Tjaart van der Walt sold his first business to General Electric in 2011. That was not the end of his entrepreneurial career. It was the beginning of a second chapter, one that has already stretched across more than a decade and taken his work far beyond South Africa’s borders. His story, and those of founders like him, says something important about where the country’s economic hope may lie.
Van der Walt, now a board member at Endeavor South Africa, invests his own time and money championing the next generation of entrepreneurs. After exiting C-Sense, he teamed up with fellow South African Coen Jonker, and together they have spent more than ten years building GoTyme Bank. The ambition from the outset was significant: to use technology to build banking businesses capable of serving large numbers of customers efficiently in emerging markets. GoTyme has grown into an international digital banking group, proof that financial innovation developed by South Africans can travel well beyond the country.
He is not alone. Melvyn Lubega, an Endeavor entrepreneur, co-founded Go1, which became South Africa’s first technology scale-up to reach a valuation of more than US$1 billion. He has since become an investor in other South African and African scale-ups and an active participant in developing the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Karl Westvig, Willem Roos, Wayne Gosling, Steven Heilbron and Pieter de Villiers are among the others whose journeys, though different, point in the same direction: building one successful company does not have to be the end of an entrepreneurial journey. It is often the beginning of a much wider contribution.
This matters now, at a time when much of South Africa’s economic conversation is understandably dominated by low growth, unemployment and the constraints facing business. Experienced entrepreneurs continue to see what others might not, opportunity often sitting quietly behind a problem. Having built successful businesses once, they are choosing to build and invest again. That amounts to a significant vote of confidence in the country’s entrepreneurial potential.
There is also hard evidence that prior experience matters. Research published by Endeavor examined the career paths of 200 founders behind some of the world’s leading unicorns, companies valued at more than US$1 billion, half in the United States and half in emerging markets. Almost half, 49%, had founded a company before starting the business that became their unicorn. Success, in other words, compounds.
What matters about founders building for the second or third time is not simply that they have succeeded before, but what they take with them. They do not begin at zero. They have learnt how to find product-market fit, hire and retain people, raise capital, manage cash, enter new markets, deal with regulation and survive the inevitable periods when the original plan does not work. They bring networks and credibility too: they know investors, customers, advisers and other founders, and they have learnt first-hand that building a significant business is possible. None of that guarantees the next venture will succeed. Entrepreneurship never works that way. But it does mean the knowledge accumulated through building one company can be put to work again.
The impact extends well beyond the founder’s own ventures. Endeavor’s research into entrepreneurial ecosystems has repeatedly shown that successful companies become breeding grounds for future entrepreneurs. Employees leave to start businesses of their own. Founders become angel investors and mentors. Their networks connect younger entrepreneurs to capital, customers and expertise. This is the multiplier effect in practice, where one successful company can help generate many more.
For South Africa, that matters enormously. The country needs a new generation of founder-led innovation, particularly those capable of scaling, because scale-ups create disproportionate numbers of jobs, attract investment and develop the next generation of skilled employees and entrepreneurs.
There are good reasons why experienced founders keep seeing opportunity here. Fintech is an obvious example. South Africa combines a sophisticated banking and financial-services system with persistent gaps in financial inclusion and access, particularly for small businesses and consumers poorly served by traditional products. It has strong technical and financial skills, established payment infrastructure, and a market where entrepreneurs can develop solutions to problems shared by many other emerging economies. But fintech is only one part of the picture. South African entrepreneurs are building businesses in software, education, healthcare, commerce and other sectors, often solving problems that extend well beyond this country. That creates the possibility of building from South Africa for the world.
Meanwhile, the wider lesson is that a strong entrepreneurial economy is not simply about producing more start-ups. It is about ensuring that the experience and value created by successful businesses remain in circulation: founders reinvesting capital and sharing their experience, networks opening doors into international markets, and talented people emerging from successful scale-ups with the confidence and skills to build companies of their own. Every successful South African scale-up has the potential to create value far beyond the company itself. Its employees can become founders, its founders investors and mentors, and its networks a bridge to capital and global markets.
South Africa already has a generation of entrepreneurs who have demonstrated that significant, globally competitive businesses can be built from here. Many remain deeply engaged in the country and excited by the opportunities they see. The question is no longer only what these entrepreneurs have already built, but what they, and the entrepreneurs they enable, will build next.
Alison Collier is managing director at Endeavor South Africa.