Q&A sessions: Where are the Zuckerbergs of South Africa?

Haroon Meer, the founder of the multimillion-dollar tech startup Thinkst, speaks to Athandiwe Saba about international acclaim, the need for more South African tech builders and taking care of his four-year-old at his home office while his wife sleeps in . . .

How did you get into the tech world? Have you always been interested in it?

I was pretty lucky because the internet took off just as I hit university. The web browser as we know it was born around the time I was in university.
One of the benefits that it gave us is that nobody could really claim more expertise than us. If you went into law or accounting, you’d have someone who has 40 years of experience on you.

But when we started with simple stuff, like writing web pages, everyone was just writing web pages for the last five minutes. Nobody had more experience because it just wasn’t around that long. So it allowed kids to kind of get more credit than we usually would in traditional industries.

How was learning this whole new world in university for you?

So in truth, I didn’t really do university right. I didn’t pay attention. I went to the University of Natal, and I started doing a BSc in computer science. But while I was there, I did just about everything else. But then I also took a job at the university working in the computer department which I worked in for about 10 years, while I got my degree. At the time, I was just enjoying playing on this new thing and learning about it. And I played a lot of pool. I played a lot of soccer. But I did get the job done.

I guess that kind of enjoyment also opens up your creative side?

It was certainly a period when I got to learn a lot. I’m not a huge fan of how we do our degrees in general. I think that our universities, particularly our computer science departments, should be held accountable because we don’t have Google and Microsoft and LinkedIn popping out left, right and centre, while foreign universities do. There needs to be a genuine reckoning that asks, “Why is this?”

Our students are as smart as students anywhere else. We have the same computers. Why is Mark Zuckerberg going to Harvard and building Facebook, Sergey Brin goes to Stanford and builds Google? But nobody in South Africa leaves the university and builds these big tech companies. 

I think that our universities are doing these curriculums wrong. For the most part, I just took my learning where I could get it and, at the time, it was by getting a job at the university.

Is it a hands-on interaction that is needed?

I think hands-on is one part of it. I think one of the missing pieces is locally, students don’t have that many case studies. So if you are at Harvard, you look around and you know that Zuckerberg sat in that seat and started Facebook the year before you. In South Africa, the best we want is to get a job at one of the accounting firms or get a job at Dimension Data, installing other people’s software. So locally, our students just don’t have the same aspiration. They don’t look at stuff and go, “Hey, we can build those companies”. There’s a whole missing ecosystem in South Africa for building software companies. And I think the universities are part of the problem.

What about the lack of resources argument?

You could, at a stretch, say that we don’t have the same resources. But that’s not true. Our students use the same MacBooks and connect to the same Amazon Web Services. We just somehow become consumers of technology instead of producers of technology.

It’s a little bit flighty, but one of the reasons we’ve never moved our company overseas is that we want to be one example for people to see that yes, you can build software companies in South Africa that service the world.

Speaking about the consumers and the builders, you then decided to be a builder. After working at a penetration testing company, you created Thinkst, the company behind the awesome Thinkst Canary.

So in terms of the product, we spent years breaking into companies’ networks. Almost every time we did it — we were pretty good at what we did — but almost nobody ever knew that we broke into the networks until we handed in the report. The average time before a company knows they’ve been broken into is about 300 days, which means that attackers break into networks and stay there forever. Only after they have stolen the crown jewels do companies know they have been broken into. 

So Canary was our take that says companies should really know about this compromise sooner. And so, in super simple terms, the name comes from the canary in the coal mine.

So what canaries are, are the digital equivalent on your networks. You put these things into your network and if you are breached, the attacker touches these things, you get a warning that says, “Hey, listen, this thing that nobody should have touched, somebody just touched.” 

What is an average morning like for someone running a multimillion-dollar company?

I’ve got a four-year-old, so I get up from the time she was born and I spend my morning with her. It gives her mother a chance to sleep in. I take her till about 10am.

And during that time, as she gets older, I can reply to quick emails or stuff like that. And I’ve been working from home for a really long time. So a stroll into the study, and my day starts.

But at this point, making more than $11-million a year, there must be some serious company things you have to deal with. How has the shift been for you from tech and innovation to management?

It’s really interesting. So internationally, there’s this guy called Paul Graham, who started one of the early tech incubators and really has written lots of essays on why people should do startups and how startups work.

One of his core messages was for people to figure out that all the business stuff is figure-outable. People seem to overthink that stuff, where they think that stuff is much harder and much more complicated than it is.

Mostly, that kind of stuff figures itself out. There’s a lot of old thinking that says, “it’s not that easy”.

Sure, 20 years ago there wasn’t a lot of documentation on it [how to run a business] online. But today, there’s documentation everywhere. All of that stuff is a lot less hard than it looks. Most people should just give it a shot.

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