners. One disappeared after he was paid £5000 in advanced, and another went so far as to change the locks and steal the electricity fuses when Kedi demanded the job be done properly. When Kedi got through that, despite providing property comparisons within a three-mile radius, one surveyor flat-out refused to value the property that Kedi refurbished. And a lender undervalued his newly refurbished properties, blocking him from releasing funds to fuel his growth. It was a gut punch, especially after all the hard work he’d poured in.
While employed, Kedi generated an extra £1.4 million in revenue, increasing the value of a mechanical and electrical roofing project from £2.2m to £3.6m over two years; but he received no thanks and no bonus. His seniors that he won over privately advised him that his success had created contempt and it was time to move on. Kedi is what I call a tremendous man. Without an advanced education, just raw talent, he manages to create nuggets of success, every day. He is kind. He is carrying many people on his shoulders. He has a generosity that I don't see anywhere else. One of the latest things that I've seen is his despair when things get up-to-the-wire tough and he doesn't have someone that he can turn to, like a big brother, who can just say ‘look, I've got you’. And relationships that he thought were that, didn't manifest into that. So, he is hellbent on being that person for other people, and I am inspired by him every day.
Realising Kedi’s success during business school and with all the stuff that I learned while at business school, I decided that we would start StayBlocks.
WHAT STAYBLOCKS IS ABOUT
“There is no reason why people with low incomes in Lagos, Delhi, Manila, Hanoi or Jakarta shouldn’t be able to own a piece of real estate in England. Web3 isn’t the innovation. The people are. The global community that will come together and say—this system isn’t working for us so we’re building our own.”
StayBlocks is about disrupting private property development and renting. We are a Web3 startup, and we want to do this on the blockchain for trust and transparency. There are communities, like in Vietnam, that have seen a fractional property offer that didn’t go well – it didn’t work, money was lost and it undoubtedly destroyed trust. We want to give global communities—including communities in developing economies that want to build wealth and are potentially unbanked—access to the ethical StayBlocks opportunity. We want to create a community-powered movement that can acquire any property site and turn it into housing. Low-carbon, energy-efficient housing. We’re calling this movement The People’s Landlord.
Our target customer, ideal renter, is the global skilled worker from countries outside the UK—foreign expat workers. We want to target this customer for our rentals because they generally find it difficult to find quality housing. I’m talking about people who come to the UK to work—expats who have a job and just want somewhere reliable, clean, and high-quality to call home while they are in a foreign land trying to better themselves. I’ve heard international venture capitalists express the same sentiment about the work ethic of immigrants. These people do not feel entitled to be renting somewhere and not paying their rent.
That is why, on the rental side of StayBlocks, this is our primary target audience. But of course, in Kedi’s startup, our tenants have been whoever we can get because we need to make revenue. It is really tough. So until StayBlocks has grown sufficiently, Kedi’s vertically integrated property startup is taking in a broader range of rental tenants.
A PERSONAL REALISATION
“Economies are slowing, and they don’t even realise why. They had access to a forgotten, underused part of society—people they could have invested in, inspired, included in social capital. And they missed it. I have spent time with people from emerging economies and I see the excellence achieved but also many other similarities in terms of with the lack of economic inclusion in the UK. I have a deep, ember-like drive to reduce inequity.”
One of my biggest learnings after completing my postgraduate business degree was about cultural intelligence and realising that - having lived and worked in the UK for my entire life and having grown up in UK workplaces - there is an arrogance, here. A lack of humility and curiousity. I have experienced a lot of discrimination and systemic barriers to success. And there is a general inability to see excellence in all its guises.
Wanting to create success for my employer—using my imagination to generate as much success as possible for my employer—is not enough. Workplaces are filled with people who are self-sabotaging to the interests of their employers. They create barriers. They impede. They block. They slander. They don’t support. They do not want to see or support visionary success.
Employers don’t understand that people from backgrounds like mine are often the most loyal employees. When we are brought in, we work our asses off for that employer. We are incredibly loyal. And yet, workplaces fail to recognise this. Productivity and economies slow down because some of their best resources are blocked by self-sabotaging elements within the system.
In my own opinion, western economies are slowing down because they are not realising that they had access to a forgotten, underutilised part of society that they failed to invest in—people they failed to educate, inspire, or empower to contribute to economic success. This is probably true for disaffected communities anywhere, but I speak mainly as part of the disaffected community with whom I share a cultural background. We are overlooked. We don’t really feature in business on the global stage (not including in entertainment or sports – but not everyone can have success as an actor, footballer or music artist).
Realising this, after having access to the global stage, I saw that people from my background are not sought after or known for anything in terms of global commerce. That saddened me, but it also fuelled me. I don’t want to be a part of the arrogance I see. I have spent time with people from emerging economies, and I see the excellence achieved but also many other similarities in terms of the lack of economic inclusion in the UK. I have a deep, deep drive to reduce that inequity. Kedi and I do a lot with our community in the UK—helping people onto the work ladder, onto the property ladder, mentoring, supporting. StayBlocks is about taking that to the world stage.
“The world teaches you that success is about individualism. I don’t believe that. Real leadership is about looking behind you and pulling people up. Surveyors, lenders, bureaucracy, bias in systems—what they don’t realise is that by blocking us and people like us, they are blocking productivity and the future economy.”
I can say that my life experience has shaped my approach to leadership. It’s not a naiveté, but on the contrary, forged out of resilience and empathy. Our type of leadership is transformative and situational. It is servant-leadership, and it is one of cultural intelligence. It is one of creativity. Cultural intelligence is everything. Without it, you could build a large international company and not even realise you’ve locked out the very people who could make it thrive.
The StayBlocks Leadership Model
Our leadership model is built on four cornerstones:
EQ (Emotional Intelligence)
IQ (Traditional Intelligence)
SQ (Social Intelligence)
CQ (Cultural Intelligence)
At the centre of these is Generative Intent—a concept I learned from a brilliant wealth-generation scholar in the U.S. and it stuck with me. Generative intent is about wanting to create other leaders; wanting to create success for other people. It’s an intent to generate, replicate and enable the success that you’ve had (or better) for others. We want to uplift. That's our flavour of leadership and that's what we will translate into the values at StayBlocks.
I'm going to create an organisation that attracts people with the same values and we will have zero tolerance for arrogance, toxic behaviors and toxic leadership. Zero tolerance for lack of cultural intelligence, because both Kedi and I had to endure with our teeth and nails through those behaviours and avoid resorting to having the same behaviour. It is possible to create a workplace that just enables people to do their best, dream, achieve and help others. I’m confident that we can create a space that does that. Every self-sabotaging system means the energy and results of ambitious, hard-working people are negatively impacted, which eventually leads to less productivity and taxes for the country.
“I refuse to create a workplace that asks people to shrink themselves to fit in. We will only attract people who build, who uplift, who multiply success. Everything I’ve done up until now—every barrier I’ve hit, every workplace that tried to shrink me—was leading to this.”
WHERE WE ARE GOING
Our Roadmap
So, what does the journey look like? Where are we going?
Phase One: Finding 100,000 early adopters. Our research indicates an early adopter market of £9.8 million. We are laying the groundwork, proving demand and building the first community of people who believe in the movement we are creating. Establishing trust and transparency. Communicating our values.
Phase Two: Developing our Web3 platform—mobile-first, blockchain-based, integrating fiat and crypto payments. We want StayBlocks to be automated, trustworthy, and transparent. That means it needs to be authorised, registered, and built with absolute credibility. We need to demonstrated that StayBlocks can be trusted over and over again.
Phase Three: Partnerships, marketing, and community growth. This is where we push the limits—how far can we take this movement? How big can it grow? We are focused on scaling, bringing in like-minded people, and fueling developments in the UK and beyond.
The vision doesn’t stop there. We started in the UK because it is where we have our foothold, but this model is scalable. We want a serious Web3 financial literacy arm; we want to attract the right legal, marketing, community engagement and blockchain advisors; and we want to create an organisation that enables people to dream and achieve without toxic workplace culture.
So, I have a bit of a dream that a community, a global community, can come together with the power of the crowd, with the power of capital behind it, and with a social mission and values - led by founders who are committed to those social values - and that we can just go around those barriers. We can totally disrupt it and render those types of barriers no longer an issue, and that we can bring people with us.
“The StayBlocks slogan is ‘grow with us.’ That’s not just about property. That’s about life. That’s about legacy.”
If you’re reading this and are inspired to join us, welcome. Do bear with us as we attempt to stand things up. We are looking for the right community manager to join us, someone that is passionate about innovative community engagement – and forward looking. You can imagine, I'm doing this in addition to my day job but we are committed for the long haul. I've met with CEOs across the world now, and it is clear to me that building success takes years, and so I started StayBlocks in 2023 – based on Kedi’s idea to offer tokens in our properties in exchange for rental income, and here we are in 2025 about to launch our landing page, our first three property raises. We have all of the experience that we have gained from running Kedi's vertically integrated property company.
Kedi, is free to work on the property company every day. I am currently employed, so I can only work on StayBlocks as a venture when I’m not working. This is the crossroads I spoke about. My dream is to be free from full-time employment and cover my household expenses to really be able to focus on growing StayBlocks to success. And so, what you won't find is me being the public face of StayBlocks, yet. But at the core of StayBlocks’ values are trust and transparency. Until I've found a way to support myself while building StayBlocks, you won't see much of me linking my professional public profile with StayBlocks, but I hope that this journal article gives the global community a bit of insight into our back story as founders.
That's our idea! I really do hope it resonates and we look forward to connecting with you; you can find us on most of the main social media platforms. I’ll share more of our stories soon.
