And it was at Rhodes that I made some of my best friends and met my future wife, Bridget. She was something of an activist and we shared values. Early in our acquaintance Bridget regaled me with a story of how she had snuck out of her house one evening to attend a ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ rally. When I heard this, I knew right away this was the girl for me.
After graduating from Rhodes, I was determined to be a journalist. I still had that romantic vision of touring through African war zones like a Camel man. In reality I was a journalist for only three months of my life. I was an intern at Johannesburg’s Star magazine, staying in a grimy house-share in Yeoville with Bridget and my old university buddy Lukanyo. I covered South Africa’s first soccer World Cup, securing my first front-page lead story, and accompanied the police to report on gruesome highway accidents.
But I quickly found my way back into tech, joining the Out There website team as a combination webmaster and subeditor. It was a strange role that suited the times – most internet-related job titles were ad hoc, made up on the spot. Out There magazine was part of a big media group known then as Times Media and today as the Tiso Blackstar Group. The group was also the publisher of the popular mass weekly paper the Sunday Times.
The digital team was essentially a bunch of Rhodes students, all from the same year. The company didn’t know who else to hire, as there were so few internet professionals at that time. The team was headed up by the sharp-tongued Robin Esrock, a smart, high-energy and focused individual who at a young age wanted nothing less than world domination. He was constantly jittery, his mind never in the present.
We initially worked in a windowless messy office, out of sight and out of the way of the good folk of Times Media. The office was littered with old computer spare parts, gangly wires connected to noisy servers, and a pile of smelly old pizza boxes stacked in a corner.
It was my first professional website role, and none of us knew what we were doing. At the tender age of nineteen we had been given control of a major media company’s website assets, a responsibility way beyond our capacities. Our bosses didn’t think much of the internet then, and they didn’t really know or understand what we were doing, so they left us to our own devices.
It’s not often that you come into a job knowing more than your bosses do. But the internet was a phenomenon that turned the business world on its head. We would often get our bosses to back off by spouting the latest internet babble and jargon to make us sound intelligent. It was an arrogance that all young internet people carried with them at the time, and we had it in big doses.
In our youthful overconfidence, it wasn’t long before we decided that Joburg was too small for us, so six months later Robin and I decided to take our rare skills overseas to London.
For a year we battled to get jobs, which meant I was doing drug trials for money and working as a barman at Lord’s Cricket Ground. I also signed up to be a ‘video packer’ and a security guard. Times were tough and money was tight, but while doing menial jobs we kept applying for professional internet jobs.
Persistence eventually paid off and the job of my dreams arrived, working for probably the hottest internet gig in London at the time: Beeb, the new commercial web division created by BBC Worldwide. At Beeb, we created websites for Radio Times and for shows like TopGear, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Fast Show. In those days there was no such thing as an automated content management system (CMS). Instead a small army of HTML coders – nicknamed HTMellers – punched out code manually to give the incredible brands of the BBC life online.
It was an innovative place. At Beeb, we pioneered the concept of live chats with celebrities, encouraging audience members to ask their own questions via our ‘Have Your Say’ platforms. Luminaries such as Kylie Minogue, Allan Lamb and Michael Palin waltzed through our offices for their live online chats. Uri Geller even popped in to bend a spoon from the canteen by our head designer Jason Robinson’s computer.
Being in London during the height of the dot.com madness was an electric experience. A whole new revolutionary ethos and culture was emerging, and in the 1990s the internet guys were on the crest of the wave. The geeks ruled the world. Takkies, jeans and T-shirts replaced ties and dress shoes in the corridors of power. Boardrooms were replaced by lounges with beanbag chairs and foosball tables.
The dot.com kids were ushering in a new economy built around the internet and showing the old world how it was done. These were exciting, unrealistic times and the salaries were outrageously high. Employees, not employers, were interviewing the job applicants, and candidates were considered over the hill at age 35. Every day you would read something about a new crazy dot.com startup, backed by millions of bucks.
Wired magazine was our bible and we self-consciously pored over every word of it. We were hip and arrogant, but we worked at a furious pace and late into the night. We all had our dot.com startup shares and were happy to work overtime because we were sure we were making history. (God, we must have been irritating.) The truth is, like most internet companies in the 1990s, Beeb burned through a lot of money while making very little of it. In these heady, innovative days, innovation was more important than profit. The prevailing ethos was to build it and worry about the revenue later.
It’s no wonder the old economy and established businessmen were laughing when it all started to fall apart in the early 2000s. They were the ones being sidelined in this new internet economy and they didn’t like it one bit. No one listened to them (or anyone else) during those heady days – they were told they just ‘didn’t get it’. During the rush, the entreprenerds were getting listed on the world’s major stock exchanges one after the other, getting big business to burn money on their wild ideas.
But it was a fad. People were swept away by this new internet craze, abandoning traditional metrics for valuating and assessing companies. Andrew Beattie, writing for Investopedia, puts it eloquently: ‘The craze of the dot-com bubble and the flood of capital that came with it led to many back-of-the-napkin business models becoming publicly traded companies almost overnight.’2 It was an era of growth over profit, and the rush to invest and not ‘miss out’ created inflated stock prices for dot.com companies in the US and throughout the world. In fact, between 1995 and 2000, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose more than 400%.3 When dot.com profits didn’t materialise, panic set in, which resulted in a stock market crash and the end of many internet companies. By the end of 2002, the Nasdaq was down 78% from its highs and tech stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalisation.4
During the dot.bomb era I decided to return to South Africa. In London, internet jobs were drying up and companies had begun retrenching. I wanted to escape the gloom of it all.
Upon returning to South Africa in the early 2000s, I joined a relatively new internet startup called iafrica.com in Cape Town. It was a site based on the Yahoo! portal model that claimed to show users ‘only the good stuff’ on the web. These were the pre-Google days, and users would often need to sift through poor-quality information and junk to ultimately find what they were looking for. In fact, in those days the web was a scary place to be and had a poor reputation because of all the rubbish that users were exposed to online. In that era, portals fulfilled a critical role of gathering and curating quality and credible information from the web for users. When Google began to gain traction with its brilliant PageRank algorithm, it effectively made portals defunct. Via this algorithm, the search engine had now found a way of allowing users to search through quality and relevant content only, hiding the horrible junk.
I worked at iafrica.com as a content producer, opening up new special-interest portals that would be windows of quality content on the rough and wild web of those times. It was a typical dot.com company, with young staff, a relaxed culture and fancy top-floor offices that overlooked Table Mountain. Even though the dot.com crash had set in, there was still something of a dot.com-rush mentality in the company. At that time, iafrica.com was one of the country’s largest internet properties, and there was tangible excitement about more growth to come.
The dot.com scene in South Africa,