meetings in Cape Town or Johannesburg – edgy networking sessions designed to bring venture capitalists and young, savvy geeks together to fund their crazy startups.
Besides iafrica.com, South Africa had key startups like ShoppingMatrix.com, Woza, Metropolis and Streetcar.com. iafrica.com still exists today, but it is a fraction of its former size in the glory days and has changed its business model from portal to online publisher. Its holding company, Metropolis, burned through parent company Primedia’s money – it didn’t seem to matter much then.
In true dot.com spending madness, employees recall how Metropolis had brand-new, bespoke chairs designed for the staff. The Bryanston head office carpets were specially woven with the company logo, and a fancy custom-made front door that never quite fitted was made – all this for a company that didn’t make a single cent of profit. Yet everyone wanted in to make a quick buck.
While I was at iafrica.com, my uncle phoned me in a sweat wanting to know which tech stocks he should buy so that he too could make millions. ‘Buy Metropolis,’ I urged him. ‘You’ll make a fortune.’ Well, he didn’t and neither did I.
The reality of the dot.com crash eventually arrived in South Africa – and the bubble here also burst. I’d lost my Metropolis share certificate – it was never quite worth the toilet paper it was written on.
Bridget’s brother, who worked at another well-known Cape Town-based tech company, was a paper multimillionaire for a short while. When the share price went south, he was suddenly worth R20 000. It was that dramatic.
Overseas, even the AOL-Time Warner deal, poised to create the world’s biggest media company, began to collapse. The old media gurus were edging out the new media philosophers in the boardrooms. They had begun to see through all the hype. And they were angry. As an obvious act of vengeance, the internet part of the company’s name, AOL, was dropped.
At the Mail & Guardian Online, one of South Africa’s oldest internet brands and pioneers, the staff was cut to its bare bones – to about 20% of what it was during its heyday – as online advertising dried up. The new website Fuckedcompany.com began to chronicle the list of dot.coms that came crashing down on a daily basis.
For geeks, suddenly the cool factor disappeared. Mentioning you worked ‘in the internet’ failed to turn heads at parties. You were no longer that young bright thing with zillions of shares and his or her own startup. As the industry came crashing down, so everyone’s credibility sank with it. As a dot.com worker, you felt you had been part of ‘the lie’.
But I stuck with online work, even though my dot.com shares were worthless and I’d seen many brilliant people pack it in and flee to other industries. The believers pointed to the recent listing of Google and the googlerific success of the company as an indication that a new dot.com era, possibly more sober and sensible, was on its way. For many, Google still represented the ethos and culture of the dot.com era: young, savvy and relaxed – but this time with added profit and business sense.
Many of South Africa’s dot.coms went belly up, but there were some that survived. Some were propped up, forgiven for their sins and nurtured through the hard times by their old-economy parent companies. Many shrank to about a tenth of their size, or just completely folded. Mail & Guardian Online only later started to claw back some of its former glory. The South African dot.com leftovers who still went to First Tuesday meetings experienced a more sombre feeling at the once buzzing, high-flying get-togethers. There was a lot less of the ‘next big thing’ mumbo-jumbo. And for a while the geeks began dressing a lot smarter – possibly because they were getting older, but also because they were desperate to prove their credibility again. They wanted to show the old guys that they were serious about business now, that dot.com silliness was all in the past.
I stayed at iafrica for about a year before moving to Johannesburg to join Carte Blanche, South Africa’s 60 Minutes-type show, as its ‘interactive editor’, another job title I made up at the time. I quickly became frustrated, however, as dial-up internet in those days was too slow to support multimedia in any meaningful way. The Carte Blanche website would always be merely an add-on, playing second fiddle to the prime-time show.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before a new job opportunity caught my eye, this one at a company that placed the internet at the very core of its business. The Mail & Guardian (M&G) was looking for an online editor, and I jumped at the chance. In typical internet style, the ‘online editor’ in those days was a loosely defined term. The role meant everything from being responsible for the content on the site, to being the main tech liaison, to looking after the commercials on the site.
One of the great things about working for the M&G was that there always was a sense of historical context at the company, an awareness that somehow you were part of a bigger historical equation – that history was being made at the place.
The M&G was a company steeped in history. As an independent, feisty and innovative media operation, it had been at the forefront of so many pivotal South African moments. Today, its passages remain decorated with grainy posters of past newspaper front pages bravely taking on the apartheid state and all its evil machinery. The M&G has always been a paper on the right side of history.
The publication was started as an alternative newspaper by a group of journalists in 1985 after the closure of two leading liberal newspapers, the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express. The newspaper was originally known as the Weekly Mail because the paper did not have the finances to publish daily.5
During the apartheid era, the paper was a frequent critic of the government, which led to its suspension in 1988 by the white minority president PW Botha. Support for the paper was rallied and it reopened three months later, and it just kept going and going.
The paper would report news that the South African public was not allowed to know, particularly news of township ‘unrest’, police repression and other coverage that was restricted under the country’s state of emergency laws. South Africa was in a state of ‘barely suppressed’ civil war as more and more people challenged the authority of the apartheid government.6 The paper published many exposés, including a report on the country’s white rulers’ support for Renamo in Mozambique, and kept a tally of activists in detention. It also exposed the apartheid state’s funding and training of the Inkatha death squads to counter the work of the revolutionary African National Congress (ANC).
The paper was later renamed the Weekly Mail & Guardian, and the London-based Guardian Media Group, publisher of the Guardian newspaper, became the majority shareholder of the print edition in 1995. The newspaper’s name was then officially changed to the Mail & Guardian.
The M&G was a perfect mix for the activist mindset my parents had instilled in me and my interest in technology. Well known for innovation, the M&G was something of an international internet pioneer, being one of world’s first large media sites on the internet. It was also one of the first newspapers to use Apple Mac desktop publishing.
When I joined the M&G as a fresh-faced 27-year-old in 2001, the company was in turmoil. Its well-known founders, Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim, had suddenly left the company over differences with the majority shareholders, and the anti-apartheid newspaper was searching for a new role in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa. Its major shareholder and sugar daddy, the Guardian, was looking to reduce its shareholding. Donor funding, which the paper relied on, was drying up and being redirected to other hot spots in the world.
In the company’s Milpark offices, a former bread factory, the dimly lit, dusty reception area consisted of no receptionist and a lonely, worn-out chair propped against a dark wall for a brave guest to sit on. That chair was an unwitting symbol of a floundering media company searching for a future. I remember sitting on that chair for my 2001 job interview with then editor Howard Barrell, genuinely wondering what on earth I was doing there.
Those were tough times. The newspaper’s future was far from assured and there was a lack of direction and motivation in the company. But I was deeply aware and respectful of the newspaper’s great past. Unusual for the time, the company had a website that was as lauded as the print product. It was one of the first websites on the continent, established