Need to get your friend on track {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? The Chinese engineer who built the flying swords just created a 5-ton mech hand to slap his mates around with. We couldn't approve more. 🦾
In This Open Letter
Moneyball: The SA team shaking up UK football.
Local: SA’s spam crackdown & welcoming CPT.
Global: Behind Google’s big Gemini Mac play.
Tech Jobs: 6 hot new SA dev roles up for grabs.
Beyond: Can professionals still meaningfully upskill?
Work Smarter: Simple side hustles anyone can start.
Think your startup deserves a national stage? 🚀
Innovation City's Startup of the Year 2026 is open — and we're co-hosting. Ten high-growth ventures pitch to investors, industry leaders and ecosystem enablers for a year of Founder Collab, membership and a design sprint. Entries close 27 April.
TRENDING NOW
SA's Moneyball Moment: A Hedge Fund Manager Just Engineered A Massive UK Football Turnaround
Everyone knows the Wrexham story and how Hollywood’s Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac bought the club and turned it around. But did you know a South African hedge fund manager led an SA investment consortium to do the same thing in Lincolnshire for a fraction of the cost…?
On Easter Monday, Lincoln City got promoted to the English Championship (the second-highest tier in UK football). A feat that this small East Midlands club hadn’t managed in 65 years.
And they did it with style: a 96th-minute winner against Reading, in front of thousands of travelling fans, to seal their spot with five games to spare.
Check this fan-made tribute to the moment…
Here’s what you didn’t know: The man behind it all was Cape Town's Clive Nates, a retired South African hedge fund manager who watched the club lose 2-0 in front of 1’500 people a decade ago, and sent a cold email to Lincoln City's chairman, saying, “I think I can help you get on top.”
Bringing SA grit and moneyball tactics to Lincolnshire
So, in February 2016, Nates led a consortium of SA investors to buy a share of Lincoln City (then a 5th-tier squad), and he became the club’s chairman.
The plan? To apply hedge fund thinking to football recruitment: Data-first scouting across global leagues, identifying undervalued players the way a quant fund identifies mispriced assets.
Their first million-pound player sale was Derby County-released Jovon McCarma; their manager, Michael Skubala, was Leeds United's old U21 coach. Rinse and repeat, they kept finding new talent where no one was looking.
The numbers that make this absurd
10 years later, Lincoln had 1’000-to-1 odds for promotion this season, with a tiny £8 million turnover last year (R117 million) – four times smaller than Wrexham’s £33 million when it got promoted out of the same league.
And yet, they chalked up 27 wins, 24 games unbeaten (a club record) and were promoted with five games still to play. A fairy-tale-seeming turnaround.
Coming home — what's next?
In February this year, Nates stepped down to give control to American investor Ron Fowler, so they can run funding in dollars (no SA Rand) – the average Championship player budget is £23 million. But if this story proves anything, it's that budget doesn't always win. "We've had to do it through punching massively above our weight," Nates says, "And we'll go again next season."
They grew attendance from 1–2k per game to 9’000 today, attracting roughly 10% of the city's population to every match day. And next season, they’ll be playing the likes of Southampton, Norwich and Swansea.
Not bad for a cold email from Cape Town, hey?
We’re watching this space…
Have your say…
CHECK THIS OUT
Companies realising that owned media is the next big growth play
OpenAI just spent hundreds of millions acquiring a podcast. HubSpot bought The Hustle (a daily newsletter with 1.5 million subscribers) for a reported $27 million. Khaby Lame, TikTok’s most-followed creator, sold his brand company in a deal valued at nearly $1 billion.
The common thread? These aren’t content plays, they’re audience ownership plays by smart companies who’ve learnt that social reach is rented; algorithms decide who sees your posts and platforms change the rules whenever they want.
Google is being replaced by AI answers that skip your website entirely. But a well-built email list? That’s yours.
The difference: South African B2B companies with 50’000 LinkedIn followers are reaching maybe 1’500 people per post. But a 10,000-subscriber newsletter with a 42% open rate delivers 4’200 real reads — every single time.
The maths isn’t close. And the relationship is fundamentally different: you’re in someone’s inbox because they chose to be there.
Owned media is no longer a nice-to-have. For scale-ups building real pipeline, it’s becoming the foundation.
IN SHORT
Easing you into the weekend…
🧽 Spam Spring Clean. There might be light at the end of the cold-calling tunnel for spam-fatigued South Africans. Gazetted amendments to the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) will make direct marketers scrub their databases monthly against a national opt-out registry. We here for it.
☀️ Make Yourself At Home. UK FinTech ClearScore Group is expanding its Cape Town operations and has just named The Mother City its home away from home, planning to grow its team to 120 employees over the next year or so. Welcome. Enjoy the sunshine.
🤖 Takealot’s AI Play. The Takealot Group has just launched an AI Academy Graduate Programme. The 12-month programme will see recent grads learn both technical and soft skills to jumpstart their career. Love to see it.
✨ Gemini Goes Mac. Google has rolled out a native Gemini app for Mac, (finally) catching up to OpenAI and Anthropic, who have been doing this for some time already. Gemini’s macOS app is available on macOS versions 15 and up. Nice one.
🛠️ More Than Developers. From smart coffee machines to agricultural GPS tools to AI strategy, Octoco's engineering team has built across every layer of the stack. Software. Hardware. Firmware. Fractional CTO. And now, a venture studio and AI unit too.*
* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.
Get the best in SA tech and business news →
WHAT YOU SAID
Gin and bear it…
Yesterday, we featured Ginologist’s neuroscience-based gin, asking which flavour profile you'd reach for. Turns out this crowd likes it classic…
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🪷 Floral — soft and sweet (19%)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🍊 Citrus — zesty and energising (25%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔥 Orient — warm and spiced (13%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🥽 London Dry — classic and bold (28%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧐 I'm booking a Sensory Experience first (15%)
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BEYOND THE NEWSLETTER
How do professionals actually stay sharp?
We asked an SA EdTech founder how working professionals can keep themselves upskilled — and the answer is way more 💪 practical than you'd think…
Don’t miss all the extra operator interviews and insights content we do on our social channels — come enjoy the vibez.
AROUND THE WEB
Have some fun…
🧩 Tool to Try: Bulker runs AI-driven qualitative research in seconds (not days).
🚀 That's Interesting: NASA had to send the Apollo 11 moon-landing crew on special training not to swear during broadcasting, because the Apollo 10 crew swore over 230 times during their mission.
🦧 Next Level: Watch this zoo orangutan copy her caretakers and start cleaning her own enclosure.
🎵 Wow Site: PurrfecLyrics gives you synced lyrics for any song.
🧠 Work Smarter: This US side-hustle master shares 7 overlooked businesses literally anyone can start — including one that could feed Amazon workers for $1bn.
