MATTHEW
BUCKLAND
SO
YOU WANT
TO BUILD
A STARTUP?
Wild startup tales, sensible advice
and life lessons from a South African
entrepreneur who founded and sold
a multimillion-dollar business
TAFELBERG
Without the love and support of Bridget Pringle, my precious wife and ‘nurturepreneur’, I simply would have not built my business or career. In fact, I owe my life to my wife, literally. The book is dedicated to you, Bridget, and our two beautiful daughters – our very own Parisian, Isabel Buckland, and our sassy Stella Buckland. I adore you guys. You are my meaning and my everything. I would also like to thank my dad, Andrew, my mom, Janet, and my two brothers, Luke and Daniel. I could not have faced these challenges without you. Lastly a big thanks to my outlaws – the special Rod and Elaine Pringle, who dashed between a farm near George and Cape Town on a regular basis.
In 2010 I left the corporate world to start my own business. It would be a digital company built around the new economy, with the internet and social media wave sweeping the world. Five years later I sold the business to a worldwide, UK-listed corporate called M&C Saatchi. My company grew quickly, employing 70+ full-time, shared and contracted people by the time I exited it. After eight years I left that company entirely in order to start something new, but I would also face a new battle – the fight of my life.
This book is a raw account of the struggles and trials involved in building a startup, incorporating my experiences of working in the internet industry for some major companies before making my eventual move into entrepreneurship.
In it are stories, business insights and life lessons – denoted by a different font – I learned along the way. The appendixes include a series of articles about startups and entrepreneurship; a complete overview of South Africa’s startup ecosystem; and a list of funders in the country that are actively investing in startups, originally published by Ventureburn. I hope you find this book interesting and useful as you pursue your own dreams.
I’ve always been driven, in whatever I do. It took me many years to understand why this is the case. Was my intense competitiveness instilled by the South African school system, or was it a sense that as South Africans we need to work harder and prove ourselves more? I came to realise that my drive most likely stemmed from a secret I had harboured for a very long time, one that made me want to attain success no matter what the cost, but which helped me develop and maintain a laser-like focus on anything I undertook. I’ll tell you more about the secret in a later chapter.
I am the oldest of three brothers, part of a family that was quite well known in theatre circles. From a young age, I had a sense that my parents were successful – maybe not in the financial sense, but certainly in the intellectual and artistic sense.
We lived in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, in the 1980s. Everywhere we went, my father was noticed. People would stop him to get his autograph or to ask, ‘Are you that guy on TV?’ My father felt embarrassed, while the rest of the family enjoyed the reflected glory. I remember thinking to myself that I wanted some of that attention and glory.
My parents are amazing people. During the days of apartheid, my father put on satirical shows criticising the white minority government. The most famous was The Ugly NooNoo, a play based on the hideous Parktown prawn that terrorised Johannesburg’s wealthy white suburbs.
The prawn was a succulent deep-maroon in colour, with a long, rhino-horn-like spike at the end of its abdomen; hideous tusk-like mandibles; and sweeping antennae that covered almost the length of its body. Legend had it that the Parktown prawn was a descendant of the king cricket, which had found its way to the city of gold from the Namib Desert via the sand used to build the expensive houses of Joburg’s northern suburbs. Finding itself in lush conditions, the king cricket swelled to grotesque proportions to become the Parktown prawn.
It was an aggressive insect that would jump at you if it felt threatened, sometimes spraying its attacker with an offensive black faecal liquid. The dark-coloured parquet flooring in our house offered handy camouflage, and a Parktown prawn loved to hide in the toe of someone’s school shoes or in a school bag. The only effective weapon for killing them was a fat Telkom telephone directory, which, once dropped, needed to stay put until the next evening to ensure the monster was dead. The freakish nature of the insect was the perfect metaphor for the apartheid ministers that the Parktown prawns symbolised in my dad’s play.
My mother was a teacher who also wasn’t afraid to call out the government’s oppressive and racist ‘homeland’ policies. She did an exercise in the school hall at the then all-white Queens High School where students had to cram onto narrow tables to show how ridiculous it was that the majority of the country’s population was restricted to living in cramped townships and designated homelands, while the white minority spread themselves over 90% of the land.
She was visited by the official government school inspectors who wanted to understand these new ‘subversive’ teaching techniques. My mother would later go on to win the prestigious national Woman of the Year award for the dance teaching and upliftment work she did in the Grahamstown township, Rini.
I was proud of my parents. They had achieved peer recognition for the work they did, and stood up for what they believed in despite it being unpopular at the time.
I too wanted to be significant, to be noticed, to make a difference. I wanted to make a mark on the world. That desire became deeply ingrained and would influence me for years to come. It would form part of my drive to succeed and conquer.
While living in Joburg, I remember my parents returning one evening, wide-eyed and breathless, from a United Democratic Front (UDF) rally. The UDF was a major anti-apartheid organisation of the 1980s, a non-racial coalition of about 400 civic, church, students’, workers’ and other organisations. Its goal was to establish a ‘non-racial, united South Africa in which segregation is abolished and in which society is freed from institutional and systematic racism’.1 Its slogan was ‘UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides’.
The UDF event my parents attended had been violently broken up by the security police using tear gas. I remember disapproving of their being there. At that age I just wanted my mother to be a tuckshop mom, not an anti-apartheid activist. Only years later would I look back on the unpopular stand they took so bravely and realise what it all meant. It would fill me with pride.
Things were changing in South Africa. I was fortunate that I didn’t serve in the apartheid army. It was compulsory for all white South African males to serve in the military, which usually meant suppressing ANC protests in the townships. The call-up had been reduced from two years to one, and an army rep called my house to find out why I had not reported for duty. I remember my dad answering the phone and saying, ‘Matthew Buckland? He doesn’t live here.’ That was the last we heard from the South African military. The next year conscription was abolished.
I had attended an End Conscription Campaign (ECC) protest meeting in Soweto with my father the year I was in matric. I was eighteen years old, and this was the first time I was exposed to that sprawling black South African township on the outskirts of affluent Joburg. That is how we lived in South Africa: together, but apart. The Group Areas Act meant that white South Africans and black South Africans lived in separate areas, and were not allowed to mix except when work required it.
I was shocked at the squalor and poverty right there on our doorstep – and amazed that I was so oblivious to it. I remember feeling scared to be in Soweto. It was technically South Africa, but it was foreign to me. The trip touched me to such an extent that I wrote an essay that was published and picked up an award: ‘Planet Soweto: Another World’.
The experience in Soweto was the