Read now How Yoco Made Small Merchants Worth Serving
Four friends, one table, and a payments system rebuilt around the businesses banks overlooked.
Read the edition →Nobody to Ask
Built in JohannesburgSince 2015
Theo Baloyi opened 24 stores during a pandemic that was closing everyone else down. He could do it because he had taken no outside money, and so there was nobody who could tell him not to.
Season one
Eight weeks. Eight South African companies. One new founder story every Tuesday.
View the full schedule → Read now 
Read now A Cheeky Bet
How two men who knew nothing about restaurants took peri-peri chicken to the world.
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Read now Her Name on the Line
A loan shark funded the first Tashas. Twenty years later, a war in the Middle East nearly took it away.
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Read now The Recipe Under the Bed
George Sombonos built a fried chicken chain on a $1,000 untested recipe and a franchise-light model.
Read the edition → Read now Nobody to Ask
Theo Baloyi opened 24 stores during a pandemic because he had taken no outside money, and nobody could tell him not to.
Read the edition →
Coming soon His Mother's Knitting Machine
How Laduma Ngxokolo turned Xhosa beadwork into global luxury.
Coming soon Eight Failures and a Shipping Container
The brothers who out-brewed the cities by starting in overlooked small towns.
Coming soon Either a Big Success or a Small Failure
How a Stellenbosch outsider banked the overlooked and challenged the Big Four.
Past editions
Decisions, near misses, and operating lessons from the people building South African brands.
The Recipe Under the Bed
George Sombonos built the largest non-American fried chicken chain in the world on a $1,000 untested recipe. The lesson is what he chose to own, and what he deliberately let other people own instead.
Read the edition→Her Name on the Line
A loan shark funded the first Tashas. Twenty years later, a war in the Middle East nearly took it away. The thread running through both is the one thing most founders treat as soft: people.
Read the edition→A Cheeky Bet
How two men who knew nothing about restaurants took peri-peri chicken to the world. The lesson is not the chicken. It is the decision to build a brand before they had a business.
Read the edition→How Yoco Made Small Merchants Worth Serving
Yoco did not win by inventing card payments. It rebuilt the economics, the onboarding and the trust around the independent businesses the banks had quietly written off.
Read the edition→ Why we exist
Most founder stories tidy up the hard parts. We write about the hard parts.