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With ice? A Japanese team is in orbit right now for mankind’s most important mission yet: To brew a batch of sake (rice wine) out in space. 🥂

In This Open Letter

1 in 3 meetings are a waste of time – and this startup’s giving you the tools to end them for good…

There are few things worse than heading into your workday with a clear plan of action, only to see that it’s been filled up with meeting after meeting after meeting…

It happens every day, in every workplace on the planet. 

In fact, as much as a third of meetings are considered useless, with nearly 70% of employees saying meetings eat up their uninterrupted focus time. Hybrid work has done a number on the workday, too, with half of meetings now taking place 9 AM–11 AM or 1 PM–3 PM, our peak productivity hours.

But there’s more than lost time at stake: Tally up who’s in those meetings, for how long, how often and multiply it by their hourly rate, and you’ll see the wastages start adding up real fast. 

How much your meetings really cost

Session Sense is an AI-powered meeting cost analysis tool that connects to Google Calendar or Outlook, scans who attends which meetings, and assigns a cost per session based on role rates set by the company. 

The platform also flags recurring or near-duplicate meetings that are likely unnecessary (think the same crowd, similar topic, over and over, with little-to-no progress). It’ll even catch on to habitual meeting schedulers renaming weekly meetings… LOL.

It also shows the top schedulers, the heaviest meeting attendees and highlights overstaffed calls using role-based costings, while identifying multiple staff from the same team. 

Smarter ways to meet

And business leaders get visual alerts that flag sessions that cross cost thresholds like: “⚠️ Overstaffed: 7 attendees, R5 000 total”, and map it to the priciest days and hours on the dashboard.

We chatted to Henrico Bekker, the oke behind Session Sense, and he told us that no individual salaries are exposed, and teams can link actual payroll or use average role values. 

If a company’s meeting culture is hard to change with guidelines, meeting price tags might just be the way to get them to see the light.

We’re watching this space…

Takealot Fulfilment Solutions offers smart logistics that scale with your business…

Combining freight forwarding, courier, on-demand and supply-chain services into a single, end-to-end partner. 

With import and export lanes across 20+ origin countries and a national network serving 170+ areas and 185 delivery hubs, TFS connects global sourcing to fast local delivery. 

✅ Our platform features advanced tech integrations
✅ For real-time tracking and optimisation
✅ Backed by a 98% on-time delivery rate

So brands gain visibility and reliability across every touchpoint. 

Whether you’re an importer, exporter, retailer or marketplace seller, TFS reduces complexity, lowers costs and accelerates growth through tailored fulfilment solutions and measurable performance.

Our team provides consultative planning, customs expertise and scalable warehousing so businesses of every size can access dependable, transparent logistics. 

Partner with TFS to simplify logistics end-to-end, from ocean lanes to doorstep.

👀 It’s GoTyme! TymeBank is rebranding to GoTyme by mid-2026 in an effort to evolve the brand since growing to 10 million customers since its 2019 debut and recently being crowned a unicorn at a $1.5 billion valuation. Interesting.

🪪 Home Affairs to Your Door? From 1 November, SA's Home Affairs will deliver passports to South Africans living abroad right to their doorsteps, with deliveries promised in 24 to 72 hours and costing between $30 and $60. Whoa…

🤖 Walmart's AI Salesbot. Walmart has teamed up with OpenAI to allow ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users to buy Walmart products through conversations. Just imagine the hallucinations right now…

🍕 Guess Who’s Back. Iconic Scooters Pizza is making a comeback (replete with its famous 39-minute delivery promise) eight years after disappearing. Meep. Meep.

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools, so our Founder’s Stack gives you your own CFO for less with OCFO, WhatsApp marketing with 2'000% ROI by Chat Inc, and loads more.

Yesterday, we showed you how TeknaLabs is working to up digital skills in SA, asking about the biggest barrier to tech literacy. Most say we need more connectivity…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💻 Access to devices and the internet (44%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📚 Outdated school curriculum (28%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💸 Lack of affordable training (0)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧠 Mindset, people don’t see it as essential yet (22%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏢 Employers not investing in upskilling (6%)

Your 2 cents…

Indeed, Andrea, we’ve been waiting for Starlink so looooooong. 🛰️

☁️ Cloud Support Engineer @ Cloud on Demand

🐮 Technical Team Lead + 35 more roles @ Flash Group

🧑‍💻 Software Engineering Roles @ Octoco

🦖 Head of Sales @ OfferZen

💼 Business Development Consultant @ Outsourced CFO

🌮 Full-Stack Developer @ The Awareness Company

🦋 Flutter Developer @ Sinov8

Hiring? Let us know here and we’ll feature it next week.

Small-caps rally as investors rotate from blue-chips amid upbeat local economic sentiment.

Data from Moneyweb (Fri 17 Oct 2025 → Thu 23 Oct 2025)

Prices dipped as dollar strength and profit-taking cooled last week’s safe-haven demand.

–3.03% (R 73 813.80 → R 71 581.02)

Data from Investing.com (Fri 17 Oct 2025 → Thu 23 Oct 2025)

Modest rebound likely driven by ETF inflows and expectations of US rate cuts.

+3.41% (R 1 848 414 → R 1 911 481)

Data from Investing.com (Fri 17 Oct 2025 → Thu 23 Oct 2025)

Slight gain in optimism over upcoming upgrades and renewed institutional interest.

+1.57% (R 66 538.6 → R 67 583.1)

Data from Investing.com (Fri 17 Oct 2025 → Thu 23 Oct 2025)

🧠 Tool to Try: Hedy gives you real-time conversation insights during meetings and interviews.

🎨 That’s Interesting: We only know that Pablo Picasso once stole several statues from the Louvre because he was a suspect in the Mona Lisa theft in 1911. TL;DR: it wasn’t him, the real thief was caught and the painting returned in 1914.

🎤 Next Level: Behold Scatman John breaking down exactly how scat works.

📱 Hack: Is the app worth getting? Check how often it gets updated — frequent updaters mean devs actually care.

🌐 Wow Site: Light Pollution Map helps you find the best places to go stargazing.

Most successful founders will agree, to make it big, you need some luck.

But how does one increase one's chances of success when luck plays such a big role? Increase your surface area of luck!

✅ Meet more people

✅ Get faster feedback on your product builds

✅ Make faster progress when you are stuck with expert help.

That’s what The Founder Collab, SA’s premium community for startup founders, does. Weekly opportunities to meet other founders, get feedback, get unstuck and a network unlike any in SA.

It’s a surefire way to increase your surface area of luck..

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