Slipped up? In-game collectors are furious at Counter-Strike 2 after Valve released a patch making super rare items available, sinking $2bn in rare collections. Whoops. 💣

In Today’s Open Letter

Love hosting guests at home? This startup’s building the marketplace right here in SA…

Loneliness is no longer a fringe social issue: The WHO now treats social connection as a measurable health need, estimating roughly one in six people worldwide experience loneliness.

An increasing body of research shows that loneliness and isolation have a serious effect on physical and mental health, quality of life and longevity.

Psychologists say connecting with real people in real life, talking to strangers and engaging in shared interests are proactive ways to overcome loneliness and isolation.

So, as cities densify and life shifts online, being welcomed into someone’s home to share a meal IRL starts to look less like a social nicety and more like vital infrastructure. 

The local startup getting everyone a seat at the table…

Local meal-sharing platform OpenSeat lets anyone host or join small, paid dinners in real homes. 

Hosts list a meal, set the price, and approve guest requests. Guests can browse by city (great for someone new in town, or someone in a new city for the first time), or by theme/conversation topic. Then they book their seat, arrive as strangers and leave as friends. 

We chatted to OpenSeat Co-Founder Callum Oberholzer, and they’re deliberately building for meals over activities, homes over venues, intimacy over noise. 

The model is already working at the seedling scale, with just over 2’000 users and already more than 300 meals hosted across Durban and Cape Town (with Jozi coming soon). 

Achieving scale

Though hosts typically charge between R100–R400 per person, with OpenSeat taking 8.5%, they’re treating the humble dining room table as a network node. 

The supply is everywhere, the format is repeatable, and the go-to-market leans on communities that already value hospitality, lowering host acquisition friction.

So can “home as third place” scale without losing the magic that makes it work? OpenSeat is betting it can, meaning a lot of those empty chairs get filled. 

We’re watching this space…

Citing facts in pitch decks or docs? Chirpz finds sources for your claims instantly: fast fact-checking without the rabbit holes.

Need agents that do actual work? Lindy lets you spin up role-based AI agents (support, outbound, etc.) and manage them all in one workspace.

Plugging tools into your agents? Starbase maps and connects GitHub, Notion, Vercel, PayPal and more; clean agent infra in minutes.

Building SaaS? Join Cloud On Demand’s ISV Programme and get up to R21’400 in value to cut costs, scale and ship faster.

What you get:

✅ Up to $600 Azure credits + 20% Azure spend rebate (eligible partners)
✅ Upgrade & Modernisation Plan (R1’600) + GTM Strategy (R1’500)
✅ 30-day flexible terms + access to Microsoft’s marketplace & co-sell engine.

And much more.

Available for a limited time only.

🎓 Future-Proofing Skills. Microsoft SA has unveiled Ikamva Digital, a platform targeting TVET colleges to arm students with digital skills, blended with local employment pathways and industry certification. Nice one.

🏎️ Race To The Podium. SA is revving up efforts to bring the F1 Grand Prix back to the continent in 2027 with a R1.8 billion plan, with private investors like MTN and Heineken already showing interest. Sjoe, hey.

🧐 Is Your Vacuum Spying? A tech enthusiast found his smart vacuum was transmitting a 3D map of his home across the globe without permission. The device had even received a remote "kill command" when he tried to stop it. Damn, that sucks…

🚀 Startups Battling Further Afield. TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 announced its top five Startup Battlefield finalists, who will fight for a cool $100’000 prize. Pretty cool stuff from FinTech for space to BioTech marvels…

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools, so our Founder’s Stack gives you company setup and compliance with Govchain, trust-building brand & comms with DoubleShift and more.

From 15 October 2025 to 15 November 2025, each friend you get to sign up to The Open Letter gets you one entry into a draw to win a brand new iPad Air!

Yesterday, we showed you how MoneyBadger is driving BTC payments in SA, asking if you’ve paid using Bitcoin. For most, it’s a no…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛒 Yes, at retail (7%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👉 Only to pay someone else, not retail (7%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚀 Nope, but keen to try it (7%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 📊 Nope, use my crypto as investment (32%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💰 I don’t own crypto (47%)

Your 2 cents…

Well, only one way to find out, Andrew. Let us know what you think. 🎯

Kenya leads Africa in digital payments — SA must catch up.

The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 report reveals a rapidly growing shift toward digital payments in Africa:

💡 Kenya tops the continent, with 89% of adults using digital payments.

💡 South Africa ranks behind Kenya and Ghana, with only 67%.

💡 Mauritius, Africa’s wealthiest country by GDP per capita, had a lower 64% adoption rate.

Globally, over 60% of adults in low- and middle-income countries now use digital payments, nearly double the figure from a decade ago.

Founders building in this space should note: mobile-first infrastructure, not GDP, is the biggest unlock for mass digital payments.

🥗 Tool to Try: CalPulse lets you snap a menu photo and instantly see calories and macros for each item (paid, but powerful).

📺 That’s Interesting: Sony built the world’s largest CRT monitor in 1989, the 109cm, 200kg PVM-4300, and only one is known to survive today.

🌪 Next Level: Storm chasers fly over the eye of a hurricane.

📚 Hack: Which “research” is correct? When reading academic papers, remember the hierarchy of evidence: meta-analyses at the top, expert opinions at the bottom.

👕 Wow Site: SizeChartLab finally fixes sizing chaos: instantly compare clothing sizes across different brands.

Hey, Renier here 👋, co-founder of The Open Letter.

I’ve spent 17 years in SA tech and seen hundreds of startups rise and fall. The ones that made it all had one thing in common: a strong community.

That’s why I started The Founder Collab — a space where 100+ SA founders connect for:

☕ Meetups & events

🎓 Weekly masterclasses

📚 35+ expert sessions on-demand

🤝 A network unlike anything else

Come build your startup alongside me and 100+ other SA founders in The Founder Collab.

Spaces are limited — new founders join weekly.

Vote in the poll, leave a quick comment, or hit reply — we read every single one.