Good weekend {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? If you thought yours was eventful, this group of scientists just created a mini-universe and accidentally discovered that time isn't objectively real. So, does that mean it's still the weekend, then? 🛸

Send this to the friends you'd take on an interdimensional adventure.

In This Open Letter

Globally, 4 out of 10 teens feel completely lost around career choice (doubled from a decade ago), with 69% reporting stress when considering a career. But one SA founder is building the tool to help them come out on top…

It’s not just stress or anxiety. Students have more information on career choice today (Google explaining degrees, TikToks showing days in the life, LLMs able to generate entire career plans) than ever before.

The problem is what psychologists call choice overload. Having more options impedes choice. It’s the same as that famous jam study in retail: Shoppers offered 24 flavours of jam were 10 times less likely to buy than when there were just 6.

So, add career-choice paralysis to SA’s 37% 15-24 yo being neither employed nor studying and 60% first-year college dropout rate.

Built out of necessity

SA founder Seelan Govender first noticed this trend when his daughter hit Grade 10 with the what-now career question and no real answers. He vibe-coded a prototype to help, quickly roping in Dr Rosa Modiba, an HPCSA-registered counsellor, for governance, and then properly engineering a solution with 700+ automated tests and a formal data architecture.

The platform mapping where a teenager's marks can take them

Thandi is an AI-powered platform that turns a learner's subjects and marks into a ranked list of careers, universities, TVET colleges and bursaries they actually qualify for.

Thandi calculates a pupil's Admission Point Score (APS) automatically, then shows which paths are a strong fit and which are worth a look, each tied to who would take them and the bursaries open now. i.e., a real roadmap, complete with funding guides for NSFAS, Sasol and Funza Lushaka, document checklists, past papers, and a growing list of tutors and application support.

The interesting bit: Thandi's actual customers are the schools, with a back-end that gives Life Orientation teachers an APS distribution, career interests and at-risk-learner flags in one view. 

Over 245 learners from 140+ schools already use it, including a head girl who secured a bursary thanks to Thandi.

We're watching this space…

Almost every business in South Africa has "moved to the cloud." The brochure promised simplicity: less hardware to babysit, costs that flex with demand, infrastructure that just works.

For many operators, the reality has been the opposite.

Somewhere along the way, simple got complicated. One cloud platform became three; each with its own console, billing cycle and renewal date. Add a backup tool here, a security vendor there, a collaboration suite and suddenly a finance team is reconciling a dozen invoices in three currencies (and nobody can say with confidence what the monthly cloud bill will actually be).

Then come the harder questions: Are we secure? Are we compliant? Who do we call when something breaks at 2 am, and will they understand a South African business?

For most companies, the people carrying this load (resellers, managed service providers, software businesses) are doing it without a direct line to the people who actually run the hyperscale platforms.

The operators pulling ahead are the ones who found a way to uncomplicate things.

🏷️ No-Name Brands Own 30% of SA Retail. Private-label brands now account for R139 billion in turnover and 28.6% of FMCG sales at Woolworths, Checkers and Pick n Pay. Wonder if any of them thought of spinning those out as consumer brands yet…?

⚡ China's EV Tax U-Turn. After years of generous subsidies that created the world's biggest EV market, China is now exploring weight-based vehicle taxes, because EVs are heavier than petrol cars and wear out roads faster. The subsidy giveth, the subsidy taketh away.

📡 MTN Turns Fibre Into a Sensor Network. MTN is using agentic AI to detect physical disruptions on its fibre network by reading micro-vibrations; dispatching technicians before customers even notice. The CTO says it'll create R30bn in AI value. Wait, so it didn't do that before?

📚 Binance Brings Crypto to the Classroom. Binance is distributing 200 copies of its ABCs of Crypto book to IkamvaYouth learning centres in Gauteng and the Western Cape — bringing blockchain basics into township classrooms with workshops and ongoing support.

🚀 NaaS Lands in SA. The Open Letter team has rebranded Stream to create SA's first full-stack Newsletter as a Service (NaaS) product: Strategy, editorial, platform and growth – all in one package for B2B techs to own their audience and build trusted distribution.*

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

Most SA founders get bland AI output and blame the model when the real issue is that the AI knows nothing about their business. So we got an SA operator who rolled out Claude across an 80-person company to show us how to start teaching the AI about your business.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to building your business's AI context fast and efficiently.

☝️ Send this to a founder who needs some AI in their company.

FIFA put World Cup tickets on a blockchain. FIFA built a custom Avalanche blockchain to fight bots and scalpers at the 2026 World Cup. So far, it's issued more than 100k digital ticket rights and processed over $25 million in trading volume.

A USB worm is silently stealing crypto. Microsoft flagged a USB-spreading worm called CryptoBandits that's been active since February. It watches your clipboard every 500 milliseconds, grabs copied seed phrases and private keys, and sends them to attackers over Tor.

Binance brings 24/7 stock trading to crypto users. Binance Research's latest report shows how tokenised stocks enable round-the-clock price discovery, also noting that crypto users are increasingly embracing multi-asset investing, moving beyond crypto into equities through the platform.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Last week, we showed you Bill's AI billing assistant for law firms, asking how much financial admin you'd hand to an AI. The verdict? Draft it, but we're still signing off…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙌 All of it, take the wheel (14%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🧾 Capture and draft it, I'll approve (46%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 The boring bits, but nothing near my money (21%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙅 None, my spreadsheets and I are fine (12%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😅 What admin? My books are a shambles (7%)

Led By Her Workshop: A New Lens on Money – 25 Jun, Online: A coaching session on the hidden narratives shaping how you earn, spend, negotiate and emotionally respond to money. Not financial planning, perception-shifting. Hosted by The Lekker Network. Register free.

The Next-Gen Engineer – 25 Jun, Online: OfferZen's engineering and talent leads on what high-performing teams actually hire for in the AI era, plus panellists from Impact.com and Pollinate. Free toolkit for attendees. Register free.

Building a Business Bank from Scratch: Zazu Founder Story – 25 Jun, CPT: Zazu co-founders Rinse Jacobs and Germain Bahri on building a fintech around the realities of running and scaling businesses in Africa. Get tickets.

Going from Zero to One – 26 Jun, Online: Tramayne Monaghan (Next176) on turning an idea into first meaningful traction — 15+ years across corporate innovation and venture building distilled into one session. Founder Collab members only. Join the Collab.

🧩 Tool to Try: Naosuu redacts sensitive data from your AI prompts locally before they leave your device.

🌍 That's Interesting: The majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from photosynthetic organisms in the ocean, not from trees. Hug a plankton.

🦅 Next Level: Watch this kid call his falcon down from the sky.

🔍 Wow Site: Wiki Spy is an endless, searchable I-Spy collage of objects cut out from Wikipedia.