Space money {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Elon Musk literally just launched a bank on X (Twitter), in conjunction with Visa and everything. Only in the US for now, but the plan is obvs to go everywhere. Get the popcorn: regulators around the world are about to put on a show. 🍿

In Today’s Open Letter

On Tuesday, we showed you how much easier it is to start a new venture thanks to AI, but what if you're successful and need to hire developers to scale it?

The hard part comes after the pilot works, when you need software engineers to go next level. Or if you're a corporate or an established business, you never stopped needing developers in the first place.

How do you tell if a developer's actually good if they can just use AI? Especially if you're a non-technical person yourself.

Most assume it's a cheating problem, so they upped detection: 72.4% of recruiting leaders have moved interviews back in person to fight fraud, and Cluely raised $15m to sell invisible screen overlays. Problem is now detectors flag honest candidates who simply paused to think.

The truth is using AI isn't cheating anymore: 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated. If AI writes most of the code on the job, a test that bans AI is measuring a skill nobody is hiring for.

We're seeing the same problem in schools, universities and the legal profession. And maybe the answer isn't to interrogate the work they hand in, but to test if they understand and can defend their position.

Changing the way we assess technical skills

Local tech talent marketplace OfferZen is building a whole new way to assess developers in the AI era with its Code Council, a network of senior engineers, tech leads and domain specialists who run the technical assessment stage on your company's behalf as part of OfferZen Contracting. Each assessment is custom-built for your company’s role. 

They don't take the candidate’s submission at face-value. They use it as the opening for a deeper conversation: why this decision, what did you rule out, how does it hold up when the requirements change.

The end game: To give companies and especially non-technical employees or founders the ability to hire engineers confidently by mapping exactly what the business needs, before anyone gets assessed at all.

They’ve turned the Code Council’s expertise into a practical tech assessment toolkit to help hiring managers assess judgement, taste and critical thinking when code alone isn’t enough anymore. 

OfferZen CEO, Matt Beck, even says you’re welcome to contact him personally at [email protected] for more info on skills assessments.

We're watching this space…

Your shared AI chats are public, and anyone can find them. Sharing Claude or ChatGPT conversations with friends makes them visible to the entire internet. It's a privacy and security nightmare. Just don't do it. See what's been exposed.

What if Claude could learn by watching you work? Record a Skill is a new Cowork feature where you do a task as you normally would, Claude watches, then builds a repeatable skill to automate it. See how it works.

Can the same AI model predict both machine failure and customer churn? Praelexis found that a predictive maintenance model and a bank's churn model share the same underlying structure, different industry, different sensors, same model. Watch the video.

🏗️ 170MW for CPT. Equinix just got the green light for massive new data centres in Cape Town, 170MW of power capacity, almost matching Teraco's entire installed footprint. If it had to be anywhere in SA, Cape Town's probably the municipality best equipped to handle the extra load, we guess.

🏠 Your Farm, Your Car, Your House. SA's new Expropriation Act can apply to farms, houses and cars, without compensation in certain cases. We can't help but wonder what percentage of SA's land is already state-owned and how it's currently being used.

📰 $56m for Terrorising Newsletter Writers. eBay just settled for $56 million with the e-commerce newsletter writers its executives harassed and stalked in 2019. The fact that eBay execs were doing this must be one of the strangest things we've read today.

🏖️ Durban's Moment. A Durban landmark industrial facility just sold for a record-breaking R285.5 million at auction. A new ClubMed, hotels popping up everywhere, now this, Durban's looking like the next it spot in SA.

⚙️ Scale Built Fast. LeaseSurance had a validated PropTech idea, but the platform to scale it nationally would take months/years to build. So Octoco rebuilt the core system with automation, risk profiling and claims processing to make it market-ready in just 5 months (not years).*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

When something's not selling, founders blame the product. But there's a lot more to bringing something new to market. We got an SA product strategist who's helped launch 150+ startups to show how to prepare a product to actually sell.

And it turns out, there are 6 specific steps to get people to buy your product, from first users to lasting habit.

☝ Send this to a founder with a great product and quiet sales.

Yesterday, we showed you RideReport’s vehicle valuations, asking how your last buy or sell went. Most here won’t be duped again…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😎 I knew exactly what it was worth (21%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😭 I got fleeced, and I know it (29%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🕵️ Never again, next time I'm getting that number first (50%)

Your 2 cents…

And there you have it, folks. It's either RideReport or you have to marry a mechanic. 🔧💍

The percentage of young women buying homes alone has overtaken couples, and it's not even close anymore.

💡 Women buying homes alone jumped from 20% of young homebuyers in 2005 to 34% in 2025.

💡 Male-only buyers stayed the same, but the total number of young homebuyers dropped 58% since 2005, driven by rising prices, stricter bond requirements and 40.6% youth unemployment.

For founders in PropTech, lending or financial services: the young solo female homebuyer is now the single biggest segment, and the products serving her specifically are almost non-existent.

The Open Letter Live, 30 Jul, Stellenbosch: Brett Commaille (Hlayisani Capital) on what separates SA businesses that last from those that don't. In-person is sold out, but use code LIVESTREAM100 to register for the livestream for free.

Faith in the Workplace, 3 Aug, Potchefstroom: An evening of honest conversations on how faith shapes the way you lead, work and serve. Register here

New York Global Connection × Led By Her × The Lekker Network: SA founders connecting globally, details and registration here.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🧩 Tool to Try: Olivasal lets you self-host video meetings with recording, AI recaps and full control over your data and compliance.

⏰ That's Interesting: The world's first mechanical alarm clock (1787) could only ring at 4:00 AM, because its inventor, Levi Hutchins, believed that is the time humans should wake up.

🔥 Next Level: This is what it looks like from inside a firefighting plane scooping up water from a lake.

📚 Wow Site: Read the Places is a literary atlas mapping real-world places mentioned in famous books.