Privacy matters {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? DuckDuckGo took a lekker swipe at Google and Meta (all of Big Tech actually) by releasing a pair of low-tech, normal sunglasses. The ad is LOLs, though. 😂

In Today’s Open Letter

The irony of our modern, inter-connected world is a loneliness epidemic that's affecting our health and well-being, so this Cape Town founder's built a way to connect 10k strangers and counting…

It's super hard making real friends as an adult. And tech's not helping: Loneliness impacts one in six people worldwide, and the WHO thinks it causes roughly 100 deaths an hour. In SA, more than one in five working South Africans (22%) felt lonely for much of the previous day.

SA founder Sibabalwe Gift Qetu-Yates got the idea for a solution after a friend described how genuinely hard it had been to move back from London and build a real circle in Cape Town.

By the end of the night, they'd sketched a first version he then built with a simple spreadsheet and a Typeform. When it pulled in around 2'000 sign-ups, he knew he was onto something, so he taught himself enough to ship real apps and launched properly in April this year.

The app that connects you with five strangers for dinner

Every Thursday, Meetable seats six strangers together for dinner at one of their partner restaurants, having matched guests on cuisine, personality and price point, and then lets the night do the rest.

24 hours before the dinner, guests receive a notification with the other guests and the venue details. And an hour before, a group chat opens, but a stripped-down one, just a few tap-to-send lines like "running ten minutes late" or "I'm at the door", so nobody arrives having already used up the conversation beforehand.

At the table, the app provides question cards designed for that specific group to get everyone past the awkward, "Jis, how's about this weather we having lately?" And, at the end of the night, you mark who you'd want to hang out with again, for future matching only if it's mutual.

Being very clear that it is NOT a dating app, he launched in Cape Town, and within two weeks Johannesburg had overtaken it. Sibs boils it down to Joburg simply running warmer, that people there are quicker to say yes to a table of strangers, whereas Cape Town likes to keep its circles closed and treats a ten-minute drive as a border crossing. (No shade).

What we like is that Sibs built it slow and steady, validating it first and then clustering everything around one night so you don't have empty tables, intentionally building up the one thing you can't growth-hack: the connection between six people sharing a meal.

No wonder he's grown Meetable to 10k users already.

We're watching this space…

What if ChatGPT sat next to whatever you're looking at? OpenAI's upgraded Chrome extension and desktop app ship Side Chat this week, ask about a YouTube video while it plays, point it at your open tabs, or highlight a paragraph and question it without leaving the page. See how it works.

Should your AI agent have its own bank account? Cloudflare Wallets lets agents pay for APIs and content autonomously using stablecoin micropayments, with allowances, allow lists and transaction caps so they can explore without draining your card. Read the announcement.

Can ML sell financial products better than your sales team? Praelexis built a recommender system for an international bank that ranks products by relevance per client, delivered via API, driving higher conversion and engagement at scale. See the case study.

There is a line item in your books that nobody negotiates, and it grows every time the rand has a bad week: international SaaS tools kill SA budgets.

The math is quite brutal: A $49 seat for 5 users, billed monthly, is roughly R70k a year before anyone has done a single thing with it. Then your card gets whacked with a forex fee, and the invoice arrives in a format your accountant has to reformat.

Meanwhile, there is usually a local equivalent priced in rands, billed in rands, and built by people who already know what a SARS deadline does to a finance team in February.

SA founders need SA tools to scale. So we keep a list of them: accounting, payments, cloud, legal, workwear, CFO help, funding, whatever you need, it's right there on the Founder Stack.

🚧 One Fence, Six Years. Mogale City published a draft precinct plan for Lanseria Smart City with a shared digital backbone and its own Gautrain station. Physical progress since Ramaphosa announced it in 2020? An incomplete fence. Announcements move faster than trenches here.

👗 A 60% Haircut. Shein is targeting $30bn to $40bn in its Hong Kong listing, down from a $98bn peak, after the US and EU closed their parcel loopholes. SA closed its version first, in 2024. Turns out that's what happens when a regulatory subsidy disappears.

🛰️ The Rocket Company Is a Landlord. SpaceX revenue doubled to $7.8bn, largely off a $1.25bn-a-month Anthropic compute contract. Starlink passed 12 million subscribers across 27+ African countries, and SA still isn't one of them.

💼 Deals Quadrupled. Sub-Saharan M&A hit $50bn in H1 2026, more than four times a year earlier, with SA leading the continent. Bank of America wants more of it, but read their criteria carefully: Regional replicability is what global capital is actually paying for.

📊 Brand Clarity Secured. Stellenbosch's Sonic Fund and Sonic Trader needed to serve very different audiences without brand dilution. So DoubleShift built two distinct brand systems, giving both the clarity to scale globally with sharper investor and customer traction.*

📈 Decisions, Not Dashboards. Clarity turns your Xero data into the decision you're actually trying to make: pricing, hiring, which client to let go. Built by a South African accounting firm, live with SA agencies and professional practices.*

* From our partners.

Last week, we filled the Workshack in Stellenbosch with 150+ SA founders, investors and tech business peeps on 30 July. And, as usual, it was a lot of fun, with good food, live music, lekker chats and an awesome vibe.

But we also heard from two founders who’d just raised VC: Thalia Pillay (Orca Fraud) and Michael Maas (Zimi), as well as Brett Commaille from VC Hlayisani Capital, and here are 3 lessons that stuck with us…

1. Screen your first customer like you're hiring them. Thalia ran a "design partner" process and turned people down while looking for the right fit. The bar wasn't who says yes; it was who's representative, who'll give real feedback, and who's seen the world's best tools. Two years later, those same people are paying clients.

2. Sell it before you build it. Michael cold-mailed a deck to scraped wine farm addresses. Three chargers in, growth stalled; competitors were giving them away free. The pivot to fleets came off one conference intro and winging it with Bakers Transport before the offering existed. Find the company whose hair is on fire before you engineer anything.

3. A high valuation is a bill you pay later. Brett did the maths out loud: a R500m valuation needs a R5bn exit, and SA sees very few of those. Get it wrong, and your next round is a down round. Thalia could have raised three times her seed and chose not to; the honest question isn't how much can I get, it's can I grow into this.

A big thanks to Capitec Business, Cell C Business, Cloud on Demand and all our wonderful partners for making the evening possible.

Yesterday, we showed you Roam & Root’s medium-term rental solution, asking how long until Airbnb finds out about it. Most here say they'll just buy him…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⏳ Under a year, then it's a "feature" nobody asked for (35%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛡️ Never. Big platforms are too busy fighting cities (9%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤝 They'll just buy him. Congrats in advance, Fynn (56%)

Young South Africans have more than halved as homebuyers in 20 years, and the youngest are dropping fastest.

💡 Homes bought by people 35 and younger fell from 107'661 in 2005 to 45'521 in 2025, a 58% drop, with the 30-and-younger group down 64% and the 31-to-35 group down 51%.

💡 Under-35s make up 37% of SA's population but hold just 7% of properties owned. Over-50s are 29% of the population and own 68%, more than double their population share.

💡 Lightstone points to pricier houses, stricter bond requirements, stagnant wages and 40.6% unemployment among 25- to 34-year-olds as the drivers.

For founders in proptech, lending or fintech: an entire generation is being priced out of the primary wealth-building asset in SA. Rent-to-own, fractional ownership and long-term rental products aren't nice-to-haves; they're the market now.

Indiana Global Connection Brunch, 9 Aug, Carmel (USA): Led By Her kicks off a global series connecting 300 SA women across 11 countries for Women's Month. Register free

Work Rewired: Hiring, Skills & Careers in the AI Economy, 13 Aug, Cape Town: How AI is reshaping hiring, skills assessment and what future-ready talent actually looks like. R50. Get tickets

You Do Not Win Deals, You Own Relationships, 14 Aug, Online: Renier Kriel on founder-led sales, real deal examples, qualifying properly and keeping momentum alive. Join here

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🥋 Next Level: Watch a nurse use jiu jitsu to fend off a violent patient attack.

🚗 Wow Site: Make My Drive Fun finds interesting sites and stops along your road trip route.