It's late on a Wednesday afternoon when Kamara stops into Pop Brixton, a multipurpose venue constructed out of brightly-colored, stacked shipping containers. Ibrahim is a Londoner though-and-through. Sitting a half-hour drive from where he was born and raised, he describes the city's profound impact on his life as having influenced everything. "I wouldn't have started [Guap] if I weren't from London because, being from the parts of London I'm from, there are not many people like me doing what I do."

Kamara grew up in Lewisham, an area nestled along the Thames River, which stretches from the city center to the outer boroughs. In 2013, it was named the least peaceful area in the UK. Although that status has improved in the recent years—placing it in the center of most of London's crime rankings—it remains, as Kamara describes it, a working class borough. Despite that reputation, Kamara's family was well off. His father opened a money transfer business in nearby Peckham, catering to fellow Sierra Leonean immigrants sending money back home in the late-90s before smartphones and online banking simplified the process. As one of the first of its kind in the neighborhood, the store proved to be a lucrative business.

Kamara told Ade Bamgbala in Blacticulate that he didn't really think about money until he was 12 years old, when his parents' separation left his mother with the financial burden of raising six children. As money shifted from being a given to a struggle, he began looking for small ways to make cash on the side. Kamara sold doughnuts on the playground in his preadolescence, became a grime emcee in his teens, and learned to trade stocks on the foreign exchange market, while studying finance and accounting at Kent University.

In the last year of his degree, Kamara and his soon-to-be Guap business partner, Jide Adetunji, were planning a traditional African party called #AFFPARTY for university students. On the day of the event, things quickly fell apart. Performers came late. Food ran out. People wanted refunds. The event ran up an £8,000 bill that it failed to come close to earning back. Kamara had lost £5,000 pounds. "That's not a huge fail, as a uni student?" Kamara exclaims at the suggestion that it wasn't such a big deal. "Yeah, that was a failure… We wanted to get that event out of the way and just get on with Guap. We learned so much from that one experience."

Luckily, the week before #AFFPARTY, Kamara was lying in bed on the phone when the idea of a video newsletter came up with Adetunji. They could monetize it through affiliate marketing. Both were excited by the idea. Neither he nor Adetunji enjoyed writing but video meant they would be able to produce content without going down a traditional publication path. YouTube was booming. Facebook's algorithm started favoring videos in its feed. The accessible technology boom of the 2010s made it simpler and cheaper than ever to make creative content. The market was welcoming but crowded. Still, the two were determined to answer the clarion call of the young creative: If you've got an idea, make it. Kamara had a camera and some money left from his student loan. After graduation, he worked at Tesco for five months to fund the remaining expenses. Guap was a go.

Between those university days and the first copy of the magazine, the idea of Guap transformed. The newsletter evolved into a magazine but the pair were set on keeping it nontraditional. Video would still be the focus, even in the quarterly (now annual) print editions—a possibility granted by augmented reality (AR) technology, which Kamara came across in the planning stages.

Surprisingly, the novelty of AR didn't add a big price tag to the project. Although the first issue was released in late-2015—nearly eight months before Pokemon Go brought the technology to the mainstream—plenty of companies had released free AR readers to app stores. However, the demo video drew a greater audience than the print magazine itself. As a small startup with no capital, the print issue suffered from a lack of a distribution network. Even for those who had a copy, the technology wasn't revolutionary. "I mean most people are like, 'woah, yeah, this is so sick!'" says Kamara about the publication's AR capabilities. "But I think most people get our content from online, so the print magazine acts as a marketing tool more than the content reader. Most of our audience haven't seen the print in life."

Augmented reality is a part of Guap but it was never the defining element. At its core, it's always been about representation.

From the outset, Kamara had a strong idea of who and what would be included in Guap. The content had to be strongly influenced by his own experience of growing up in working class South London, where the possibilities for his future felt severely limited. "Everybody wanted to be footballers, rappers—or you would say you wanted to be an accountant, or a doctor because your mum said you have to be one—but there were so many different jobs we didn't see."

It's a familiar refrain that echoes far beyond London's South. In Paris' outer suburbs, called the banlieues, young men practice their football skills in the hope of one day being scouted for the highly competitive European leagues. Less than one percent will come close to making money from the game. The same is true of those hoping to make a career in the saturated rap scenes of Chicago and Los Angeles. Many young people of color, particularly men, hang their hopes on improbable futures because it seems that's the only option offered. As banlieue resident, handyman, and political refugee Claude Bohulu put it to The Guardian about the problems in his neighborhood: "No one feels there's any future. That's what has to change."

This is what Kamara hopes to do for London. "We wanted to show everything else you could be or everything else you could do," he says. He doesn't speak, dress or look different to fit the biased entrepreneurial mold and he doesn't want anyone else to either. "You don't have to change how you speak, or change your dress code, or change anything, as long as you're providing value to the world that should be enough."

Although Guap often features musicians, Kamara didn't want it to solely be a music platform because, as he sees it, people of color are already represented strongly in that industry. Rather, he envisioned the publication highlighting a broad spectrum of creative industries and professions, often those that go unnoticed.

Kamara and Adetunji worked on the platform for two years before they ever saw any money—'proper money', as Kamara puts it. That came last year. While they were working persistently on Guap in South London, 8,000 kilometers and a world away at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon headquarters, a larger strategy was being hatched. The footwear brand had seen continually dropping sales and heated competition in recent years. Taking a hint from Adidas' hugely-successful campaigns, a plan was devised to localize marketing, rooting content in the culture of the 12 select cities where Nike would attempt to engage and connect with young consumers. London was among them. The first email Kamara received from Nike didn't mention sponsorship, partnership or collaboration. All they asked for was his trainer size.

"There was a competition. Anyone could enter, 'just be a young creative," says Kamara on the resulting commission to run Nike's workshop for young creatives designing a new Air Max line for London. "There were five days of intense designing. Young Londoners were in the neck space, and just building their trainers, sketching designs and stuff. Each of the media partners had to run a workshop to help the development of the trainer. So we had to do a workshop on color theory, and London's color, and how color influences our lives." The color of London? "Grey," says Kamara.

Today, Guap has expanded to include an in-house creative agency, GUAP NETWRK, which works with brands to produce content and events. Brands and agencies have long capitalized on the perceived coolness of black culture, which not a fact lost on Kamara. "We have a network or audience that most people don't have. Not even the biggest audience but the audience that we represent, a lot of brands want." It's Kamara's mission to put young people of color like himself everywhere in the process—not just in front of the camera. "We saw that big agencies were profiting from our culture but never brought our culture in, so we decided to do something about it," he posted on Twitter a few weeks before this interview took place. Kamara hires both on-camera and behind-the-scenes talent who otherwise wouldn't have had an opportunity to work on larger campaigns whenever possible.

Beyond giving a platform to creatives in his community through the Guap agency and the magazine, Kamara wants his own experience to serve as inspiration. "I'm still showing my journey, while I'm on it because anytime you see a successful entrepreneur, you never see the journey, you just see the end. So if you go on my Instagram, from my very first post, it's just been a timeline of everything that's happened."

The last beams of the day's light are reflecting through the corrugated plastic walls of Pop Brixton's second floor, as Kamara reveals the secret behind finding and identifying the next big thing. He mentions social media as a source but insists that it isn't about amassing followers. "If someone's talented, they're talented. It doesn't matter if they have 10,000 followers or 10. It's just about seeing the light, and actually going with it, and giving them a platform."

Written By Emma Murray