LITMIR.BIZ

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not fair, that it needed changing and was there for us to mould, and that we should not accept unquestioningly what we are told or even take the world at face value.

      There are lessons for us here in entrepreneurship. The activist and the entrepreneur are not too far apart. Both disagree with the world order; they refuse to accept the status quo and feel the world is there for them to change and shape.

      It’s an exhilarating feeling when you are able to make your mark on the world. When my Soweto piece was published, I felt like I was playing my part in changing perceptions, creating awareness and challenging a reality, even if in just a microcosmic way. It was a mark, however small and insignificant, but a mark nonetheless. This is what drives activists and entrepreneurs alike: that giddy sense of changing things and upsetting the status quo, and an intense belief in your ideas and world view.

      When I was seven years old, my parents were still relatively young and had few financial resources, but they somehow managed to scrape together enough cash to buy me my first computer. I begged them for a new ZX Spectrum 48k. In those days you were either a Commodore, Atari or ZX Spectrum person. The Commodore and Atari guys liked to play games, but the Spectrum people liked to programme their own games before they played them.

      Nikolai, my close childhood friend at the time, and I both wanted to be computer games programmers. Nikolai was my ‘smart’ friend, always a step ahead of everyone else.

      We wrote an unpublished Hardy Boys-type book together. We would wake up at 6 am, meet at my house, and furiously type out chapter after chapter before leaving for school later that morning. We were disciplined at it and we worked hard. We also created robots together out of tape recorders and soldered light bulbs with any electronics we could find. We created pixelated computer games, plugging in thousands of lines of code into that ZX Spectrum.

      This was my first exposure to computer programming. We programmed in BASIC, but fundamentally it was all about strings, loops, arrays, and if/then/else statements – the very fundamentals of programming. It gave me a jump-start into understanding computing and fostered my deep passion for technology and all things digital.

      We later took our understanding of electronics to create a ‘wire loop game’, which was essentially a test of hand-eye coordination. It involved a mangled wire hanger linked as a circuit to a light bulb, a battery and a spoon-like metal loop. The aim of the game was to guide the loop along the narrow, twisted wire without touching the loop to the wire and thereby activating the circuit, signalled by the light bulb switching on. A player would put down a bet, and if he or she touched the main wire while traversing the loop along the wire before reaching its end, they would lose. If a player managed to move the loop through all the wire’s twists and turns all the way to its end without touching it and activating the circuit, they would win back 25 times the money they initially bet. There was a business here. We set up shop outside my family’s house in Parkhurst and charged passers-by twenty cents to try their luck for a chance to win five rand. We made a killing that day and buried the proceeds in the north end of my Parkhurst garden.

      I’ve always been close to technology. Rhodes University, where I studied, was one of the first places in South Africa to get the new phenomenon known as the World Wide Web. Back then it was all about orange-black or green-black monochrome screens and excruciatingly slow internet speeds.

      In those days, just before the arrival of the web, we used IRC (International Relay Chat), a form of instant messaging. Then came the colour screens and the rudimentary web browsers, such as Mozilla, which no longer exists. Mozilla was the precursor to Netscape, which would define the ‘browser wars’ era with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer of the late 1990s. In time Netscape would be defeated by Microsoft, which itself would eventually be defeated by Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari years later. That is technology for you. Companies can have near 90% market share only to be completely wiped out a decade later by a new disruptive entrant. Ask Nokia all about that. But back then it was a huge rush to be able to visit the White House virtually via this thing called a web browser. It was like you were there, but not there. The White House was one of only about a thousand sites in the world you could visit at the time.

      We have gone through so many internet waves. The internet first became popular at universities, where it was largely text-based but had the bare bones of what we know as the internet today: interlinking. It then went through the graphical era, where graphics became better as bandwidth and browsers improved. We then hit the Web 2.0 era, which promoted user participation and the web as a service. From there Google made its indelible mark on the web, ushering in the search engine and the smart, contextual advertising era. This was soon followed by the social media era featuring the dominant platforms of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram we know today. Companies like Nokia, Apple and Microsoft ushered in the mobile and smartphone era. And up next will most likely be the extended reality (XR) era, which will see the widespread adoption of augmented and virtual realities, which have up until now been held back by a lack of data, battery and computing power. But it is coming. Each of these eras causes a major shift in the web, rendering it practically unrecognisable to users of the era before.

      A group of us worked tirelessly for the student newspaper then and were part of the collective that changed the paper’s name from Rhodeo to Activate. This was the 1990s, and as keen history students we didn’t want to be associated with a colonial oppressor like Cecil John Rhodes. A young Lukanyo Mnyanda, now the editor of Business Day, was part of that key decision. We thought the university might follow suit and change its name, but it didn’t.

      In my third year we finally got email. I remember reading an article on the journalism school noticeboard about this revolutionary new way of communicating that was on its way to us. Writing for Cue magazine, the official newspaper of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, I marvelled at the newspaper’s new technology, noting that we were ‘abandoning primitive cut-and-paste methods of page makeup’, and that Cue’s design was now ‘fully computerised and copy was shipped from writers, through editors to production via email’.

      I vividly recall writing that story. I remember the room, the computer and even where I sat. The journalism computer room was on the bottom floor of what is now the drama department. Maria Mcloy, a fellow student and friend of mine, was sitting opposite me also writing a story. I remember the Star Tonight editor Darryl Accone dashing around in a constant panic with his long ponytail in full swing. He was a great editor that year.

      I recall the journalism professor Guy Berger putting pressure on me to file the story while I was really fretting over it, trying to think of an angle and rewriting the intro over and over again. I think Guy was trying to mimic the fast-paced, deadline-driven atmosphere of a newsroom. I remember being irritated by this, because I felt under constant pressure – but it helped teach me the value of sticking to deadlines.

      I know who that Matthew was – a guy with a romanticised dream of becoming a war correspondent, traversing Africa and telling its brutal stories. But I didn’t end up where I thought I would. Instead of becoming a journalist, I gravitated towards the internet as a technologist and in a business capacity.

      Little did I know at the time that the internet would prove to be one of the most disruptive technologies of the century. Yet such disruption is the very playground of entrepreneurs. Like an earthquake that breaks apart structures that have stood for years, so disruption changes industries and shakes up dominant companies. Entrepreneurs thrive amid this destruction. They are found in its wake, occupying the cracks and the fault lines, rebuilding and making what was once there something better and sometimes bigger.

      I didn’t know it at the time, but I would later become one of those internet entrepreneurs.

      It was at Rhodes that I designed and coded my very first website. I pitched a new drama department website to my dad, who was then deputy head of the department. My bill was R1 500, but there was no budget for it, so I was compensated with some money out of the stationery allotment. I marvelled at the fact that I could make money out of something in the virtual world.

      My time at university was one of the defining periods of my life, as it is for most students. I found the freedom to express myself there, which was a welcome change from a conformist school environment. I could now decide what

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