A rough history of the web industry in South Africa

A personal account of how the web industry got started, and some of the colourful characters who populated it

I guess it’s starting to feel like I’m running out of time to write this piece. I’m getting, well, old, frankly. The next web generation has arrived and is hard at work creating all kinds of cool stuff, and its history will be ready to be told. So I’m going to put a peg in the ground with this brief, rough memoir.

Memories are personal things, and I’m going to make this a very personal piece because that’s how I can tell the story best. I will leave out many people that I don’t know or never met, and probably bore many readers with names and places that mean nothing to them. But enough with disclaimers …

In late 1994, I was finishing up my honours degree in philosophy at Wits University, and stressing about what exactly I was meant to be doing with my life. Appropriate, you may say, for a philosophy student. But after four years of asking impossible questions, I was ready for one that had an answer.

That answer came — partially — from a group of friends studying electrical engineering. Suddenly there was talk of this thing called the internet. Within a few months, I was FTPing and telnetting and gophering and MUDing and IRCing my way all over the world. I remember a particular, though childish, thrill of FTPing to the doorstep of some CIA FTP server at one point, and really feeling that I was some kind of über-geek.

At university with me, and working on the student newspaper, was a fine-arts student named Michele Sohn. She was exploring computer-manipulated photographs in her final-year fine-arts project, and, as a result, was invited to exhibit in the upcoming Johannesburg Biennale — a prestigious art exhibition to be held at the newly completed MuseuMAfricA in Newtown.

As part of her exhibit, Michele talked Ronnie Apteker — whom she knew from her student work at a flea market and who had recently founded a little company called The Internet Solution — into giving her a 64K internet link to her exhibition. She also talked the guys from a new internet café in Yeoville called “The Milky Way Internet Café” into sponsoring a bunch of computers, and in effect, opened one of the first public internet access spaces in the country early in 1995.

When the exhibit opened, Michele invited me to join her to assist in cataloguing the whole biennale on the exhibition website. Knowing absolutely nothing about the web (I’d seen it a few times in Mozilla 0.9a at Wits the previous year) I joined and learned, on my first day, how to code a few basic HTML tags and make my first web page. From humble beginnings.

During the next few months, the exhibit was one of the most popular at the biennale, for the obvious reason that people were stunned speechless about the web. These were heady days — Netscape 1.0 arrived, background images could be added to pages, tables, I mean, like, wow. I remember showing people “Yahoo!” for the first time, and punching in some random term only to have thousands of jumbled pre-Google results arrive a few minutes (sic) later. But for obvious reasons it was like having the world’s best magic trick.

When I visited Internet Solutions during that year, there were fewer than 10 guys surrounded by cables and boxes in a little office suite in Rosebank. David Frankel, who joined the company that year to inject a real business focus, was an intimidating, driven guy who was obviously going to go big — even then, that much was clear. How big no one could really have imagined.

I can’t remember exactly when, but somewhere along the way I remember saying to Michele that this web thing seemed to have potential. Surely, I reasoned, companies were going to want websites for themselves. She wanted to start an online art gallery, and sell South African artworks online (an idea perhaps a few years too early, but one she should perhaps have pursued). I wanted to start the first web development company in Jo’burg.

And late in 1995 we did just that. It was called Jouissance Internet Design Consultants, and our first clients included Standard Bank, Smirnoff and Rennies Travel — for whom we built the first-ever websites.

Things were starting to heat up. Out in Cape Town the genius of Nick Wittenberg was captured in a bottle called Electric Ocean — creating eye-wateringly beautiful websites that left the rest of us gasping. He and Steve Garratt were very earlier pioneers of something that today we called “digital agencies”.

Michele and I hooked up with a young commerce student named Nevo Hadas late in the year, who used to hang around our tiny Melville office and pick up scraps of HTML code. Nevo was quick to spot an opportunity and was already a marketing whiz — a few months later he parted ways with us to start Hunt Lascaris’s first web business — called Tool — with Gavin Rooke. Rooke went on to found Trigger, a recent beneficiary of one of the super-deals happening in the digital agency space.

Sometime in late 1995, and thanks to Nevo’s contact with the company, Michele and I were called up by VWV Studios. Specifically, a guy called Jason Xenopoulos, a freelance writer and up-and-coming man of many talents. Jason took us to lunch and made a compelling case for why our little business should join up with the much larger VWV, a big player in the corporate video and events market, with clients (and budgets) that made our eyes pop out our heads.

After much deliberation, we decided to take up the opportunity, and ourselves combined with another small multimedia company formed VWV Interactive, the most ambitious web development business yet founded in the country. We exploded on to the local scene with customers like South African Airways, and quickly signed up one big corporate customer after the next.

Jason is perhaps the most persuasive and charismatic person I’ve ever met, and with his drive and ambition at the helm, the small start-up exploded to close to 40 people in its first year. Among these were Tim Spira, who went on to be one of the founders of the ill-fated Metropolis, and later MD of iafrica.com and publisher of Finweek; Kevin Lourens and Di Wilson, as well as a number of others, who are now the core team at Cambrient; JP Farinha, one of Jason’s high-school friends, who is now MWeb’s CIO; and Vincent Maher, who needs no introduction here, but whom I hired straight out of Rhodes in 1996 and who never looked back.

The first year of that business was the most fun I’ve ever had pretending to work. And, I’ll wager, the most fun any of that team will ever have and get paid for it. We hurtled from one insane idea to the next, with no respect for bandwidth, usability or even common sense. Much what we did was horrible garbage, but there was always something that excited us about it. Maybe with a few million dollars of venture funding and a nice office in downtown San Fran, we could have turned that into a business.

Around us in the industry, other businesses were starting to appear. Tinderbox down in Cape Town, with Aqua Online’s now creative head Clint Bryce, who went on to be purchased by Internet Solutions and then Prism; Blades, a small creative hot shop also in the mother city; Blue Moon, another events company, launched their web team; Michele left VWV to start Gray Matter, which I still don’t know was a deliberate misspelling or not; and Nevo’s Tool, which grabbed hold of a big chunk of Hunt’s client base and produced a whole bunch of talented individuals in its own right who went on to be big players in today’s web industry.

The real big fish were Internet Solutions and MWeb. IS, when it was sold to Didata in 1997 valued at R400-million, shocked every internet industry insider. No one had any idea that that was the wealth Dave and Alon Apteker had created in such a short time. MWeb, the Naspers play, started with Bruce Cohen at its helm, and drove off enormous media muscle and a dial-up base to become the biggest internet company in the country. Funding one wild thing after the next, MWeb made many mistakes, but it established itself regardless as the 500-pound gorilla that it remains today.

Of course, much else went on. Things got crazy, and we all rushed headlong for the bubble burst in 2000. By then VWV Interactive was way off course, and losing deals to smarter, leaner competitors. Businesses like Aqua Online were raising huge money with their listing, and were able to ride out a storm we weren’t. Jason had left years earlier to start up Metropolis, make a movie, and is now working in advertising and his own ventures. He and Tim had hired a young Matthew Buckland at Metropolis, and Vincent arrived via his own spin-off business Digital Commerce, back at Rhodes New Media Lab, this time creating a whole new generation of web geeks.

The Web 2.0 hype may grow to be as big or as exciting as the first time around; maybe it’s nostalgia or maybe it’s true, the sheer passion and craziness of that time won’t be seen again. Even the really young entrepreneurs of today are smarter and more risk averse than we were. And good on them; there was a lot of shrapnel on this trip.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.