🧠 Making 20M+ Way Smarter South Africans
Looking good? This guy built his own custom Tesla roadster (from Model 3 parts) and drove it around town to gauge people’s reactions. Pretty cool, but not as cool as today’s Open Letter exclusive… see below…
In this Open Letter:
- Open Letter exclusive: Are you sitting down? ‘Cos Mxit is back…!
- Boosting performance: Using tech to boost 20M+ brains at work.
- Apple’s health coach, Africa’s biggest startups & teaching kids about money.
- Scaling to comps and overseas funding: 3 Things in startup this week.
- SA’s biggest recent funding round raisers: The results are in.
- Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.
EXCLUSIVE: MXIT IS BACK!
Break out your phones and prepare to party like it’s 2005 because South Africa’s pioneering original instant messaging social network Mxit is back — with a few exciting new updates… check out our exclusive preview.
TRENDING NOW
Unlocking the Power of 20M+ Way Smarter South Africans
In today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we examine the business impact of emotional intelligence, showcasing a local startup doing some amazing things with AI in this space…
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a big deal in the workplace.
It’s the ability to understand, manage and use your own emotions while recognising and influencing others’ for better communication and relationships, along 5 core EQ verticals:
- Empathy
- Social skills
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Motivation.
And, as you can imagine, EQ is magic in the workplace: Directly linked to performance, which is why it’s so rare – only 36% of us are truly emotionally intelligent and 90% of top performers rank highly in it, hence they get more money in the bank, while those without it experience poor communication, low morale and more conflicts, driving stress and burnout.
No wonder emotionally intelligent organisations report stronger customer experiences, higher customer loyalty and advocacy. #winning
Ok, so how do you build EQ?
Surprisingly it’s much the same as building physical strength: Consistent effort and many reps.
At a neurological level, our brains form neural pathways based on repeated thoughts and behaviours; the more we engage in certain patterns, the stronger these pathways become. If those patterns happen to be good, great! If not, performance could suffer.
Enter neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to reorganise itself by making new neural connections throughout life: When you gradually replace old/negative patterns with positive thinking and behaviours, you can rewire your brain to make new neural connections over time.
And it’s important to do because our brains (unfortunately) have an inherent negativity bias – we tend to focus more on negative experiences. So it’s good practice to offset every single negative experience with at least three positive ones.
The local player building your brain gym
Mygrow is an emotional intelligence enablement platform driving personal and collective growth for individuals and teams with an online brain gym featuring pro psych workouts like the Three Good Things technique, signature strengths, affirming statements and more.
The platform takes users on a journey through daily video-based learning on a specific technique before a short learning-affirmation quiz, and then jumping into actually doing it.
Best part? You can make major changes with a series of just 10 minutes a day.
Mygrow designed their program around one daily session (they call it a Droplet), so no “catching up” or skipping ahead… And their gamified leaderboard tracks individual growth across teams, so you can see who’s working to grow their EQ.
Using AI to measure growth…
Mygrow’s powered by an AI-driven technique engine that scores your attempt at each technique (plus about 12 other factors), analyses your historical data and provides feedback for improving on a given technique.
And it works best in groups: Mygrow starts with a pilot of 5 to 10% of the organisation, who eventually becomes Mygrow “champions” that act as cheerleaders for the next subset of employees – helping with check-ins and being an in-person driver for the product while normalising growth and development in the entire company.
A reporting dashboard informs champions who are engaging, which teams are struggling and who are showing a lower or higher growth score than the average. (Taking into account that everyone has a different EQ starting point and thus, journey.)
We recently chatted with Theran Knighton-Fitt, Mygrow co-founder and chief humanising officer, who is confident after their push into AI since 2024 (which brought so much more consistency than human coaches) that a Mygrow Droplet just 3 times per week can guarantee a skills growth impact of more than 70% for any organisation...
With platforms like Mygrow helping individuals and teams grow their EQ and thus skills and performance, we’re watching this space…
IN SHORT
A few tech things to take to work…
🚨Vocal panic button. The world’s first voice-activated panic super app has just launched in SA. Valor lets users set a custom panic command phrase which, when used dispatches response teams to their exact location while monitoring the ambient sounds to assess the situation and update response teams. Hopefully, you don't say it accidentally or forget what it is.
🍏 Coaching you to health. Apple is reportedly working on improving its Health app to add an AI Coach to advise users on how to get healthy. Supposedly called Health+, it’s been worked on since 2023, with a reported launch date in mid to late 2026. Hopefully, it doesn’t tune you about how much Apple TV you’re watching…
🌍 Africa’s biggest startups. Funding into startups on the African continent reached $2 billion last year — a return to pre-pandemic levels. Here’s a rundown of Africa’s Unicorns, including SA’s very own TymeBank (2024) at $1.5 billion and our “Soonicorns” Clickatell (about $500 million), Yoco ($400 million to $500 million) and Onafriq (between $300 million to $500 million). We love to see it…
🪴 Teach ‘em young. Local e-learning platform Fintr (the peeps behind the FinMaster boardgame) is launching its brand new newsletter Mini Millionaires to help parents raise money-smart kids using a short, practical weekly email filled with tips, stories, and simple guides. We’re signing up now…
🏠 PropTech Boom. Local PropTech startup, Launchbase (which we featured here), recently revealed that after consolidating data from 2024, their platform managed to sell R4.8b worth of properties. Flexing the potential of PropTech in SA.
😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with fractional CTO and tech scaling with Octoco, easy-peasy cloud-based accounting software from Xero and 5 more vital startup tools & services. Pss we have some new services and products on there, go check them out…
BUILDER’S CORNER
3 Things for Tech Founders
Brought to you by Stream — you build your business, we tell the story.
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Use SA’s new open-source IP strategy resource: If you're raising global capital, this open-source framework is a must. Created by Dommisse Attorneys with SA SME Fund, SAVCA, and Endeavor, it shows you how to set up IP offshore — without losing your SA team or getting stuck in legal quicksand. Built for speed, scale, and investor trust. Start using it here.
Become a 2025 Startup of the Year: If you’re building in SA and ready to raise your profile, this one’s for you. Innovation City’s annual competition helped spotlight past winners like Kena Health and Wamly — and this year, there’s extra value: entrants get access to a benchmarking report based on anonymised data from all submissions. Entries close this Friday, 4 April. Enter here.
BUILDING TOGETHER
Happening over at The Open Collab
In the last few days alone, in our online network, we…
- Had an awesome first in-person event in Joburg 🥂🪩.
- Helped Malan find a couple of great labour law consultants.
- Helped Benjamin get some business valuator options to review potential investments.
- Sourced Enrico some good Stellenbosch co-working space options.
- Celebrated the arrival of Piet’s awesome new company swag!
- Got power growth-hacking lessons from the guy that grew SnapScan 🚀.
- Celebrated the success of Marco’s collab-inspired marketing strategy.
- Welcomed a host of new members — so much fun in here 💃🏻🕺🏽.
Coming up in The Open Collab:
- Join Office Hours tomorrow where we talk about all things startup. Bring your questions and get help in moving faster than ever before.
- This Friday we have a Startup Marketing Masterclass hosted by Kurt Schröder, founder and CEO of DoubleShift - a leading startup marketing and branding agency.
- PLUS access all our previous masterclasses including growth hacking, a 3 part sales masterclass and much more.
SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder network.
WHAT YOU SAID
All for the money…
Last Friday, we riddled you which SA startup raised the largest seed round in 2023, and most bet on Naked, but actually it was Peach Payments with a US$31 million Series A round in April that year…
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💰 FloatPays (13%)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 🛡️ Naked Insurance (54%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔗 Stitch (13%)
🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💳 Peach Payments (20%)
BEFORE YOU GO
Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You
Advertise or Partners — Engage 22 000 South African professionals that read The Open Letter - partner with us or run an ad campaign.
Build A Newsletter — Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? We can build it with you. Check out Stream.
Startup Founder Network — Join 100+ SA founders in our SA startup founder network called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.
Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason
