JOHANNESBURG — Sir Terry Pratchett sadly passed away in 2015 but he’ll most likely be remembered as one of the greatest fantasy authors of his time. There’s a famous quote in his one novel I Shall Wear Midnight: “If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.” And as Biznews turns five, we are reminded of just this. In order to know where we are going, it’s important to know from where we came. This is the Biznews story so far… Thanks to everyone for all the support. – Stuart Lowman
Happy Birthday to you! That’s it. I really like singing happy birthday songs and everybody that we’re close to, I sing to them. But I guess today it would be a little bit ridiculous because I’d be singing here to myself and you’ll be, wherever you might be in the world listening to our 5th birthday story, but it is happy birthday and it is actually the right day.
I was having a look through during my quiet time this morning, Stu, I was having a look back and I actually wrote that the first full day of Biznews was on the 4th of August 2013, but actually we launched the site on the 3rd of August 2013 and I thought to myself, “You know if you are born at ten o’clock in the morning on the 17th of October then you don’t say, “Well, my first full day on earth was the 18th”. So, it is happy birthday to us this morning and happy birthday to everybody who’s joined us and I see there are many people who have actually come along and we’ll be doing the Biznews story and before we do anything further though my colleague Stuart Lowman, our Managing Editor in Johannesburg. Stu?
Thanks a lot Alec. Congrats on the five-year milestone, I think it’s fantastic. It’s always a good point in a business’s career, so that’s well done to everyone involved. Just quickly from an attendee’s point of view, can you just raise your hand? There’s a little button there that you can hear us, just so that we know there is sound coming through to you. Oh, there we go, I see some hands coming, that’s excellent thanks a lot and obviously, we want to keep it very interactive. So please, there’s a little question dropdown menu on the right-hand control panel. You can put a question or even a comment in there, it’s all good. I’ll just interrupt Alec as he goes through things as we normally do just to keep it very fun and interactive. I think we’re ready to go, Alec.
Yes, it had better be a bit of fun because why else have a birthday celebration? It’s really good to be able to have members or our community with us today to celebrate what is an extraordinary day for us and of course, Stu isn’t that funny? We’ve just lost the PowerPoint presentation. You know it’s funny how this happened last time as well. The PowerPoint presentation during our last webinar was clicked off. Now, I do pay Microsoft every month or at least once a year for their system, so it isn’t a question of us not paying our licences or something but anyway, we’ll pick it up in a moment. There shouldn’t be a problem there.
I mentioned earlier, it is our actual birthday today, the actual birthday of Biznews. It all started out in a rather strange way and I suppose what you can…where you can really begin it and Stu, you’re going to need to help me through here just to make sure that we’re on the right page… I just want to make sure that you can see the presentation because I have some lovely pics here. Let’s hope it does let us go. Can you see Stu?
Perfect Alec, ready to go.
Okay, well where it has to begin is the why. So why did Biznews begin in the first place? Why did we do this five years ago, today?
The starting point actually begins with this guy. Now his name’s Jannie Mouton. When he was fired just before he turned 50 Jannie went into a difficult period in his life and he’s always remembered it and he’s also remembered the people who were around there and he passes on his genius, I guess, to those who go through similar circumstances and very shortly after I left Moneyweb, it wasn’t in the happiest circumstance. But I guess that’s the way these things happen when you start a business above your garage at home, build it for 15 years, and put everything into it. I didn’t take a salary for eight years for heaven’s sake, and it was a listed company.
When I left, I wasn’t very happy, Jannie phoned me up and he said, “You know just take time for yourself, do a little bit of writing, do a little bit of reading, and plan your future”. He said, “That’s exactly what I did”. He said he took a couple of months in fact and every morning he said he woke up and he would write down five things that he wanted to achieve in the rest of his life. It was fantastic to have him just to phone spontaneously like that and to say, “Alec, you can do it, boet”. I was just slightly into my fifties in fact and he was around the same age when he started PSG. It was wonderful, in fact, last week one of the top fund managers in Europe has put PSG – he only has ten companies in his portfolio around the whole world and he’s put PSG into his portfolio, so thank you to Jannie Mouton.
The other man who actually was part of the why was Warren Buffett. Now those of you who know my work will know that this is my hero. He’s an incredible human being. It’s not his wealth that I admire so much, but just his views on life and his big one that got me was, “Tap dance to work. Never work with people who churn your stomach, he says and tap dance every day and then work. You’ll never work a day in your life”, so that’s Warren Buffett.
Then the other man who had a big influence on the why is Clayton Christensen, the father of disruption, a deeply religious man. He’s a Mormon, a Harvard Business School professor and he was rated number one in the two most recent analyses of the best business brands in the world. He’s actually fallen down to number two, so he didn’t make it three in a row, but Clay Christensen – I had as you can see here – the privilege of interviewing him. I met him in Davos; I spent a little bit of time with him. Jeanette and I went to a session with him and his wife and I remember reading and listening to what he has to teach and he says, “If you’re going to do something… If you’re going to create a business try to be the best in the world at something”. It might just be plumbing in Newcastle or it could be as grandiose as Jeff Bezos’ view, but for me that was the big thing that stuck in my mind.
If you’re going to do something again be the best in something. It was quite difficult at this stage because I was also getting many people who said – there’s a picture of me in the house that we were renting right there. What had happened was, we were on the farm in Mooi River, there had been a problem with the telephone lines in the farm, and they were taken away.
I came back to Moneyweb in Johannesburg, I’d been working remotely and after seven months we were renting this house for a year and after seven months things didn’t work out too well with the company that had acquired control and then here I was in this little room and did exactly what Jannie Mouton told me to do, spent every morning, a couple of hours just working out the future, so thanks to Jannie for that.
Next step was to go to our very good friends, the Swanepoel’s, Bernard and Tracey. On the left is Bernhard on his 50th birthday. I’ll tell you what good friends they are. They came with us to go and watch the Kentucky Derby in the United States for his 50th birthday and he really isn’t keen on horseracing and then Tracey and Jeanette on the right-hand side all dressed up for the Kentucky Derby.
What the Swanepoel’s do or indeed, what Tracey does; she has a company called “Thinkspiration” and “Thinkspiration” said, “You’re going to start this business or you’re in the early stages of starting this business, bring the team around and let’s brainstorm with you for a day”. Now Bernard is one of the great entrepreneurs in South Africa. He built a company called Harmony from zero to the fifth-biggest gold producer in the world. He’s very much below the radar now in the work that he does. He does have the Mining Indaba once a year, but Bernard and Tracey then spent the day with our little team and we went through and eventually we got to the why. Along the road we knew what we wanted, we wanted to be iconoclastic, for instance.
As you can see there, entrepreneurial, reader-centric, well, what that meant was customer-focused I suppose, and community-focused. We’re learning, ever-learning and we still have those guidelines today, and we ended up with the why.
So, why is Biznews around? Why would it be created? Well, five years ago it was to promote free enterprise in South Africa by supporting democracy and attacking corruption. We thought we could do that better than anybody else on earth. Maybe we couldn’t, but at least that was something that we felt that we could do better than anyone else.
So the who and this is always the cornerstone, the rock and there she is, my Jeanette, the glue of Biznews. She’s the one who continues to push us forward to tell us the dream to bring the team together to make sure that we coagulate because we are a remote company and she’s done a lot of work in that and Jeanette is well, most wives I guess would’ve said, “Go and get a job” and I had many opportunities once I left Moneyweb to go and work for somebody, but she said, “No, follow your dreams” and we did.
Justin, our nephew, it was very much a family affair to begin with. I’m sure if Justin’s watching this he’ll be a little embarrassed by those pictures with him and his wife Jessica at one of our birthday or Christmas parties, whatever it was of celebration, but Justin is a marine biologist. He was on his way to the United States.
I’d just started fiddling around with the website and Justin then came and joined us and taught himself how to build the site and that’s really where it came from and just to complete the family affair there’s my daughter Caitlin who worked for us for a period of time and you can see the very remote situation.
We started off in Houghton in our home and of course the chairman and the vice chairman of the company, Margot as you can see; she’s our jack russell and with the longer hair, the American version, (if any of you have seen Eddie, he’s in Frasier); Eddie is the jack russell there, the American type. Then of course, Charlie who you’ll see on the bottom right-hand side, the ever-present double. In fact, Charlie’s sitting in the room here. So if the postman happens to knock and somebody starts barking it won’t be me.
Then as we grew and developed, here’s you, Stu. Do you like that picture?
Yes, it doesn’t look too bad, Alec, in the playroom, it’s all good and my trusted partner in crime, the cat there.
What’s the cat’s name?
Yossie.
Yossie, not…?
No, he’s good for company.
I can see and that’s really what it’s about isn’t it, Stu? We work from home, we have other priorities. You can see in the background there Stu’s two youngsters get top priority in his life, but I see you have a nice notebook there with our quadrants, what to do today, top right-hand side, and so on. So there are many things that we’ve developed over the time that kind of worked for all of us.
It’s great Alec, I think it’s that balance as well that’s much-needed in today’s world. You know, trying to bring the two worlds together rather than keeping them very separate. Therefore, I think it’s very important and it works well for us.
They wouldn’t really go for us at Silicon Valley or in Wall Street Bank where they want you to intern. They want you to work 23 out of 24 hours. That’s kind of not what we do but we love what we do. We tap-dance to work every day and that’s what it’s about.
Then Lindi who’s on the webinar today is Stuart’s right-hand and she works from her home as well and that’s here setup where she is. Lindi’s been with us three years now, Stu.
Yes, Alec, she’s celebrated her third-year anniversary at the beginning of the month, the 1st of August, so it’s a double celebration for us.
What is interesting is, although Stuart was at CNBC and at Bloomberg and we got to know each other there, and Lindi worked with me at MoneyWeb, and when the finances allowed Lindi came across and is now a very key and very happy member of our team.
There unfortunately is the photograph that we have of our team in the early days, Justin, Stuart’s next. Stuart, you actually look respectable there compared with the rest of us. There’s Lindi and Rowan and Jeanette looks like she’s a well, we won’t say it, but she could be a showgirl, I suppose it’s a polite way to put it. Rowan is an entrepreneur, he worked with us for a few years, he’s now gone back into his entrepreneurial ways, but he was very instrumental in developing and helping us to develop Biznews. He’s the guy with the dollar signs as you can see. He’s a real money guy, Stu? It makes the rest of us kind of work for the love.
Oh for sure Alec. As a commercial manager you know, they’re all good.
Yes, very much that – but we’re getting to learn and we know where we’re going. Justin also is following his own dream as a marine biologist. He’s now in Cape Town with Jessica. Jessica’s an investment analyst. In fact, I think North Star are the fortunate people to be able to snap her up and Justin runs a little tourism business where he takes bespoke tours out to the Cape Point and around the Cape Peninsula and as a marine biologist, I promise you, you can’t get a better tour, so that’s our nephew Justin Blake.
Right from their first day just about, Jackie Cameron in fact (I was looking back and you’ll see it later) … Jackie Cameron reminded me recently that we have worked together for 18 years. Jackie was a core part of the Moneyweb team and she was a core part of the Biznews team from day one. She lives in Stirling Scotland, so it shows you the benefit of a remote business is that you can have your colleagues all over the world. On the bottom, right-hand side is their new B&B that Jackie and Adrian have started in Scotland – also entrepreneurial.
We love our people to be entrepreneurs to find ways of expanding their situation and there’s another long-time colleague of mine, Felicity Duncan.
Felicity was a Fulbright scholar who spent two years as a consequence of that in Columbia in the United States. As you can see there, at the top there, Felicity Jane Duncan. University of Pennsylvania is where she qualified for one of the many degrees that she has and just an absolute star who was with us right from the beginning. Now what happened was, both Jackie and Felicity helped out for virtually no remuneration in the early days of Biznews and they both had to go and get jobs because people have to live and then when we were in a situation where we could afford them or where the company could afford them they came back and worked with us and both of them are as you know, permanent residents in the business as is Gareth van Zyl, my colleague in Davos this year, as you can see on the top right-hand side with the big smile on his face.
We decided to come back from Davos on first class, did Gareth and I. We invested a little bit more and you can see why he’s happy about that, but he has his microphone in his hand and he does interviews from Johannesburg at his Parkview home, so remote is the name of the game.
And there’s one of our two fisherman-related colleagues, Chris Bateman, actually just works so he can catch fish as you can see on the top right-hand side with his daughter, fisherperson in training, but Chris is a wonderful member of our team based in Cape Town, as is Traci Klumper who looks after all of the transcriptions that we do and as you can see bottom right, Traci also being from the Cape (I guess anyone in the Cape has to fish), loves her fishing as well. So those are the members of our core team. We do then have lots of others who we interact with from time to time.
Joanne on the left-hand side and then I had to put that picture in of Gugu and Jeanette. I worked together with Gugu, well she worked with us at Moneyweb. We didn’t work together directly at Biznews, but Gugs and I worked on CNBC Africa together which was a good source of content for Biznews and of course she’s gone onto bigger and better things. She won a big award, very justifiably, this year for being the top business radio broadcaster and you can imagine how my heart pounds when I think about how proud I am of the little role that I had to play in her life as she now presents the business drive show on Kaya FM, it’s very worth listening to. Then somebody else we’re very proud of down the bottom, they guy with the hat on, Mo Maduna. Mo was sponsored by our friends, the Swanepoel’s.
He goes to the same church and Mo, although he has a degree from Wits, he wasn’t able to get a job, he wasn’t even able to get into the door, and so the Swannies said to us, “Would you bring Mo in? He’s quite keen to go into sports journalism which is a long way from where we are, but would you bring him into your team and see if you can work together?” and he did, he worked with us for a year. We loved Mo and he left us and got a job at Power FM I think, where he is a producer, so we’re very proud of Mo and the little bit of support we were able to give him as an intern within the business. There’s my friend, Bob Skinstad who lives pretty close by here in Weybridge and on the bottom right, you can see Miles Downward who’s our motoring editor. He does it part-time but is also an important member of the team. Okay, so those are the who, now the what.
Day one, well, full day one, August the 4th and as you can see, I managed to go back into the archives on the internet to find this. We were called biznewz.biz, that was the first URL we could get. It was only because of Justin’s continued searching that we managed to find Biznews.com, our current URL for sale at an exorbitant price from some Russians, but it was worth it. I guess if you were biznewz.biz, it’s a bit difficult to find that all the while. But what is interesting about this, this is day one and as you can see it was pretty rough and ready, the website, but on day one, on the front page Robyn Louw who really has gone on to big things, she writes beautifully, she writes for us from time to time and she writes for Sporting Post in Cape Town focused on the racing industry. I’ve been trying to twist her arm to expand out of it, but no, she’s a lifer there and the second story I love.
Strate CEO Monica Singer explains why pioneering Uruguay is breaking so many moulds. She wrote for our very first edition did Monica and earlier in the week Gareth van Zyl, my colleague interviewed Monica Singer about her new life, her new world, so it just shows what goes around comes around and Monica’s having a lot of fun now.
That’s the second iteration. As you can see, that was in October 2013, so we started in August 2013, a few months later. Thanks to the very good offices of my friend Andrew Trench, who was at the time the investigations editor at News24 and his wife Gill Moodie. So Gill had this website, Grub Street. I loved the look of Grub Street and I love the work that Gill does. I always have been a big fan of hers. So I asked Gill if we could white-label because Justin and I were really struggling.
We managed to, by the way, get Biznews.com as you can see there, so we got the .com rather than the .biz, but we asked her if she could help us, if she could allow us to white label her site because I liked the design of it and she said well, of course we can and in fact, come and see Andrew, her husband. Andrew actually did a little bit of tech work on the backend, never charged us and worked with us and helped us to get off the ground. Take from that very rough and ready beginning to build this for us, while we could then learn more and more about WordPress. That’s Justin and I.
Justin who literally you know watched many hundred YouTube videos on WordPress and how to build a site etcetera and then eventually this is what happened, January 2014 nearly a year after – yes, what’s it, four months after we launched and a lot of work in it, this is what came up, Biznews.com. By this time, we had bought the URL from the Russians, so we were going to be pretty serious now. Justin had then learnt how to do this coding and I really liked what it was. Now I remember when we cracked 30 unique or 30 consecutive visitors, how delighted we were. I think it was because we had a story that Gareth Cliff kindly allowed us to republish and then we really hit the bigtime later on, but I’ll get into that in a moment.
The Biznews as we have it today, that’s the homepage as you can see.
We have data, if you click on the homepage on the market data section it’ll take you through to a long-time partner of ours, which is Ernie Alexander and his team at Profile Data and there it was.
When we finally cracked this huge number of 150, it was so important that we took a photograph of it. Now we got to 30 and that was a big day, then we moved on, took offices, and started getting together, we hit 150 and today I just had a look at this by comparison. This was early morning as you can see.
Our worm, as we call it is still rising; we were at 566 concurrences, so almost four times where we were when we thought we’d really made it back then. Biznews today is a sustainable business and primarily because of all the support we’ve had over the years from advertisers. BrightRock are just the best people. They started with us almost from day one, Suzanne Stevens, and her team and they’ve just stuck with us and they’ve supported us every time that we’ve knocked on her door and it’s made a lot of sense. They sponsor us going to Davos, which is a big part of our funding operation and also a big part of our contribution to our community. We’ve also had great support from FirstRand who like what we do. I’m particularly grateful to them for our Good Hope section.
I hope you look at that often, it’s to get good stories about South Africa. RMB, a very strong supporter of ours, Futuregrowth from day one almost, they were Michelle who’s the head of marketing and Andrew Canter, her boss, they’ve really been supportive, as have Standard Bank. I come back and often we do a webinar. We do a webinar once a month with Standard Bank and seminars with them, Sygnia, Magda; she was the first sponsor of our newsletter. In fact, I hadn’t done any advertising at that stage and in fact, that was one of our very first advertisers. BDO, Sable, Warwick, many names there that we’re very grateful to, Absa, who were helping us right from day one. These are big companies who saw maybe something in us that we might not have seen in those early days because what generally happens in media is that people wait for a year before they support you, but we got the support early on and it made all the difference.
Today the Premium section is helping us to be sustainable because advertising as it used to be in the past has been swallowed up by Google and Facebook. Now where we focus our advertising in the “free to air” section, which we’re going to keep free for everybody is through sponsored content, but then we also have a Premium section which we launched in November 2016 because without getting a subscription model you really are going to die. Media cannot survive without a subscription model. It was something I kicked against for many years, but we’re delighted and thank you very much to everybody who has come along and has joined our subscription model. I’m now writing a daily piece for Biznews Premium. It’s called “BN Confidential” or “Biznews Confidential” and I hope that you’ve enjoyed that.
Another part of Biznews Premium is “The Rational Perspective”. As you can see there, for the age of those podcasts that have now been published, if you haven’t been listening to them, please just listen to one or two and I’m sure you’ll be hooked. Once you get onto it the idea what you do is to subscribe so that when “The Rational Perspective” podcasts and they usually run to about 15 minutes or so, is published and I do at least two a week, that you’ll be able to get it on your phone and you can listen to it and really work hard at making great content there. The transcripts of “The Rational Perspective” are only on Biznews Premium, but the audio itself is available to all.
Then there’s my book, “How to Invest in the JSE”, another part of our early stages in 2016. I wrote this book on my hero Warren Buffett and it was a bestseller, would you believe, it sold 8,000 or 10,000 copies and you still can get it. It is also available in electronic form from Amazon.com. The whole idea there was to try to grow our market by writing about easy ways to invest and from that stemmed another partnership that’s very important to us with EasyEquities where you can invest in portfolios that we have there at a very low cost.
The big partnership though, as far as investing is concerned is with Standard Bank and we launched this portfolio, a global portfolio with Standard Bank Webtrader in December 2014. So just after a year of being around, Standard Bank said to us that they wanted to encourage South Africans to invest through Webtrader which is a fantastic platform that gives you access to stock exchanges all over the world. And Brett Duncan, my friend who runs online share trading for Standard Bank said, “Why don’t you put a portfolio together?” and I did, so we’ve been very lucky. We bought into Amazon.com as you can see at $327. It’s now sitting at $1,700 and you don’t have to be too clever to make a great return if you buy early into that kind of a stock. So we’ve been riding our winners and the annualised return of this portfolio in nearly four years that we’ve been around has been 36%. I hope that you are one of those who have been along for the ride from the outset.
Okay, so the how. How do we do these things?
Well, there’s a little apple, I have a much bigger one now on my desk, but one of the things we decided to do early on was to build a studio at home and to then use the studio to do interviews and this is the first setup of the studio. We actually built a soundproof area of my home in Houghton, which used to be a veranda and we set it up. It was quite a job.
There’s Justin, I think explaining to me again, which plugs I was supposed to be putting in where and Murphy’s law, the very first interview I had with this man, RW or Bill Johnson, who is a great intellect, a little tough on people I guess and of course what happened, we had a fantastic interview for half an hour and nothing came out.
So, I think Bill Johnson believes that I’m an idiot till the end of time. I did ask him if he would redo the interview, I was very brave at that point and I got the response you would expect from Bill Johnson, which was, “Hmmm, hmmm.”
Anyway, we then moved very shortly thereafter.
There we go, there’s our 35 on the screen at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and we took out offices there. It was a really scruffy part of the building. People who’d been there before had left it in a bad state. Essentially, it was just one big basement and Nicky Newton-King had this idea about building a media hub. We were the first takers; we built our own offices. It cost a lot of money for us to do that but we were very proud of our first permanent structures, if you like, at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and this was in 2014 and we built a beautiful studio. We had these television screens up on the wall, so you can see on the right-hand side, that was Google Analytics telling us we had 35 people on the website at that point in time and on the left was Biznews.com and this was early in 2014. So we had our site there, we had all this information; we had other websites on other TV screens, very professional. It looked like we were in the space age and we had some interesting people joining us.
One of the first people to come through was Michael Jordaan. You can see behind him, Marika Sboros, who also went off and did her own entrepreneurial thing afterwards. There she is sitting, Jeannette, unusual for her, having something to eat and there’s Marika who was a big part of our early days, she wrote some amazing stories about banting you might remember and also Tim Noakes, she was very close and then she did some great work on Oscar Pistorius. So it was very sad for us when Marika went off and started her own website and her own work, but you know she is a health journalist and a little bit off the Biznews base, but I’m sure that she feels that we did good things together and there’s Michael Jordaan, one of our first guests. You can see all the TV screens on the wall there. That was the hub of Biznews and there’s a picture of me, if you look very closely, almost like a ghost. That’s because Michael’s in the studio and those are the photographs being taken.
Then we had some really interesting people come through. Tim Modise was a colleague of ours. He’s now moved on to other things. He did the transformation section, a lot of interviews. There’s Mmusi Maimane, he did one I remember with Julius Malema who came into the office very quiet, and not the Malema you see in the places that he goes to stir up his supporters. There’s John Malden who has millions of people who subscribe to his news. He’s top right alongside Andy Andrews, a memorable interview. There’s Piet of course, Jannie’s son, Piet Mouton with Francois Gouws and then Moeletsi Mbeki one of our best listened to interviews, but there were many.
Here are some of the others, Gerrie Fourie. You can see some of Jeanette’s artwork on the wall there, Biznews Radio environment, we were looking at that as well and on the bottom-left Mr Khan one of the Dragon’s Den guys. He came into our office, I liked him a lot, and he did a very interesting interview with us. He packed houses when he came to South Africa. There’s Clem Sunter and of course my dear friend and former neighbour Nick Binedell, the man from GIBS.
There’s one of the nicer interviews that I did. It was with Steve Wozniack, the co-founder of Apple. I wonder what he’s thinking about today after Apple became the first company in the United States to break a trillion dollars in market capitalisation, he started the company with Steve Jobs.
We also did some interesting stuff where we could. Right from the beginning Jeanette and I decided that we would support, where we can, the growth and the building of South Africa. This is one of the engagements that we had with Crystal House in Cape Town. Crystal House in Cape Town and the Live Village with Titch and Joan Smith are definitely two of my charities – and then I have to add possibilities, Louis van Rhyn’s P4P, “Partners for Possibility” as the three organisations, if I was a gazillionaire they are the ones that I would be supporting. They’re wonderful people doing amazing things in South Africa and as you can see Jeanette quite enjoyed these two youngsters.
Then we had a birthday party at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In the big picture there, our late dear friend, Matthew Lester who was a great supporter of ours from day one. Matthew moved his column across from the Sunday Times where he had a huge readership to write for us, so he wrote for Biznews for free for years and when he passed away it was a dear friend and a very sad moment for us and you can see there we celebrate our birthdays. That time we did it in person with colleagues. Of course, now I’m sitting in London, so it’s not that easy, but there’s a lovely cake that was made for us specially by Isaac the then manager of Fournos in Rosebank where we had quite a lot of board meetings.
So, lots of old friends, lots of old memories. I just put the picture on the top left-hand side in because those are our very first advertiser; Craig Gradidge decided to take a chance on us when we started off right in the beginning. He took a R5,000 a month advert for his brokerage and Craig, I’ll always be grateful to you and then Antony Wilmott next to him, who was our second advertiser and Antony’s Singular Systems was a long-standing supporter of ours well, for many years until the Johannesburg Stock Exchange decided that the over-the-counter exchange that Singular Systems was running was no longer relevant and it had to be closed down. That was the end of our advertising support there, but Antony is a dear friend and really supportive. Down in the middle, my former producer from Moneyweb, Janine Bester, one and only and then on the top right-hand side my good friend Joel Smith with Jenny Briggs. Jenny is the doyenne of online advertising in South Africa. She’s been at it pretty much as long as I have and then bottom-left, the two Kennedy’s, Cal and Byron. Byron who’s the spokesperson for Vodacom now and we worked together when he had his very first job out of school and of course then we moved on to doing quite a lot of work with CNBC including co-hosting.
There we have 2014 in Davos with Gugu, the self-same Gugu who’s now very famous for the work that she’s done on radio, loved this time. You can see it was a little bit cold there and Davos is a place where you get to see lots of people.
Bottom left, I like that picture particularly with Maria Ramos, not just because it makes me look tall, I think anybody does next to Maria, but because Maria was also somebody, or Absa, her company that supported us in the early days as did Hendrik du Toit there in the top left, the new CEO at Investec and there’s Chris Becker, top right who is an inspiration to anyone in media in South Africa with Jeanette of course and Laurie Dippenaar, a dear friend with Fanie Titi, who at the time was chairman of Investec.
You meet interesting people in Davos and an interesting point there of Davos, something that really got me, you can see we made it finally onto the big board there through Tweeting or whatever it was, I think my Twitter account was quite busy, but I had to take this picture because it’s, “Editor and publisher of…” and then they didn’t put Biznews. They put our URL or some URL that they’d discovered there, whereas underneath you see the New York Times and then top right you see Henry Blodgett from Business Insider, but oh, whatever. Today they do know that Biznews is around and alive and there’ve been many wonderful events that’s the most recent one where Cyril Ramaphosa made such a good impression in Davos.
The reason we go there is because of BrightRock and their strong support over the years and there’s another one of the people I admire hugely, Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Sapiens” and “Homodeus”, two of the very best books you will ever read.
Okay, so we move on then to the next big stage in Biznews’ life and that was the globalisation. You’ll recall that around about this time, this is late 2015 we had quite a lot of chaos going in South Africa, given our why, which is to support free enterprise by supporting democracy and attacking corruption.We were being attacked quite a lot; social media, even lawyers were coming at us, the Gupta lawyers. That’s another story, but at the end of 2015 we had Nenegate and early 2016 en route to Davos I did a number of presentations in London. Jeanette was very proud of me and hence you can see those nice pictures and then in May 2016 we moved to London and of course one of the first pictures we had to take with our icon Nelson Mandela and you can walk by.
That’s Caitlin and Jeanette. You can walk past his bust and remind you about home pretty often, it’s on the south bank between Waterloo Station where most South Africans go in. Most South Africans stay in the South West slice of London.
Then we went straight into Zuma Must Fall issues. This is Nerine who is the proprietor of High Timber, a South African restaurant owned by the Jordan’s at Jordan Wine. Anne Richards and Richard Stovin-Bradford, who’s a South African journalist who was working at the Sunday Times years gone by and worked for the Financial Times of London for some years as well. They were all part of the whole Zuma Must Fall issue.
Then we had this huge event at Trafalgar Square where people were very unhappy. This is, remember post Nenegate, post the firing of Pravin Gordhan, when corruption was just out of control in South Africa and they gave me a chance to have my say. So from being scrupulously independent after what the Guptas did to us, I guess I felt well, we had an opportunity then to at least say something back.
Here’s a man who supported the movement or the anti-corruption movement in a huge way, Paul O’Sullivan, the forensic investigator. I got to see Paul pretty much every time he came to London.
Then we moved on to join the – well, we didn’t join this time because we had the Zuma Must Fall movement, but we went to observe the Bell Pottinger, that’s Will van der Merwe from the DA abroad team protest in Holborn. That is right in the middle of a very busy area in London, a bunch of South Africans got together to say Bell Pottinger Must Fall and they did. It didn’t take them very long.
Another highlight about our time here in London was an event we had at the Institute of Directors. It’s so expensive, we had to charge I think it was 70 pounds a ticket and we had nearly 150 people there and we still lost money, but anyway, it was worth it because FW de Klerk is a man whose role in the new South Africa has been significantly underplayed and it was a great event for us, some top people in the London South African community came along to it.
Here’s somebody else that I’ve got to know in the UK, Lord Peter Hain. As a boy, I remember he was the man who was the best-known anti-Apartheid campaigner amongst the general population because he was the man who instigated the sports boycott. It was only afterwards I got to know him and his story that I realised that Peter, although born in Africa, not in South Africa grew up in South Africa and his family was chased out of the country because of their anti-Apartheid beliefs. I met him at the House of Lords, he showed me around, which was really a highlight, but another highlight on the left-hand side is the toilet in the House of Lords and look what name you see there, Servest, Kenton Fine’s company is everywhere in the UK as are so many other South African businesses, but I thought I had to take a picture of that in the House of Lords, the South African business that is looking after it.
I have met many of the interesting South Africans who come through. Only recently I hooked up with Magda Wierzycka to do an interview with her.
Here are some of the others, top left Geoff Paterson who very sadly passed away not long after this. He’s the creator of Fourex, which as you can see from that machine, it’s like an ATM machine that you put dollars or pounds or any currency and you get dollars, pounds and euros out, depending on which one you want. It is a fantastic business and Geoff thought it all up. Sadly, he’s not here to watch it. Bottom left is, those of you who know my career will know that the late Simon Marais was a huge influence in my life as well and this is Dan Brocklebank from Orbis. He’s one of the first interviews I had with a British guy in London who said Brexit was a good idea, which of course was very much a minority view, but I guess that’s what Simon would’ve thought as well.
Next to him, Mick Davis who is a South African, who is the Chief Executive of the Conservative Party, the ruling political party here, from Xstrata and there was an interesting guy on the top right Yusuf Kadji who’s been accused of cigarette counterfeiting, smuggling and all kinds of heinous things. He met with me in London, wanted to meet with me, tell us his side of the story. Unfortunately, the interview that he did was so liabless that I haven’t been able to publish any part of it. I’m still trying to get confirmation of even the most basic stuff from BAT, but anyway, he said, “Look, yes, sure I was naughty, but I wasn’t half as naughty as other people were”. Anyway, this was all at the Gupta era, but a fascinating interview and it seems almost like when people come to London, they do talk more.
There’s another opportunity you get only here, was to sit down with the CEO and the CFO of Naspers.
And Theo Botha on the right-hand side popped in to let me know he was going off to Anglo American. There’s Barry van Zyl who’s a musician, the drummer for Johnny Clegg who I got to know quite well here as well and then various people who come through.
On the bottom right-hand side, in fact, our best listened to podcast, Pieter Dirk Uys. We had the privilege of seeing his last performance here of his one-man show. In the middle, Geoff Johnson who’s the President of the Tenth Province, if there were to be a president here. He brings all the South Africans together and with him Ryk Neethling, a fine man and of course Garth Jaffert on the left-hand side, so just some interesting people.
Oh, and Mick Davis again, I get to see interesting offices as well, went into his office and on the right-hand side that’s Sir Robin Renwick. As you can see he agrees on the Einstein principle that a clean office is not the way it’s supposed to be, you’re supposed to have lots of stuff on your desk.
And here are a couple of the South African companies in London who’ve been very supportive, Bernard Kantor of Investec on the right-hand side, a dear friend of many years and Jarred Khan who in fact, used to be – he and Deon Gouws on the right-hand side, Jarred Khan used to be one of my market commentators in the early days of Moneyweb Radio and it’s interesting to see who you bump into in London from South Africa. I hope you’ve enjoyed the slideshow. We have a few minutes for a few questions Stu. I’m not sure if you have any that have come through, but I hope you enjoyed that little presentation of where we’ve come from and where we’re going to go to, I guess.
Thanks Alec. Just a quick question from Johan; he says, “What is the secret of success?” Not sure that’s very easy to answer, but…
I think the secret of success is what those guys taught me right in the beginning and that is, “Tap dance to work, love what you’re doing and you don’t work a day in your life” and then keep balance. Remember that the old age homes are full of – well, not old age homes, there are many grumpy unhappy old people who don’t have their families around them, so it really is your family, developing relationships with your family and really prioritising. That’s what I would say. I’m sure that – Stu, what do you think it is?
I think that sums it up quite nicely. It shouldn’t be seen as work, what you do. You’ve got to get into it and just love it I think and as you said I like to tap dance to work every day, I think that’s the way. Although, what do we do, we tap dance down the hallway to the other room in the house you know – and I think that actually plays into loving what we do because you miss out on one of the biggest frustrations in life which is traffic. You only deal with that when you have to go to a meeting, so it takes one of those roadblocks out of the way, which helps a hell of a lot. I think it’s all these little things that really help make it fun.
Yes, have a why in what you do. You know for us we need that. If you have a why, well then be courageous and stick to it. Always speak truth to power for instance. Never forget that as long as there’s life there’s hope. I mean these were, at one stage with the newsletter, I remember putting hope springs at the end because things looked so gloomy in South Africa and I’d get these emails, those flames from people who told me how dare I suggest that things are ever going to get better, we’re going Zimbabwe’s way, in fact, it’s going to be worse. It just shows, just believe because tomorrow is better, you know there’s a grand plan in the universe, we aren’t just here, just sommer so and that grand plan, get in the flow, have fun, enjoy what you do. You’re not going to work a day in your life and actually you have a life of love and service and what could be better?
Thanks Alec. There’s a question from Michelle. She congratulates us on the five years but just wants to get your take on expropriation without compensation and the potential impact on the SA economy and investor confidence.
Yes, you kind of scratch your head about that one. It does go back to the ANC elected conference where lots of things happen. In fact, I’m going to apply my mind to try to pull it all together, but it is something that I just have to believe that Cyril Ramaphosa’s going to handle this responsibly as the president. If it gets out of control, if it becomes a wildfire then there’s not a hell of a lot even a president can do in a situation like that and of course we know what happened in Zimbabwe. We also know that if you have this socialist kind of approach where the land just gets grabbed by the state ala Venezuela you really do get yourself into more than just a pickle. But there too many clever people in South Africa, there’s too much goodwill, there’s deep goodwill between the races even though we had Bell Pottinger trying to stir nonsense there.
There is a little bit of a hangover, it’s a little bit of a babalas if you think of the Bell Pottinger era and I was interested to see that it looks like Bell Pottinger 2 in Zimbabwe and what’s been going on there at the moment. Let’s just hope that they manage to settle things down there, but as far as South Africa’s concerned expropriation without compensation is an issue that is going to worry everybody. The ANC is saying that, or Cyril Ramaphosa’s saying that he wants clarity and as a consequence of clarity, he could then kick his investment phase into play, but I think the overall thing about all of this, the overall story here is that when you have an expanding cake, people don’t worry about nonsense. When I say nonsense, like they don’t compete for resources so aggressively because they know that cake is expanding and that’s Ramaphosa’s challenge.
Zuma couldn’t care. He suffered usually from the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is where you don’t really understand and you don’t want to understand and you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t want to know what you don’t know, whereas Ramaphosa’s a far different kettle of fish. He knows that to get the country back on its feet, you have to grow the economy. Once the economy grows lots of these things that are so fractious at the moment will fall into place and will become far less of a problem, but while the economy and remember this is an economy that in 2011 was at $427 billion and went down to below $300 billion in 2016, so that’s the reality of what you’re dealing with. I describe it the other way because I did the calculations. You have a pie that we used to have a bigger slice of and of course, now the slice is smaller, so let’s just remember all of that.
Thanks Alec, here’s a nice one from Milan. He says, “Are true leaders born or developed?”
I think environment, I think developed. I think that you can win the lottery of life and have great genes and be put into the wrong environment and start becoming self-absorbed, selfish, and egotistical. As a consequence of that you’re not a leader; you’re not a leader’s backside. Leaders are selfless, they’re a service; they’re forever learning, they contribute. My friend Bob Skinstad says that you have two types of people, you have the givers and the takers and leaders are givers, they’re not takers. So I guess if you’re in an environment where everybody around you is taking it would be very hard to be a good leader.
Thanks Alec. Here’s an interesting one on the Belvedere Scheme. Markus wants to know what’s happened from you being sued for exposing Cobus Kellerman.
Well, it is interesting that whole thing. Kellerman has issued summons against us, we’ve defended, but I think what really puts it into perspective is Naspers also defended, CNBC is also defending, and so Tisa Blackstar is defending. So, it’s not just us, it’s not just Biznews; it’s a whole range of media companies who are defending. We have lots of information on that. I don’t know if these things are sub-judice now and you can’t write them or you can’t publish them or say anything about it, but what I can say is we have great lawyers and I have to thank Dario and Dean Toon and the team and Webber Wentzel. They are amazing and to also engage a little bit with Willem de Klerk who represented Jacques Pauw in his fight against the Zumas. He’s representing Naspers, so you have some very good guys on our side of the fence if you like, so we look forward to it.
There are some very interesting, great questions we’d like to ask and I think David Marchant, the chap from OffshoreAlert who actually exposed the whole thing, remember that’s what happened, OffshoreAlert did the exposure. We then saw there were South Africans involved and we reported it. So it’s a bit like the Guptas you know they put those London lawyers’ Shillings on us after we reported what other people said, because what do we do at Biznews? We curate content and we contextualise it, so we take stuff that might otherwise be missed, we use our knowledge as editors and our experience to take the best of it, contextualise it and share it with you as well as doing quite a lot of original content, but that’s really what our strength is, to try to be your guide toward what you really need to know because there is so much information and there’s a flood of information every day, but there’s a real scarcity of wisdom. Anyway, David Marchant is really keen to get Kellerman on the stand, so who knows. We’ll see what happens there, it’s his move.
Thanks Alec. I think you did answer this question in the presentation. Mike just wants to know why the move to the UK?
The move to the UK came at a time that there was a lot of pressure on us personally. We really, being an independent company and I own the company 100%, you are seen as a bit of a soft target, and when you look at the #GuptaLeaks and the emails that came out of that, it was very specific that they attacked Biznews and myself. They were even getting other journalists to, or trying to encourage other journalists to investigate me and write bad stuff about me.
I think thankfully it was only the Gupta papers and I think one other group that said that we were the fake news kings and then we had this stuff from social media etc. So you had that on the one hand and on the other hand you had South Africans globalising, South Africa’s part of the world. You know we’re 0.3% of global GDP, so surely we need to find out what’s going on elsewhere because if we can get the best of elsewhere we can bring it back home and make a difference. So that was really what we felt, was that we could serve our community best and in the work that we’re doing by being in a location like the UK where of course you’re freer in what you can produce on the one hand and secondly you can bring back to the homeland and to your community, the importance of what’s happening globally.
Thanks Alec, and I think the important point there is also, you sometimes get caught up in the noise if you’re in South Africa, so it’s nice to have that outside viewpoint on what’s happening because you’ve got the experience and history of what SA’s about as well, so I think it’s very important from that content point of view.
Yes. Stuart, just tell me. Are we okay with the slideshow? Has the slideshow gone or are we…?
No, the slide show is still there. It’s just where you leave it. There’s nothing wrong with the slideshow. It’s just wherever you leave it, it sticks there.
Okay, I’ll just click through it as we talk.
I think someone has to click through it continually Alec, and then we’ll have a slideshow. There’s a question from Stephen. Do you find the quality of life better or worse in the UK compared to SA and when (or if) you retire, would you come back to settle in South Africa?
That’s an interesting question. I think it’s different. We in South Africa are used to lots of space. We’re used to amazing people. Everybody you meet in South Africa has a smile on their face. I think, it probably has to do with the fact that we have lovely weather. There’s a generosity of spirit and soul in South Africa that is unmatched anywhere in the world. The people in the UK are more cerebral. When you see the television stations here, they have quiz shows that ask questions that are very hard to answer. It’s an old democracy/young democracy kind of difference. In a young democracy, the opportunities are greater. The risks are higher. In an old democracy, it’s highly-competitive. Remember, there are 65-million people in the UK. A lot of them come from really, really good universities. It’s not just Oxford and Cambridge.
They have great universities here – highly skilled, so the skills shortages in the UK are kind of non-existent whereas in South Africa, we know that the skills shortages are extreme. There are different benefits but I will tell you one thing. I love South Africa. We are South Africans. It’s out tribe. We just are what we are and I suppose we are products of our environment. We engage most of our friends here and every South African you meet in the UK or elsewhere will tell you this. Most of our friends are South Africans. Are we going to come home? I think South Africa will always be home but it doesn’t mean that you have to live there for it to be home and I think that’s the important thing. Are you making a difference? Are you serving the country? Would you retire in Greece, Corfu, the United States, Venezuela, Argentina, or South Africa?
I guess it depends on the circumstances at the time. But I’m loving it here. It’s a whole new adventure and we’re able to do better work than ever, so I like it but you can’t say it’s better. It’s not better or worse. It’s different.
Excellent, thanks Alec. I’ve just got one last question from Jarryd. He says, “Your take on the recent BRICS conference: anything positive to take out of it?”
Yes. Lots of positives to take out of it. Just the mere fact that people are talking… The mere fact that you have – on the one side of the Atlantic – a country that’s been dragged in a direction of protectionism, hate, bile, and anger and at BRICS, you have the leader of that group saying, “Let’s engage. Let’s find out more about each other. Let’s understand each other better by seeing each other.” The more you have that in the world, the better it’s got to be. I don’t’ think that the big boss, when he put us on earth, “Well, you go and live in that corner and you hate everybody else who doesn’t live in your corner. If you look different to somebody else (and these are very cosmetic) …” Remember, our DNA is about 99.7% identical. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of the world you come from. We’re all human beings. Originally we all came from Africa. So let’s just find out more about this.
I find this fascinating. I find different cultures fascinating. I find people amazing. We’re all spirits, having a human experience in different ways. So when you see that intention, that goal, and that aim is being promoted as something like BRICS is doing… BRICS is not ‘we live in our little world (the 5 countries) and we don’t want anything to do with anyone else”. BRICS is all about expansion. It’s all about generosity of spirit, really whereas there are parts of the world that aren’t really like that at the moment. So yes. Bravo.
Thanks, Alec. Just a thing. I’m not sure if Mr Koch is your old maths teacher. There’s no question, just congratulations to Alec saying, “Well done”.
Now, I’ve got to tell Mr Koch that my darling wife often talks about him. How’s this? She wrote on the board. You come tell the story here. Jet’s right here. Oh, she won’t. No, Jet’s running out. She says that she really struggled with maths at school but she sat at the front of the class, especially when Mr Koch was there. Mr Koch was also our cricket teacher. The day that he walked in at the beginning of the year, he wrote on the board ‘I love maths’. Well, Jeanette never forgot that. She keeps reminding people of that. She says, “I passed maths at the end of that year and Mr Koch helped me to get…I think the only distinction I got was from his class.” So thank you Mr Koch and I’m delighted that you took the trouble to listen in on how things are going here and actually remembered that we were in your class. My word! She was Jeanette Clark in those days, but I think you could recognise her still.
Thanks, Alec. I think that was a lovely little venture back into the history of the company. I think it’s good for everyone to see where we’ve come from to where we are now. It’s great.
Thanks Stu. And for the role that you’ve played, and Jackie, Felicity, Justin (who’s no longer with us), Lindi and everybody – even the dogs… Everybody who’s played this role (my Caitlin in the Biznews story). We’re 5 years old today. We are expecting to be around for a long, long time to come and to continue with the path of tap-dancing to work, and love and service. Thank you to everybody (and there are lots of people who actually came into this) to join us today live, and I’m sure lots more people will listen to the recording. It has been our pleasure to serve and seriously, that’s what it’s about. That’s what we love doing. So Happy Birthday to us. Happy Birthday to you. It is a moment for gratitude and we really are grateful. Thank you. Cheerio.
Comments from the Biznews community
Congratulations to you and all your team on an important milestone. Sincere thanks for your courage and “testicular fortitude” in the fight against corruption that you have taken on for all of us South Africans. I am really grateful for people like yourself, Magda Wierzycka, Iraj Abedian, Wayne Duvenage and the many others who are effectively guardians for the rest of us. – Garth Smith
Thanks for the opportunity to hear the Biznews story, much appreciated. Well done on these past five years and may there be many more productive and “making a difference” years ahead. – Bruce Trebble
