Fast Company SA - February 2016 by Fast Company SA

MARK ZUCKERBERG FACE B O O K CE O LO O KS

“Design is such a vital tool; it’s relevant to all sectors of the economy”

R AV I N A IDOO

Founder, Design Indaba

TO A I , VR—A N D DRO N E S

ELON MUSK I N SI DE H I S N E W PLA N

INSIDEst the 21

TO SAVE TH E PLA N E T

TOUR OF TOMORROW A GLI M PSE O F FU TU RE TE CH A LRE A DY I N U SE

DESIGN

INDABA Building a better world through CREATIVITY

R35.00

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How Ravi Naidoo has turned the event into a movement

February 2016

Contents

S P E C IAL F EATURE

Art comes alive Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo wants to make the event “a kind of a Cirque du Soleil for the intellect”. (page 32)

A BETTER WORLD THROUGH CREATIVITY Fast Company takes a look at how the Design Indaba has been driving its belief that local creativity can overcome societal challenges in Africa and, indeed, the world. Since its inception in 1995, the event has been nurturing and showcasing the country’s talented creatives and bringing top designers from around the globe to inspire great concepts that make a real difference.

“More is more”

32 Design Indaba founder

Ravi Naidoo on why the event is a movement for creative talent BY CHRIS WALDBURGER

The Originals

Meet the 2016 Emerging Creatives who are designing for the future

4 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

Conference, festival, publication and beyond

How the Design Indaba has grown into the largest creative platform in South Africa

Contents

Food of the future Microalgae is emerging as a viable, sustainable substitute for some fats in foods such as ice cream and salad dressing. (page 66)

Elon Musk Thinks Bigger

48 How the strategies behind

FEATU RES

The New New Rules of Business

16 Today’s constant change is only a

warm-up for what’s still to come. Twenty predictions for the next 20 years BY ROBERT SAFIAN

Mark Zuckerberg Is A Unicorn

20 Facebook’s CEO has built a R4.8-

trillion business—and he’s just getting started. A look at his plans for the next decade BY HARRY MCCRACKEN

Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity—plus an enormous new Gigafactory in the desert—come together in an audacious bid to save the planet BY MAX CHAFKIN

We Are A Part of The Startup Nation

Inside UCT’s pop-up social innovation curriculum for aspiring social entrepreneurs who are solving real-world problems—from campus BY EVANS MANYONGA, ANDREA WEISS

Tour of Tomorrow

66 A photo essay showing

futuristic technologies applied all over the world today

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 5

Contents Aiming high Elon Musk says the goal of his company, Tesla, has not been to make cars. “The goal has been: We need to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.” (page 48)

REG U LARS

10 From the Editor 12 The Recommender 82 Surf and Turf

Environmentally responsible production brand, Sealand, aims to rid our shores of rubbish by turning waste into wares

84 Architect of A New Creative Future

Thomas Chapman is the founder of a design studio that is leading urban transformation in Joburg’s inner city

86 The Great Innovation Frontier

Four innovation habits to cultivate in 2016 to find better ways of doing things BY WALTER BAETS

88 Fast Bytes & Events 92 Trend Forecast

Why it won’t necessarily be the formally trained at the forefront of future groundbreaking design and innovation BY DAVE NEMETH

6 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Robbie Stammers

robbie@fastcompany.co.za

ART DIRECTOR

Stacey Storbeck-Nel

stacey@insightspublishing.co.za

CHIEF SUB-EDITOR Tania Griffin

ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Keith Hill

keith@insightspublishing.co.za

ADVERTISING MANAGERS Kyle Villet, Zaid Haffejee

ADVERTISING SALES EXECUTIVE

Mandla Mangena

OFFICE MANAGER Taryn Kershaw

EDITOR Evans Manyonga

evans@fastcompany.co.za

Melissa Golden, Andrew Tingle, Luca Locatelli, Noel Spirandelli, Elyor Nematov, Alessandra Sanguinetti

FAST COMPANY INTERNATIONAL TEAM

DIGITAL PLATFORMS

CHAIRMAN

By Digital Publishing

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FINANCIAL MANAGER

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SOUTH AFRICAN EDITORIAL BOARD

PUBLISHED BY

Robert Safian

DEPUTY EDITOR David Lidsky

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Noah Robischon

EDITORS-AT-LARGE

Jon Gertner, Rick Tetzeli

SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Jill Bernstein

DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL STRATEGY Lori Hoffman

DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL & NEW BUSINESS ENTERPRISES

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Bill Shapiro

Robert Safian, Harry McCracken, Chris Waldburger, Max Chafkin, Andrea Weiss, JJ McCorvey, Neal Ungerleider, Adam Bluestein, Ben Schiller, Adele Peters, Elizabeth Segran, Walter Baets, Dave Nemeth, Evans Manyonga Cover: Supplied by Design Indaba Gallo Images/Getty Images (Justin Sullivan, Josh Edelson, Scott Olson), Antoine Antoniol/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Saumya Khandelwal/Hindustan Times via Getty Images, Thoban Jappie, relajaelcoco, McNair Evans, Christopher Noelle, Vivek Singh,

EDITOR

JJ McCorvey

Louise Marsland, Anneleigh Jacobsen, Prof. Walter Baets, Pepe Marais, Alistair King, Koo Govender, Abey Mokgwatsane, Kheepe Moremi, Herman Manson, Ellis Mnyandu, Thabang Skwambane

ARTISTS

Joe Mansueto, Mansueto Ventures

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Florian Bachleda

PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Sarah Filippi Managing Director: Robbie Stammers Physical address: 176 Main Road,

Claremont, 7700, Cape Town Postal address: PO Box 23692, Claremont, 7735 Telephone: +27 (0) 21 683 0005 Websites: www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.co.za www.insightspublishing.co.za

ART DIRECTOR Alice Alves

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Carly Migliori

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER Quentin Walz

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Mark Rosenberg

No article or any part of any article in Fast Company South Africa may be reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher. The information provided and opinions expressed in this publication are provided in good faith, but do not necessarily represent the opinions of Mansueto Ventures in the USA, Insights Publishing or the editor. Neither this magazine, the publisher or Mansueto Ventures in the USA can be held legally liable in any way for damages of any kind whatsoever arising directly or indirectly from any facts or information provided or omitted in these pages, or from any statements made or withheld by this publication. Fast Company is a registered title under Mansueto Ventures and is licensed to Insights Publishing for use in southern Africa only. 8 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

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From the Editor

Designing for tomorrow, today Design has steadily become a major element in our world today. Groundbreaking innovations seem to be coming from various spheres, no longer confined to the traditional spaces that have strong capital backing. Instead, it has become so embedded in our modern culture, with designers working on literally everything and anything, and collaborating on an unprecedented scale. Though design has never been in a state of stasis, a major boom is happening as we speak. The influence of individuals like Steve Jobs cannot be understated. Their efforts have nudged creative thinking in the right direction through their design-driven mindset. From smart-corner urban warehouses, to makeshift shacks in the sprawling townships, and an increase in maker and hacker communities, a new era of design is truly upon us. It’s clear that collaboration, innovation and creative thinking are having a major influence on the world. Thomas Chapman, an urban architect (and one of the main speakers at this year’s Design Indaba) featured in this edition, argues that the architectural profession has

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Creative collaboration Fast Company SA is the proud official media partner of the 2016 Design Indaba Conference.

a far more significant role to play in Africa than in more developed contexts, as the continent has many real spatial problems to solve. In essence, design thinking can challenge some of these issues we face. In an effort to draw greater attention to this approach of “driving a better world through creativity”, Fast Company SA is the proud official media partner of the 2016 Design Indaba Conference. We are excited to be associated with this cuttingedge event that has gained worldwide acclaim for its relevance in nurturing future creative talent while fostering a strong element of traditional design thinking. A sterling example of this is Indaba’s Emerging Creatives Programme, a developmental platform for young creatives. We feature the 2016 group of architects, fashion designers, illustrators, furniture crafters, jewellers and others who are thinking out of the box to come up with world-changing designs for the future. And the man who started it all is our cover personality Ravi Naidoo, creator and MD of the Design Indaba and its founding company, Interactive Africa. “We wanted to create a platform that would really put South Africa and Africa up on the global creativity grid,” he said of his motivation to start the event way back in 1995. Since then, he has ensured the Indaba offers our fledgling designers a strong foundation, and that the creative landscape continues evolving. As we kick off the new year, this first edition of 2016 is dedicated to South African design and creative thinking. We hope to see many of you at the Design Indaba, getting a glimpse at what the future holds.

Evans Manyonga evans@fastcompany.co.za @Nyasha1e

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The recommender What are you loving this month?

Philip Faure

Global head: Wealth Planning and Philanthropy, Standard Bank

Favourite travel club

Bateleur Club: My wife and I share a

passion for travel to wilderness areas in Africa. For our 20th wedding anniversary, we bought membership to the Bateleur Club by luxury travel company, &Beyond— giving us access to some of the top luxury wilderness lodges, but at local prices. It’s a great way to treat yourself to a few nights of luxury once a year (without the kids), as long as you’re prepared to travel during out-of-peak periods.

FAVOURITE BOOKS Green Is Not A Colour by Devan Valenti and Simon Atlas: Beautifully designed and intellectually

engaging, the book packs a powerful punch by exploring a wide range of environmental issues that face our planet, as well as the various technologies and processes that provide solutions to these seemingly overwhelming challenges. The book is a must-read for students, educators, entrepreneurs and anyone else concerned about the future of the Earth.

Rashiq Fataar

Founder, Future Cape Town website

12 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

Dr Terence Sibiya

Managing executive: Client Coverage,Nedbank Corporate & Investment Banking

The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren: In my hectic investmentbanking world, I often have to stop and wonder what on Earth I’m really here for. This books grounds me and guides my spiritual journey, allowing me to continuously question and discover my true purpose. It gives perspective on how all the various pieces (family, work, community) of my life fit together.

The recommender

FAVOURITE BUSINESS TOOLS

Favourite fashion accessory

Dagan James Rego

Associate, Biccari Bollo Mariano Inc.

Moleskine journal: With the way tech is going nowadays, we’re all trying to make our lives paperless. However, there’s just one tool that every lawyer and businessperson should never convert—the Moleskine journal. There’s something appealing and authentic about it. I make sure I capture everything important that goes on in my busy day—all of it is contained in a professionallooking, leather-bound journal. My favourite Moleskine edition is the Evernote Business Notebook (which also offers technological capabilities for those who really desire making everything paperless).

Devan Valenti

Co-founder, The Lightning Lab

Bettél watch: Produced with hand-made precision, these wooden

timepieces are not only beautifully crafted but also emulate an honesty in their use of natural materials. Founded by entrepreneurial couple Stuart and Makeeda Swan, their vision is to use their creativity to design products that can be manufactured and sold in South Africa, supporting local business.

Simon Atlas

Co-founder, The Lightning Lab

FutureCape Town.com: Very few people have such a passion and genuine understanding for the potential and importance of the value of cities and how they should function. The Future Cape Town website has done a magnificent job educating and inspiring both industry professionals and general enthusiasts.

FAVOURITE RUNNING SHOES Claire McFarlane

Adventurer & founder, ProjectBRA.org

Vibram FiveFingers: So how do I train for a 3 000-kilometre barefoot beach run, living in Joburg? My pair of FiveFingers gives me the sensation of being barefoot, but keeps my soles protected even when running the harshest trails. They’re perfect for every adventure—and, being so compact, make light travelling a breeze. FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 13

The recommender

App Alley

Couch to 5K: This training app

teaches couch potatoes how to run 5km (or for 30 minutes non-stop) in only nine weeks. You switch it on alongside your music app when you go running, and it tells you when to walk and when to run. The timing is uncanny, since it keeps pushing you just past your ‘I’m going to die’ point and then lets you walk again. Before you know it, you’ve gone from walking most of the way to running longer distances.

Stacey Vee

Head: Content Strategy, Content Candy

Slack: I like to describe

Elma Smit

SuperSport rugby presenter & marketing manager, MyPlayers

Slack as ‘Skype on steroids’. It’s hands down the most useful productivity tool we introduced in our agency last year. Internal emails have decreased by at least 70%. You can allocate a channel to each client or project, share ideas, upload files, and schedule meetings and reminders. Slack also plugs into Google Drive and project management tools such as Trello.

Francis Gersbach

Sky Guide: When I

was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut so I’d spend hours looking at the sky, searching for stars and satellites. Now I’ve found a little cheat. The Sky Guide app not only notifies you five minutes before a satellite passes or when there’s an astro event, but it also uses your phone’s gyroscope to follow where you’re looking— giving you a virtual sky in your hand, all labelled with constellations, the sun’s path, and much more.

14 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

Alessio La Ruffa

Photographer, alessiolr.com

Tweetbot:

I love the slick third-party Twitter client for iOS; it has a clean user interface and doesn’t display Twitter ads, which is a great help when you want to stay updated and cut through the noise. If I need to know how my tweets are doing at a glance, Tweetbot offers stats showing their performance.

Alessio La Ruffa profile image: Thoban Jappie

Photographer, GreatGrampops

TWENTY PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEXT 20 YEARS By Robert Safian

The doctor handed me the scissors. As I pressed down the blades, snipping the umbilical cord, I looked up at my wife. She was smiling, holding our newborn son. That was 20 years ago. Our baby is now 1.8m tall and a junior at varsity. When I look at him, I see all the stages of his life in one continuum, the toddling and the tantrums, the laughs and the arguments, the late nights coaxing a crying infant to sleep, and waiting for a teenager to come home. Fast Company US turned 20 in December 2015, and the world has changed dramatically since the cover of issue No. 1 declared: “Work Is Personal. Computing Is Social. Knowledge Is Power. Break the Rules.” Yet, that manifesto is more relevant than ever. How we interpret those words has evolved— we did not predict an App Store or an Oculus Rift—but their spirit has

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become central to our culture. We celebrate birthdays to remember all that has gone before, and also what is to come. With the December/January 2015 issue, No. 201, we recognise Fast Company US’s 20th anniversary by looking toward the future. The dynamic change of the past two decades is just a warm-up for what is still to come. I talked recently about this with CEO Hans Vestberg of the Swedish communications company, Ericsson. Because Ericsson builds products for the major telecoms providers and cellphone makers, as

well as hundreds of governments around the globe, Vestberg has inside knowledge of everybody’s plans—information he cannot specifically reveal, but that informs his thinking about where our world is trending. “Today, there are 7.2 billion mobile subscriptions,” he says, “and only 2.9 billion people have broadband,” by which he means high-speed Internet access. “But as technology advances, prices will fall. By 2020, 90% of the world’s population will be covered by mobile broadband networks. Another five to 10 years further, broadband will

have universal reach.” This, Vestberg argues, will have a transformative impact. He points to a historical precedent that is now hundreds of years old: the steam engine. When first invented, its function was to remove water from mines. Only later was the technology applied to other arenas, spawning steamships and railroads and turbocharging industry. The advent of connected mobile technology is just as powerful and equally underestimated, Vestberg says. We are still in the early stages, with implications for healthcare, education, banking, energy, manufacturing and more. “Our imagination is our limitation,” he says. Vestberg’s predictions of transformation are echoed by those on the frontier in other disciplines: genetics, alternative energy, artificial intelligence and so on. If you travel down the likeliest development paths in each of these areas and then wrap all the advances into one future, you see that we are at a dramatic inflection point. I have used the phrase Generation Flux to describe this era of transition. Because the changes are coming so fast, there is a rising premium on our ability to adjust, to be adaptable in new ways. This can be scary for some, but it is also undeniably exciting—and for those prepared to embrace this emerging reality, the possibilities are tantalising. What follows are 20 observations that we

world-spanning enterprise, virtually guarantees he will be a bedrock figure in our economic and cultural evolution for decades to come. 3

believe will hold fast in the years ahead. They are predictions—and, as such, are fraught with limitation and supposition. None of them, on their own, is shocking. That is by design. In combination, though, they outline a world of tomorrow where work is still personal, computing is still social, and knowledge is still power. And where the rules for success will be ever changing. 1

Speed Will Triumph. The best soccer teams in the world emphasise pace of play over perfection. They recognise that keeping the ball moving quickly is

better than waiting and trying to make the ideal pass. Speed emerged as a business imperative in 1995 with the meteoric rise of Netscape, and it has become even more central in the years since. Constant iteration and redefinition are central features at businesses from Amazon to Google to Netflix, and every industry is now required to embrace that pace. (The unanswered question: Which governments will learn to operate with this speed imperative?) Facebook may be the ultimate expression of iterative change, expecting new initiatives to be imperfect—and relentlessly improving them over time.

Mark Zuckerberg Will Lead. When we called Zuckerberg “The Kid Who Turned Down $1 Billion” on the cover of our May 2007 issue, he was a babyfaced 22-year-old with just 19 million users. Today he still has that baby face, but he has grown into an unparalleled leader. Now 31 years old, with nearly 1.5 billion customers across the globe, Zuckerberg is wildly successful yet still underestimated. He has relentlessly improved himself as a businessperson and continues to be focused on learning. This psychological feature, along with the fact that he has a net worth north of $30 billion (around R480 billion) and a controlling stake in a

Malala Will Build. After you’ve won a Nobel Peace Prize as a teenager, what’s next? Malala Yousafzai is answering that question by leveraging her global public image—not simply to raise awareness of the educational needs of girls in the developing world but also to orchestrate onthe-ground programmes that will have tangible impact. What her nascent Malala Fund represents, she explains, is an ongoing effort to change societal expectations. Malala herself represents the leading edge of a cohort that is only just being unleashed: young talent growing up in obscure corners of the globe. This generation will increasingly have the tools and opportunity to redefine our world. Malala is just the beginning. 4

Elon Musk Will Inspire. Whether Musk is the reallife incarnation of Tony Stark is not the point. Nor is the ultimate success of his enterprises: Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity (though we wouldn’t advise betting against them). What matters is that Musk’s ideas, and his example, are a catalysing force for progress on one of the most devilishly complicated issues of our time: climate change. As the world’s population grows and the standard of living improves, we will produce more

greenhouse gases, more pollution. Concerted, high-impact government action will not materialise unless there is a crisis. What remains, then, is a market-based solution— which is precisely what Musk is dedicated to instigating. In outlining his most audacious plans yet, Musk tells contributing writer Max Chafkin, “ ‘The Issue With Existing Batteries Is That They Suck’ ” (page 48). By exploiting that seemingly modest deficiency, Musk not only wants to build a bigger business but also inspire us to address our biggest challenges. 5

Technology Will Improve the Human Condition. Science fiction often depicts a dystopian tomorrow. But if you consider the long lens of history, technological advances have consistently improved people’s lives. We cannot forget the often cruel and rapacious things that have been perpetrated in the name of progress. Nor do we expect an end to the tragedies of natural disaster or disease outbreak, of war or terrorism. Whether by accident or overt design, nuclear, chemical and biological threats remain constant. But it is also worthwhile to remind ourselves that fears of tomorrow have often been overblown. Perhaps the most telling statistic: Global life expectancy has climbed consistently over the centuries, and in the past decade has improved for all regions of the world. That advance will continue unabated.

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Digital Tools Will Unlock Opportunity. Inequality remains rampant across the United States and around the world. The digital divide has often served to heighten the gap between the haves and have-nots. But rising mobile penetration offers the potential to shift that dynamic. When broadband smartphones achieve global ubiquity (as Ericsson’s Vestberg predicts), digital learning tools offered by Khan Academy, Duolingo and others will transform opportunity in the developing world. The teachers and students of tomorrow will not be confined to classrooms, nor to the countries and cities that can afford them. 7

Democracy Will Be Digital. Naysayers have given many explanations for why voting in the US does not take place via the Internet: identity authentication, security, reliability. These concerns have all been overcome by businesses such as banks and retailers—and before long, government will solve them as well. As a new generation of voters comes to the polls—a group raised on one-click purchases and instant access via apps—the traditional voting process will become untenable. New candidates will establish their credibilityby extolling their technological sophistication, and e-voting will be everywhere.

Diversity Will Deepen. Those controlling the halls of power in business and government in the US remain predominantly male and white. This will not persist as our population becomes more heterogeneous. An increasingly diverse leadership will be more successful too: As the pace of change accelerates, we will face knottily complex problems—and the greater the variety of approaches and experiences available to tackle them, the better the likelihood of success. 9

Mission Will Trump Money. Economists have long stressed the power of financial incentives. What’s measured is what matters; competition breeds excellence; you get what you pay for. It is all logical, yet in many circumstances it is coming up short. Recent real-world studies have shown that having a purpose associated with work produces better performance than pure financial reward. The next generation of workers will expect to be engaged in their jobs through more than just financial means.

DNA Will Be Unstoppable. The decoding of the human genome has launched a wave of new treatments and approaches. Inspiring as these examples are, though, the impact of genetic data is in its infancy.

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Medical Training Will Be Rewritten. Modern doctoring begins with a boot-camp experience: endless days of unending shifts as young interns are forced to ingest—and deliver—diagnoses with reflex-like expertise. As our library of medical knowledge expands beyond any doctor’s ability to retain all that information, the doctors of the future will have to become data interpreters, tapping into Watson-like technical tools to both diagnose conditions and optimise treatments. This transition promises to make healthcare more effective and, ideally, will allow doctors to focus even more on the important task of patient service. 12

Human Empathy Will Be Central. It’s not

just doctors who can improve their bedside manner. We can all stand to listen and respond with more sensitivity. In fact, as machine learning and artificial intelligence insinuate themselves more deeply into manufacturing and the workplace, the one arena that will never be usurped by technology is human-to-human communication. 13

Entrepreneurship Will Not Be for Everyone. The ubiquity of ABC’s Shark Tank underscores just how appealing the entrepreneur has become in global culture. Everyone wants to start their own business, to launch their own Zuckerbergian success. Government leaders extol the virtue of the startup world, and more and more young people hope

for a future where they can be their own bosses. There’s only one problem: Entrepreneurship is hard work that requires both high-intensity risk taking and a steel-stomach capacity for absorbing disappointment. Some people are psychologically suited for this roller coaster; many of us are not. 14

Bubbles Will Burst. Is there a tech bubble? Can all those billiondollar ‘unicorn’ startups really be worth so much? Will investors who believe the hype ultimately end up getting burnt? The answer to all three of those questions is “yes”. Yes, there is a tech bubble in some places. Truth is, there is always a bubble somewhere. Some of those unicorns are really worth billions—

That doesn’t mean we will all be disrupted, but it does mean that every enterprise will need cyberprotection in ways that haven’t historically been budgeted for. Costs will rise. Count on it. 17

and some are not. Some investors will get burnt; others will get rich. Which is which? We’ll know once it happens. Talk of bubble versus no bubble is a distraction for most of us, a parlour game. When major bubbles burst, almost everyone is taken by surprise—and even those who aren’t are generally upended nearly as much as the rest of us. What’s most important, once again, is remaining adaptable: If the arena you’re involved in turns out to be a bubble, it will be time to change arenas. 15

Simple Will Be More Difficult. New technologies often rise on the promise of making everything simpler,

better and cheaper. Over time, we learn that they often do make things better—and even cheaper—but rarely do things remain simple for long. Consider the advertising marketplace, which once seemed pretty straightforward (network TV ads for all!), but marketers had limited knowledge of who saw their ads and how those prospects responded. Marketers can now target specific pools of customers and track their activity. Yet, nothing about the modern ad world is simple: There are more avenues for reaching customers than ever, and managing a variety of social, web and mobile programmes makes the old days of TV’s hegemony seem quaintly appealing. Companies like Google

contend that things will get easier, thanks to new analytics and programmatic marketplaces. More likely: The industry will become more effective at targeting the right message to the right person in the right way—but it will also be more complex. 16

Cybersecurity Will Be Costly. Every company is a ‘tech company’ today, because we all use technology to operate (in the same way that we are all ‘electric’ companies, because we tap into that grid). The necessary corollary to this fact: We are all vulnerable to cyber disruption, whether from hackers or our own or others’ incompetence.

China and India Will Dominate. Pundits have long predicted that the ‘sleeping giants’ China and India would awake to challenge US and European economic dominance. In the past 20 years, the progression down this path has not been a straight line—but it has been undeniable. The manifestations have been counterintuitive too: Apple is effectively a China-centred manufacturing giant with an American design and marketing arm; its Chinese rival, Xiaomi, is expanding into India following an analogous strategy. The impact of these rising economies will continue to deepen. 18

Food Will Be Healthier. No high-fructose corn syrup. No trans fats. Less salt, sugar and fat. The supermarket aisles burst with assertions of healthier foods; it is undoubtedly true that, more than ever, we are increasingly aware of what we are putting into our bodies. The success of Chipotle’s and Whole Foods in the US—and Wellness Warehouse, Kauai and Woolworths in South Africa—illustrates that consumers are willing to pay for higher quality products and, even more,

to demand them. What once was luxury will, over time, become table stakes. 19

Cash Will Disappear. Carrying a little emergency money around with you has always made sense, even if you ended up tapping that resource for something less than essential. But that need is rapidly dissipating. First there were ATMs (why carry cash around when you can grab it when you need it?), but electronic payments via phones and chips are the wave that will wash away the need for cash entirely. Penny for your thoughts? What’s a penny? 20

We Will All Be Family. Phones, planes and televisions have all served to make the world smaller, and the ongoing wave of technological change will only draw us into closer proximity. We will have less licence to ignore the troubles (and challenges) in other parts of the globe, and we’ll have a vested interest in maintaining familial peace. Nobody knows how to criticise you quite like your kin—they know your vulnerabilities well—but no one is better at coming to your aid, either. Of these 20 items, this is the one with the largest measure of hope: that our increasing knowledge of and intimacy with one another leads to greater understanding and opportunity for all. editor@fastcompany.com

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“THESE THINGS C A N ’ T F A I L”

As Facebook has grown, so too have CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions. An inside look at how his vision for virtual reality, artificial intelligence and drones will cement his dominance for the next decade By Harry McCracken

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“M

ark is fixing stuff.” I’m killing time in the Frank Gehry–designed Building 20, the signature feature of which is its soaring 40 300 square metres of open space, the latest addition to Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California. A PR handler is explaining why CEO Mark Zuckerberg is running slightly behind schedule for our chat. I express surprise. Mark still fixes stuff? “To say he’s actively involved,” she confides, “is an understatement. He notices things that are broken before anybody.” As recently as 2012, the year Zuckerberg set a personal goal to code every day, that might have meant he had detected something glitchy on Facebook’s site and was reprogramming it himself. When he emerges a few minutes later, unspecified stuff presumably fixed, we sit down on adjacent couches in a fishbowl conference room near his desk in Building 20, and Zuckerberg makes it clear that those days are gone. “If we’re trying to build a world-class News Feed, and a world-class messaging product, and a world-class search product, and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality, and build drones, I can’t write every line of code,” he tells me. “I can’t write any lines of code.” The Facebook of today—and tomorrow— is far more expansive than it was just a few years ago. It’s easy to forget that when the company filed to go public on February 1, 2012, it was just a single website and an app that the experts weren’t sure could ever be profitable. Now, “almost a billion and a half people use the main, core Facebook service, and that’s growing. But 900 million people use WhatsApp, and that’s an important part

22 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

of the whole ecosystem now,” Zuckerberg says. “Four hundred million people use Instagram, 700 million people use Messen ger, and 700 million people use Groups. Increasingly, we’re just going to go more and more in this direction.” To further grow these services and any others that Facebook develops or acquires, Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on three major technology initiatives. One is developing advanced artificial intelligence that can help Facebook understand what matters to users. The second is virtual reality, in the form of Oculus VR, the groundbreaking company that Facebook acquired in March 2014 for $2 billion (more than R30 billion), which Zuckerberg believes will be the next major technology we use to interact with each other. And the third is bringing the Internet, including Facebook, to the 4 billion–plus humans who aren’t yet connected, even if it requires flying a drone over a village and beaming data down via laser. Given the robust health of Facebook’s business, Zuckerberg is comfortable lavishing attention and resources on these visions. Facebook gave Fast Company US wide-ranging access to Zuckerberg, his senior leadership team and others to delve into the company’s audacious plans to shape the next decade. In the tech industry, there’s nothing weird about setting goals so lofty that they sound unachievable. Google CEO Larry Page, for instance, is so invested in the virtue of gambling on disparate, wildly ambitious projects—from self-driving cars to smart contact lenses—that he restructured his company around the concept in August last year, making Google’s core businesses a division of a new idea factory called Alphabet. Zuckerberg, by contrast, isn’t interested in doing everything—just the things he views as deeply related to his company’s central vision, and crucial to it. “There are different ways to do innovation,” he says, drawing a stark contrast without ever mentioning Page, Google or Alphabet. “You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them, and be committed to them.” Facebook’s mission is “to give everyone in the world the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” as Zuckerberg says, explaining he is now spending a third of his time overseeing these

future initiatives. “These things can’t fail. We need to get them to work in order to achieve the mission.” When Facebook was morphing from Ivy League college project to Silicon Valley startup, Zuckerberg had not only “never run a company—he’d never been in a company,” marvels Marc Andreessen, the browser pioneer, venture capitalist, Facebook board member and long-time Zuckerberg confidant. “He’s learnt everything he knows about business in the last 10 years. And now he’s one of the best CEOs in the world.” Whether because Zuckerberg, 31, started so young, or because he retains his youthful demeanour and grey-T-shirt work uniform, he has been underestimated for almost as long as his company has existed. Facebook wouldn’t work outside Harvard. It wouldn’t work outside elite colleges. It wouldn’t work among the general populace. It couldn’t topple MySpace. It couldn’t make enough money to justify its valuation. It couldn’t hold on to teenagers once their parents signed up. It wouldn’t matter as much on smartphones as it had on PCs. It couldn’t make enough money on mobile to satisfy Wall Street. Zuckerberg and his team have overcome every doubt. Almost 90% of the nearly 1.5 billion people a month who use Facebook access it on a mobile device at least part of the time, and more than three-quarters of its $3.8 billion (R63.2 billion) in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2015 came from mobile users. The company runs four of the six largest social platforms in the world (all but Google’s YouTube and Tencent’s WeChat) and is wildly profitable. Four years ago, when the company revealed that 1 billion people logged in to the service in one month, the news was astounding. In August 2015, 1 billion people used Facebook on a single Monday, and it felt inevitable. When I ask people close to Zuckerberg how, exactly, he has pulled off these achievements, I don’t hear a lot of anecdotes about him swooping in and personally making genius-level decisions that suddenly changed everything. Instead, they praise his inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to deploy resources, and devotion to improving Facebook and himself. He has a knack for carving up grand plans into small, doable victories. “Most of our conversation was about long-term strategy, and then we’d backtrack from there to what we should do over the next month,” says Bret Taylor, who worked

M A RK ZUCK ERBERG'S GROW T H CH A R T Facebook’s CEO has worked hard at improving himself—and it’s paid off for the business

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PERSONAL CHALLENGE

Wear a tie every day.

Learn Mandarin.

Only eat animals he kills himself.

COMPANY MILESTONE

Facebook is taken more seriously by advertisers and becomes cash-flow positive a year ahead of schedule, transforming it from startup to long-term comer.

Although Facebook isn’t available in China, the service exceeds 500 million monthly active users, becoming the world’s largest social network.

Acquired more than 10 startups. Moved company headquarters to the former home of Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, on a large, centralised campus.

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Code every day.

Meet a new person every day who doesn’t work at Facebook.

Write at least one thank-you note every day.

Read a new book every two weeks.

Facebook’s IPO values the company at $104 billion (R1.7 trillion), a record for a new listing— though a software glitch slightly marred the debut. Purchases Instagram.

Launches Internet.org, in partnership with other tech companies, with the goal of making Internet access available to the entire world population.

Among the cards Zuckerberg might have sent: to Jan Koum, for selling him WhatsA pp for R369 billion; and to Palmer Luckey, for selling him Oculus VR for R33.5 billion.

Facebook expands its platform as a publisher, introducing Instant Articles and accelerating its video initiatives. It also begins to seed Oculus with content.

Illustrations by relajaelcoco

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 23

24 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

HOW ZUCK USES FACEBOOK Mark has been using his own creation longer than anyone. Today, his posts give insight into his interests and activities—and no matter the subject, Facebook’s mission of making the world more open and connected always seems to be top of mind.

HE’S STATESMAN-LIKE

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If you see a photo of Zuckerberg in a suit and tie, the odds are high that he’s meeting with an international dignitary. In September, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a town-hall forum on Facebook’s campus. Modi endorsed the power of social media to keep government accountable.

HE’S HUMAN

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On July 31, Zuckerberg posted that his wife, Priscilla Chan, was expecting a baby girl after three miscarriages: “You feel so hopeful when you learn you’re going to have a child. You start imagining who they’ll become and dreaming of hopes for their future. You start making plans, and then they’re gone.”

HE TAKES STANCES

291 731 likes

When the US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage, Zuckerberg posted a graphic showing the growth in Facebook LGBT groups since 2008. “Our country was founded on the promise that all people are created equal, and today we took another step toward achieving that promise.”

HE CELEBRATES SUCCESS

60 997 likes

“Our community reached a nice milestone today,” Zuckerberg wrote in February last year. More than 2 million small businesses were buying ads on Facebook—which he said was good for those companies, their customers and the economy. Left unstated: It’s also very good for Facebook.

HE’S PLAYFUL

991 333 likes

In April, Zuckerberg donned sunglasses to pose with action star Vin Diesel, who dropped by Facebook to talk about what it’s like to have 87 million followers. He was stoked—“I’m looking forward to seeing Fast & Furious 7 tonight!”—and noted that Diesel writes all his own Facebook posts.

Antoine Antoniol/Bloomberg via Getty Images

as Facebook’s CTO from 2009 to 2012 and who was at the company when it corrected course after a famously bumpy first attempt at putting the service on smartphones. “It’s one of the main reasons Facebook is where it is today.” Zuckerberg “is a total inspiration in how much he cares about his work and in how hard he works,” says Chris Cox, who dropped out of a Stanford graduate programme in 2005 to join the company as a software engineer and is now chief product officer—and is so integral to its culture that he still speaks with every new employee as part of his or her orientation. “For all of us who work with him, it’s like, Man, he is so good at improving.” Sue Desmond-Hellmann is a Facebook board member and CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which puts her in close proximity to two prodigies who quit Harvard to seek fortunes out west. Both Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, she says, “have this sense of relentlessness. ‘Why can’t that happen? Why can’t we accomplish this?’ It can be fun to be around that. It can also be like, ‘Oh. My. God.’ ” When I meet with COO Sheryl Sandberg, she shares a personal story of a family gathering and making s’mores, which captures several of Zuckerberg’s preternatural gifts. “Mark said, ‘I’m going to make a marshmallow,’ ” she tells me in her conference room, which is adorned with a framed drawing of her as Spider-Woman. “I looked at my friend and said, ‘He’s going to make the perfect marshmallow.’ Because he’s going to be the one out of all of us who is going to have the patience. In order to make the right marshmallow, you can’t do it right in the fire, because then it gets burnt. You can’t walk away. You actually have to sit there for five to 10 minutes with the marshmallow above the flame, but not too close, so that it gets completely heated but doesn’t burn. And the only person who’s actually willing to do that is Mark. Because he is that focused and that determined. I’ve never met anyone with more perseverance than Mark Zuckerberg.” In hindsight, there were two particular moments that have put Facebook in the enviable position of being able to pursue its most audacious dreams. The first was a recruiting spree back in 2007–2008, when the company concluded it needed more players with serious Silicon Valley experience. A significant percentage of the current leadership joined during this time, including Sandberg, who came from Google to be the principal architect of the business. From Mozilla, the Firefox browser purveyor, Zuckerberg hired Mike Schroepfer— known universally as Schrep—who ultimately replaced Taylor as CTO.

Chris Cox Chief Product Officer, Facebook

Saumya Khandelwal/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Cox poses for a profile shoot during an interview on January 12, 2016 in New Delhi. Of the billion Facebook users the world over, less than a sixth are in India. But of its next billion users, Facebook expects a third to come from India. To get its target, Facebook is trying new things like Facebook Lite: the thinner, easierto-load version that consumes less data and is built specifically for India.

“The amount of trust and bandwidth that you build up working with someone for five, seven, 10 years? It’s just awesome,” says Zuckerberg. “I care about openness and connectedness in a global sense. [Sandberg] has the emotional warmth and ability to connect with people that allows us to live that mission inside the company. She’s even better than people think she is.” As for Schrep, “he’s just extraordinary at the patience and composure you need for managing long-term projects.” Zuckerberg, unlike many of his rivals, has been able to keep his leadership team stable. Their cohesiveness led to the second key moment: the Instagram acquisition and its subsequent success. When Facebook announced it was buying the photo-sharing juggernaut in April 2012, less than six weeks before its IPO, a flurry of articles followed with titles such as “Five Ways Facebook Will Ruin In stagram”. Instead, the deal became a model for how businesses in Facebook’s portfolio get managed. Zuckerberg left co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in charge,

encouraged them to preserve their own culture, and gave them access to tools— from Facebook’s recruiting team to its spam-fighting technologies—that helped them get where they were planning to go anyway, only faster. “Schrep and I work day-to-day, operationally, on how we build our team, where we hire from, organisational stuff,” says Systrom, Instagram’s lanky, bearded CEO. “Mark and I work most closely on product. And Sheryl and I work most closely on advertising and strategic issues around policy. Imagine getting to have Mark, Sheryl and Schrep on your board. Many companies in the Valley would kill to have that. And we get it by default, which is pretty sweet.” Instagram’s user base tripled in the 10 months after the acquisition announcement, to 100 million monthly users, then doubled in the next 13 months. (It now boasts more than 400 million users.) The lessons Facebook learnt from the deal might have been as valuable as Instagram’s revenue potential. It began pursuing major acquisitions more aggressively—it acquired

WhatsApp and Oculus in early 2014—and then found itself looking at its own services with fresh eyes. Zuckerberg hired PayPal president David Marcus to run its chat product, Messenger, and decided to remove it from Facebook’s smartphone version, forcing users to download a stand-alone app. “We were all incredibly uncomfortable with that,” says a former Facebook employee who was present when Zuckerberg explained his rationale. “But he had thought it through carefully, the core use cases and the competitive situation.” A little over a year later, Messenger’s active user base more than tripled. Splitting Messenger off from Facebook let Marcus begin to build his own business model, one akin to China’s messaging behemoth, WeChat. Messenger has its own app store, with partners such as ESPN offering animated GIFs, and a feature that allows companies (including e-commerce retailers Everlane and Zulily) to conduct customer service—from delivery tracking to returns—within Messenger. “We’re not in a rush,” says Marcus. “But over time, we

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 25

can build a really good business out of these interactions.” Three thousand miles away from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, in an office building in New York’s Noho neighbourhood that was once a Wanamaker department store, a researcher named Rob Fergus is showing me software designed to identify objects in a video stream. Computers have long struggled to learn what’s happening in video, which contains so much more data than text or a still photo. He points a webcam that’s attached to a laptop running his program at a remote control. The software, which is so computationally intensive that it causes the cooling fans inside his laptop to kick in at a full, ear-piercing blast, thinks the remote is a turtle. He focuses the camera on a computer mouse. Once again, it thinks it’s spotted a turtle. Only occasionally does it correctly identify an item. Fergus looks sheepish. But the point of the demonstration isn’t to prove that Facebook is ready to roll out this AI feature,

just that they’re working on it. If you’ve ever felt like your Facebook News Feed is filled with people you don’t care about sharing thoughts you didn’t particularly want to hear, you’ll appreciate why Facebook is pushing to further the art of AI. In its current form, the social network is still far better at collecting vast amounts of data than understanding what that data means. Advanced AI could help emphasise the stuff that’s truly relevant to you, keeping you on the service longer and boosting your attractiveness as a subject for targeted advertising. “Facebook is working to be at the centre of the world of AI, because it will affect Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger,” says Systrom. “It’s broadly applicable to all social products.” Facebook has dabbled in AI for years. In 2010, for example, it introduced facialrecognition technology to identify people in photos. In late 2013, though, Zuckerberg came to believe that AI—which he calls “one of the hardest engineering challenges of our time”—was central to the company’s future and decided to establish a lab devoted to it.

He began courting Yann LeCun, a New York University faculty member and world-class expert in deep learning, to run it. Unlike the archetypal young turk Facebook employee, the 55-year-old, Paris-born LeCun is an éminence grise of his craft, with decades of experience studying machine vision, pattern recognition and other technologies with the potential to make the social network smarter. LeCun, however, was disinclined to leave academia or New York. When Zuckerberg thinks Facebook needs something, though, he refuses to treat obstacles as obstacles. He offered to let LeCun set up Facebook AI Research’s headquarters in Manhattan and retain his professorship on the side. LeCun came aboard. Problem solved. Because Zuckerberg would not be able to interact with LeCun in person on a daily basis, he had the AI researchers who did work at Facebook’s main campus sit near him so he could learn from them. “When we moved to the new building, we ended up being separated from Zuck by about 10 [metres],” LeCun chuckles. “He said, ‘No,

Sheryl Sandberg COO, Facebook

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Sandberg speaks on a panel at the Fortune Global Forum on November 3, 2015 in San Francisco. Virtual reality is “becoming reality,” she said.

26 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

LeCun’s work is directly affecting Facebook’s bottom line, in the form of better spam-prevention tools and software to verify that ads are up to company standards—a task that was once a labour-intensive manual process. “I joke that the lab has paid for itself over the next five years with work they’ve already done,” says Schroepfer. Palmer Luckey and I are flapping our arms in adjoining isolation-booth-like rooms in Oculus’s quarters in Building 18 on Facebook’s campus. In the virtual-reality world we’re sharing, though, Luckey, the endearing 23-year-old wunderkind who founded Oculus VR in his parents’ garage in 2011, has transmogrified himself into a hovering, cartoony head and hands, and we’re playing antigravity Ping-Pong. Next, we set off fireworks together and he shoots me with a zap gun, which instantly shrinks me to the size of a gnat as he towers above me. A few days later, when I meet with Zuckerberg for our first conversation, he’s eager to talk about Oculus Ping-Pong even before I begin asking him questions. As he delineates the pleasures that user-adjustable physics bring to table tennis, his expression takes on some of the same goofy glee I’d experienced. (Zuckerberg, a gamer himself, is a devotee of Civilization, a venerable game series that Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe worked on in a previous life. The goal of the original 1991 version of Civ—“build an empire to stand the test of time”—neatly encapsulates its appeal to the Zuckerbergian brain.) Anyone who’s had his or her mind blown by a few minutes of Oculus time in a 3D, 360-degree world can appreciate why Zuckerberg is grinning. But if Oculus were only about games, it wouldn’t be an obvious fit for his mission-first vision of Facebook’s future. His interest in VR dates back to his experience with, of all things, phones. When the modern smartphone was being born—Apple’s iPhone debuted in 2007 and Google’s Android in 2008—Facebook was a red-hot startup, but there was no way it could have written its own mobile platform from scratch, let alone persuaded the rest of the industry to adopt it. By 2013, when it had a bit more clout, Facebook created Home, which slathered a Facebook-based veneer on top of Android. The notable flop reinforced the limitations of building on someone else’s operating system. “One of my big regrets,” Zuckerberg says wistfully, “is that Facebook hasn’t had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.”

UP A ND T O T HE RIGH T Facebook’s growth machine is what gives the company its currency to pursue AI, VR and connectivity. FACEBOOK MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS/POPULATION

US and Canada 213m out of 365m

Europe 311m out of 738m

A sia-Pacif ic 496m out of 4.3bn

R e s t of t he wor ld 471m out of 1.7bn

REVENUE IN 2015 Q3 U S a nd C a n ad a R35.5bn

A si aP ac i f ic R11.6bn E u r op e R17.4bn

R e s t of t he wor ld R7.4bn

SOCIAL MEDIA USE BY SOUTH AFRICANS 2015 W hats App 16.4m

Yo u T u b e 8.6m

Facebook 13m

Instagram 2.6m

T w itter 7.4m

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 27

Sources: Facebook 2015 Q3 Earnings Report; World Wide Worx and Fuseware’s South African Social Media Landscape 2016

this is too far, move closer.’ ” And so they did. (This is a signature move that Zuckerberg uses to absorb new material; when the team prepared Facebook’s Timeline feature in 2011, he placed key design talent near his desk, and he seated Systrom near him after the Instagram acquisition.) The mandate for the 50-person AI team is also vintage Zuckerberg: Aim ridiculously high, and focus on where you want to go over the long term. “One of our goals for the next five to 10 years,” Zuckerberg tells me, “is to basically get better than human level at all the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition. Taste and smell, we’re not that worried about,” he deadpans. “For now.” Fergus and his fellow researchers have the freedom to start small rather than think immediately of the massive data problems posed by services with several hundred million users or more. Antoine Bordes, who relocated from a French university to join the New York team (though there’s now a Paris branch, because the city is also a hotbed of AI talent), is teaching a computer concepts such as “John is in the playground” and “John picked up the football” in order to help it learn to answer queries such as “Where is the football?” Everything draws on a vocabulary of just 50 words, a purposefully dinky number chosen so that researchers can tell exactly what’s going on. “This is not big data,” says Bordes, who is wearing a T-shirt depicting a robot boxing a dinosaur. “This is supersmall data.” LeCun has given Facebook a lab with a strong university-like feel. Rather than having to make sure their work lines up with Facebook’s product plans, researchers—many of them fellow academics—can pursue their passions while a separate group, Applied Machine Learning, is responsible for figuring out how to turn the lab’s breakthroughs into features. “The senior research scientists, you don’t tell them what to work on,” LeCun says. “They tell you what’s interesting.” Technologies incubated by LeCun and his team are already popping up in Facebook products such as Moments, a new app that scours your phone’s camera roll for snapshots of friends, then lets you share those photos with those people. “Most researchers do care about their stuff having practical relevance,” says Fergus, who is technically still on leave from NYU, where he worked alongside LeCun. “In academia, a great outcome is you publish a paper that people seem to like at a conference.”

(The company has done okay on smartphones: Multiple studies show that Facebook captures more of users’ mobile time than any other service.) Oculus, then, represents two big bets in one: that VR will be the next major computing platform, supplanting phones the same way that handheld devices usurped desktops—and that human nature won’t change. “If you look at how people spend time on all computing platforms, whether it’s phones or desktops before that, about 40% is spent on some kind of communications and media,” Zuckerberg says. “Over the long term, when [Oculus] becomes a more mature platform, I would bet it’s going to be that same 40% of the time spent doing social interactions and things like that. And that’s what we know. That’s what we can do.” Already, Oculus helped out with Facebook’s new 360-degree video feature that debuted last September. Before Zuckerberg’s vision can be realised, Oculus needs to start shipping its Rift headsets. The Facebook acquisition didn’t change the company’s near-term

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goal, which is to offer a version of Rift aimed at hard-core gamers. The closest Iribe has got to disclosing how much the headset will cost is saying that the all-in investment, including a PC, will be about $1 500 (R25 000). That includes an Xbox One gamepad, provided through a surprise deal with Microsoft. The Oculus Touch hand controllers, which are as much of a revelation as the headset and necessary for tasks such as wielding a Ping-Pong paddle, will cost extra and arrive later. Oculus might have prospered as an independent company; among other accomplishments, it had already scored the most spectacular hiring coup imaginable by signing on legendary game programmer John Carmack (who helped create the landmark first-person shooter Doom) as its CTO. But like Instagram, it has benefited from Facebook ownership. “We have supercharged recruiting,” says Iribe when I chat with him moments after the June 2015 media event in San Francisco, where he showed off the Oculus Touch controllers for the first time. “We were 60 or 70 people

when we got acquired. And we’re 360-plus today. It’s just incredible how fast we’ve been able to grow.” Oculus has taken full advantage of Zuckerberg’s penchant for strategic acquisitions. “We come to him and say, ‘Hey, there’s this brilliant group of computervision scientists, and if they were here and working on this feature, it may be able to land in the next product or a product in two generations,’ ” says Iribe, who has quietly snapped up five small companies since Oculus officially became part of Facebook in 2014. “And he’s like, ‘Okay, let’s go do this.’ ” As usual with a new venture, Zuckerberg is taking an uncommonly patient approach to making money from Oculus. “Over the long term, we need to make sure it’s sustainable,” he says. “But sustainable could mean selling it at break-even and having a business around software or some other part of the platform, which is actually something that we’re much better attuned to.” For Facebook, judging Oculus based on its potential is second nature. “We’ve got a five- to 10-year R&D road map for Oculus

AFP Photo/Josh Edelson

Zuckerberg at the F8 summit, Facebook’s annual global developer conference, in San Francisco on March 25, 2015, where the biggest news was the new Facebook Messenger platform.

that’s very clear about what problems we need to go take down and how we’re going to do it,” Schroepfer tells me. “And so we’re just going to build better and better sensors and hardware and software that’s going to allow you to do more and more, and that’s going to create these amazing experiences.” Not everyone is as convinced of Zuckerberg’s VR dreams. Wall Street, for one, is having trouble peering quite so far ahead. “I worry a bit about expectations,” says Colin Sebastian, senior analyst at Robert W. Baird. “Consumers have dreams of seamlessly entering these interactive environments and interacting with friends. The tech is early and the virtual environments are very basic.” And the competition is intense. Sony and HTC also have VR headsets coming out this year. Then there’s Google, with its Cardboard viewer that offers VR using just a smartphone and a paper case for as little as $15 (around R200 in SA). Cardboard is nowhere near as compelling as Oculus, but it’s cheap, approachable and available right now. Zuckerberg has bigger ideas in mind for what Oculus could become. When he discusses the company, he consistently refers to “VR and AR”, the latter being augmented reality—the technology that layers virtual objects into the real world. (Imagine a fictional character appearing in front of you to interact with you in your home.) AR underpins Microsoft’s forthcoming HoloLens product as well as the stealthy, much-buzzed-about Magic Leap. In October, both Zuckerberg and Iribe confirmed publicly that Oculus is indeed working on AR. If Oculus can squeeze its technology into something that looks more like a pair of glasses and lets you see the real world as well as the virtual one, “it could be the last electronics device that a lot of people need to buy,” Zuckerberg muses. And this time around, Facebook would be the company selling it.

What’s changed is we have a lot more resources now in terms of the business growing and the number of people we have to help us move the world forward.” With the company now reaching almost 1.5 billion people, Zuckerberg can raise that last part—moving the world forward—to a new level. In August 2014, he appointed product VP Naomi Gleit, one of the company’s longest serving employees (she joined in 2005), to manage dozens of staffers dedicated exclusively to implementing functionality that helps Facebook members do good. A donation tool, launched in 2014, allows users to respond to disasters by giving money, a task that—Facebook being Facebook—it sees as an engineering problem that should be attacked through continuous iteration. “I geek out on this, but with the Ebola campaign we asked users to select a donation amount,” explains Gleit. “We also asked them to pick a specific charity that they wanted to donate to.” This proved confusing to users and didn’t produce as much giving as Facebook had

Facebook has succeeded because it has consistently found a way to scale—its service, its business and its ambitions. “The Facebook of today is in so many ways exactly like the Facebook of 2008,” says VP of human resources and recruiting, Lori Goler, who joined the company that year, when it had a mere 80 million users and less than one-twentieth its current headcount. “The culture is the same. The values are the same. Mark’s tremendous vision, intellect, learning mindset—all of that is the same.

hoped. “With the Nepal campaign, we reduced it from five steps to two,” Gleit says. “We had a preselected donation amount, and we chose multiple charities and then distributed among them equally.” Tools like this “maybe only can happen on Facebook, or can happen uniquely well on Facebook,” says Zuckerberg (who, along with his wife Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician, has given $1.6 billion/R26.8 billion to various causes). “I think about the organdonation listing work that we did. The Safety

“ONE OF OUR G O A L S,” Z U C K E R B E R G S AY S, “ I S T O G E T BETTER THAN HUMAN L E V E L AT A L L O F T H E P R I M A R Y S E N S E S.”

Check stuff that we’ve done, where 150 million people were notified of their friends being safe in the [Nepal] earthquake. You can only do that if you’ve mapped out what people’s relationships are, and you have a sense of where people are in the world, and you have a tool that they’re checking every day.” He’s right: Facebook can indeed do things no other company can. But it can’t do anything for people who remain disconnected from the digital world. “If we really want to connect everyone in the world and give everyone the ability to have a voice and share what they want with the people around them, then you can’t just build the biggest Internet service,” Zuckerberg says. “You also have to help grow the Internet.” In 2013, Facebook enlisted Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung and other tech giants to help it found Internet.org: the global-connectivity initiative dedicated to bringing the Internet to the 60% of people worldwide who aren’t yet online. The effort is a hybrid of short-term altruism and long-term capitalism. “The fundamental connectivity problem is a financial one,” Sandberg explains. “For 90% of the people, it’s cost. The World Bank puts absolute poverty at about $1.25 [about R20] a day. One in six people lives under that. If you’re the average connected Facebook user in the US, you spend a dollar a day implicitly on data. So the business models have to change, and the cost needs to go down. And that’s what we’re trying to do.” Adds Matt Grob, CTO of Qualcomm, “It’s not lost on our businesses that as economic standings improve, there will be opportunities—but that’s not the initial goal. We’ve seen throughout the world that when you provide improved connectivity, people are more able to educate their children and participate in political and government activities, and sell their wares or find jobs.” Internet.org’s first effort—an app offering free access to Facebook, news, search, job listings and other services—is live in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa and 17 other countries. Facebook has deployed it in collaboration with local wireless carriers, and almost 10 million people use it. But the app has received pushback on multiple grounds, particularly for offering only certain curated services rather than the full, unbridled Internet—a violation, critics say, of net neutrality principles. The debate has been particularly heated in India: Investor Mahesh Murthy charged that giving poor people free access to a sliver

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of the web amounted to “economic racism”, and several major media companies that had joined the effort pulled out. For Facebook, releasing something, gauging reaction, and then tweaking as necessary is not only normal but also a badge of honour—after all, one of the company’s guiding principles is “Done is better than perfect”. When I ask Zuckerberg about the controversy, he says, “Internet.org is working. We’ve learnt a lot from our efforts already. We’ve listened to a lot of feedback from people in the communities we’re connecting, and have responded by making significant changes to the program.” Among other adjustments, it’s made the app more secure and private, and now lets any thirdparty service submit itself for inclusion, subject to technical restrictions. Given time, the company may get the Internet.org app to a place that’s relatively uncontroversial. Even now, it has its allies. “I firmly believe that at this point, some Internet is better than no Internet,” says Helani Galpaya, CEO of LIRNEasia, a communications think tank based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For the places on Earth where there’s currently no Internet, Facebook and Internet.org are tackling that issue too. In terms of land area, explains Yael Maguire, director of Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, “there’s only 10% of the world that is not able to connect if they pulled out a phone. The focus for this lab, going back to the mission of the company, is to figure out how we can connect the last 10%.” Talking with Maguire, you quickly see why Zuckerberg entrusted him with this challenge: The way he rattles off stats and facts and calmly deconstructs goals that sound nearly impossible is reminiscent of his boss’s own manner. Facebook opened the Connectivity Lab in March 2014, and Maguire and his team have concluded that the answer to their challenge is a drone—although Maguire prefers the lesspoliticised (though not exactly catchy) term, HAPI Link, which is short for highaltitude platform Internet link. By charging an unmanned aerial vehicle’s battery via solar power and flying it at about 20 to 25 kilometres, above weather and conventional aircraft, the company believes it could efficiently send high-speed Internet access down to where it is needed via laser. Facebook began the project with more hardware engineering experience than one may imagine. It started accumulating this more than a half-decade ago, when execs

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decided the best way to deliver Facebook reliably and efficiently to hundreds of millions of people was to construct its own data centres and fill them with its own servers. That path led to the Open Compute Project, Maguire’s purview at Facebook prior to the Connectivity Lab, which created power-efficient, easy-to-repair servers that the company could instal by the thousands in data centres located everywhere from Prineville, Oregon to Luleå, Sweden. Rather than treat its designs as proprietary, Facebook shared them with the rest of the industry via a non-profit that grew to include support from Apple, Dell, HP, Intel and Microsoft, among others. “When I joined, we didn’t have mechanical engineers,” says Open Compute Project Foundation board member Frank Frankovsky, who headed hardware design for Facebook’s servers before leaving in 2014 to co-found a storage startup. “We hired some of the best in the world. And guess what? Drones need mechanical engineers too.” The company acquired instant expertise in unmanned aeronautics in March 2014 by plunking down $20 million (R335 million) for Ascenta, a UK–based startup founded by Andrew Cox, whose previous efforts included a military drone that set a world record by staying aloft for almost two weeks. Hearing Zuckerberg explain his vision proved a powerful recruiting tool. “I personally called up the guy who’s leading our laser-communications effort, who was working at [NASA’s] Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” he recalls. “And he said, ‘What? Why are you calling me?’ I said, ‘Because we’re connecting the world, and I want you to come in and meet the team, and this is something that’s really important to me, and I think we can make a big difference.’ ” Even in the retelling, Mark makes it sound urgent. Fourteen months after the Ascenta acquisition, Facebook announced it had a full-scale prototype, dubbed Aquila and crafted from ultralightweight carbon fibre. An empty next-generation Boeing 737600 airliner weighs upward of 36 tonnes and has a 34m wingspan; Aquila has a 42m wingspan, yet weighs only 400kg. The company plans to begin test flights by the end of 2015. Once the planes are manufactured, Facebook plans to partner with local telcoms to deploy them. For all the quick progress the Connectivity Lab has made, much remains to be done. It’s still developing the battery technology necessary to keep the drone in

the air for three months—the company’s goal. And though it’s figured out how to use lasers to transmit data at blistering speeds in the tens of gigabits per second, thanks to technology borrowed from Facebook’s data centres, it’s still ironing out the details of drone-to-drone phone communication. Then there are the FAA regulations, which require that each drone has a dedicated pilot on the ground controlling it—a restriction that Maguire says would make Aquila economically unworkable (the same is true of Google’s Project Loon Internet balloons; the two fierce competitors are collaborating to work through some of the policy implications). The solution? Computer science. “We need good machine-learning algorithms and control algorithms,” Maguire says, “to make it so that you have 1 000 planes per pilot or . . . I don’t know what the number is, but somewhere between 25 and 1 000.” Zuckerberg, who researched and wrote a meaty, unsigned Facebook white paper on the state of connectivity, is unfazed. And with 54% of the voting power of Facebook stock in his control, bouncing ideas off his board of directors is as close as he gets to seeking permission for his plans. “The myth is that Mark makes decisions and informs the board,” says director Andreessen. “The reality is that we have very detailed discussions.” As Zuckerberg recalls, the board asked him: “ ‘You’re going to spend how many billions of dollars on this? And how is this going to make money?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a direct plan now, but I just believe that if we connect these folks, it will be good. And it will help those economies grow. And those people have better lives. And I think some portion of that will come back to us over some period of time.’ ” Zuckerberg has earned the right to trust his gut. “At the beginning of Facebook, I didn’t have an idea of how this was going to be a good business,” he tells me. “I just thought it was a good thing to do.” He pauses. “Very few people thought it was going to be a good business early on, which is why almost no one else tried to do it.” Today, everyone understands: Not worrying about whether Facebook was a good business turned out to be a great way to do business. Zuckerberg has recalibrated his ambitions accordingly. As Andreessen tells me, “This is a guy who’s 31. He has a 40- or 50-year runway. I don’t even know if there’s a precedent.” hmccracken@fastcompany.com

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MORE IS MORE Ravi Naidoo has been the creative brain behind some of South Africa’s most visible, post-apartheid creative endeavours—including the annual Design Indaba By Chris Waldburger

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Naidoo’s company, Interactive Africa, was the creative agency behind the country’s winning bid for the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup. Over and above this, he directed or founded the following projects: the African Connection Rally (a continent-wide road show to promote telecommunications investment); the First African in Space Project (with Mark Shuttleworth’s foundation); the Cape IT Initiative (CiTi); and, perhaps most enduringly, the Design Indaba.

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ntriguingly, he is a scientist by training, having studied physiology at the University of Cape Town. As a global guru in design, Naidoo suggests that such eclecticism is an asset. “I have always been an advocate for people being hybrids. I really think that knowledge is like energy: It can never be destroyed; it just transforms from one form to another. And really, I would have to tell anybody that you should have no remorse for anything that you study, because it will all be relevant at some stage or another.” It is this spirit that has marked the Design Indaba as Africa’s premier festival of creativity. “Design Indaba is about ‘more is more’. We want to give you more inspiration; we want to give you more immersive experiences; we want to give you more examples. And I think that’s particularly important,” he says. Since 1995, the Indaba has become an important fixture on the global creative landscape. At the heart of it is the sense of optimism and spirit of pioneering engendered by the dawn of democracy in 1994. The slogan of the festival underpins this ethos: “A better world through creativity.” This ambience of mission gives the event its educational sense. The design entrepreneurialism that fuels the festival has led to its constant evolution. As Ravi explains: “We do believe that business models are perishable, and we do believe that we must constantly seek relevance and that we must constantly morph and change. So I believe in the kind of plasticity of what we do at Design Indaba. We feel more like sculptors with a piece of clay than we do as builders building a fat edifice.

So it’s a completely different mechanism to how we approach Design Indaba.” This means the event has never sunk into a kind of PowerPoint malaise. In fact, last year, world-renowned South African artist William Kentridge made a presentation that changed into an opera. These kinds of presentations have seen the festival move to the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town for 2016, in order to allow for a broader canvas for the myriad design showcases. “And so we want to make this a kind of a Cirque du Soleil for the intellect; we really want to make it a beautiful, goose-bumpy experience, and we’ve asked all of our speakers to really push the stall out. Some of them are interacting around kinetic sculptures, some of their presentations morph into a concert, and yet others are doing the presentation in the form of a play,” says Naidoo, excitedly. This constant widening of the concept means Design Indaba is no longer simply a conference or festival; it is a kind of collegial, broad-based movement for creatives. There is a film festival, the Emerging Creatives Programme, the Your Street Challenge, Africa. Now., as well as the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa endeavour. “I think Emerging Creatives is one of our projects that we’re most proud of. Any designer of any consequence under the age of 35 in this country has been debuted in this

A bigger canvas Naidoo wants people to think of the Design Indaba not simply as a conference or festival but a collegial, broad-based movement for creatives.

programme since 2005,” says Naidoo. “We are giving it more attention than ever, and our attitude toward Emerging Creatives is not just about the exhibition—it’s about a through-the-year kind of commitment through seminars and workshops and facilitating scholarships. So the idea of the Emerging Creatives is way more than an exhibition; it’s really an institutional commitment from Design Indaba to be able to utilise all our limits to create a launch pad for young creatives.” He is also intent on marketing African creativity to the world via the Africa.Now. Project. “Africa.Now. is going to be an absolute focal point of our work. We really want to be the pre-eminent platform in Africa for the African creative, and we’re working extremely hard on that. And we’re talking with a massive international publisher right now to produce the definitive coffeetable book on where African design is right now; we’re doing a flagship Africa.Now. exhibition right now in Amsterdam, and planning an even bigger one in 18 months’ time at another location. So, essentially, Africa.Now. has morphed into way beyond the three-day spectacle that was the Expo, to actually be a throughthe-year commitment.” One of Naidoo’s passions is taking the aesthetics of design to the streets. Two initiatives that do this well are the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa (MBOISA) and the Your Street Challenge. “I think MBOISA is such an interesting thing, because it’s such a populous thing we do… We want to talk to the creative class, and we want to talk to all [economic] classes with a more egalitarian attitude, to infect as many people with the virus of creativity and what good design can do. And we ask a simple question of people in the public eye: Simply, what to them is the most beautiful object in the country? It’s a provocative question; it’s one we ask with a glimmer in the eye and a little bit of a wink, because part of the

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Another venture In 2014, Naidoo launched Win The Right Way with Chivas Regal, a competition for startups that are solving global challenges. On the left is one of the judges, Xolisa Dyeshana from Joe Public.

test is to see what people consider to be beautiful.” Meanwhile, the Your Street Challenge allows contestants to submit plans to design improvements to their neighbourhood and win funding to implement these designs. Many of these programmes form part of the Do Tank stable of creative programmes for the common good. All in all, the “more is more” ethic is almost blindingly dazzling as it posits a way of creating that is seemingly limitless in its possibility. Naidoo explains that his strategy for the holding company, Interactive Africa, is a document that consists of one word. “The word is ‘stretch’, and the stretch is to say to South Africa, to Africa: Have big, hairy, audacious goals; go for things that are really going to happen and have a multiplier effect. From a standing start, we now host the world’s biggest design conference—which is quite amazing, to think it takes place in Africa.”

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This concept of stretching and reaching beyond the status quo is the chief ingredient of Design Indaba’s success, according to Naidoo. “I think the most important aspect of Design Indaba is that it broke the mould of most of the creative events that tend to be very self-serving, only talking to the creative community. I think what Design Indaba has done quite well is to grow bridges between academia, the design practitioner, the creative commissioner, the commissioners, and business and corporates, and even government—so when you come to any one of our events, it’s very well represented with a kind of cross section who can take advantage of design. And I think that is very important, because we believe design is such a vital tool: It’s relevant to all sectors of the economy and it’s not just something for the hipsters, it’s not something that resides in Woodstock. It’s something as relevant to Gugulethu and Khayelitsha as it is

to Fresnaye. It’s a force in the economy, and we should really utilise it as part of the toolkit to face down the challenges of the 21st century.” What he is proposing is almost a new kind of Marshall Plan for post-apartheid South Africa, with an unleashing of creativity and collaborative design as a vital weapon in reasserting a shared public commitment to the common good. The continuous spinning out of new ideas; the evolution of a conference into a kind of communal movement; and the pursuit of “a better world through creativity” all combine to make Ravi Naidoo and Design Indaba true players in the quiet pioneering of an excitingly new postmodern South African economy.

“[Design] is a f orce in the economy, and we should really utilise it as part of the toolkit to face down the challenges of the 21st century.”

1500992M/E

THE ORI Meet the 2016 Emerging Creatives, some of South Africa’s most vibrant young design talent

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Emerging creatives

GIN A LS

Next ABONGILE GWELE SECTOR: JEWELLERY

The Emerging Creatives Programme is a developmental platform for young creatives who have relatively little industry exposure. Design Indaba established the programme in 2005 because of a strong belief in nurturing this new talent and knocking down the barriers to entry for those getting started. Going on 10 years, and with fundamental changes in the media landscape and the local design industry, the Design Indaba has endeavoured to make the programme even more relevant in the South African context. The work of the Emerging Creatives will be showcased to retail buyers and media from around the world. A year-long programme of support, mentorship and guidance in how to manage and grow a small business will run alongside the opportunity for these participants to further propel their creative careers. Architects, fashion designers, illustrators, furniture designers and jewellers— all sectors make up this unique group. Here are examples of the works by the Emerging Creatives Class of 2016.

I’m 25 years old with a BTech in Fine Arts. I have experience as a visual arts lecturer with the British International College as well as sales consulting with Black Fabrics, and worked as a junior curator at the Pretoria Art Museum for three years during my years of study at Tshwane University of Technology. In early 2014, I started my own business as a means of gaining extra income, and in 2015 made it my full-time work. Apples and Oranges started out as an accessories line of pieces made strictly of African wax cloth. It has expanded into a clothing line selling online, and I’m aiming for retail distribution in 2016. The accessories line is currently stocked at YOUMEWE in Melville, Johannesburg.

I would like to exhibit my jewellery range, which is what I started off with. This will include elaborate necklace designs made of African wax cloth and copper wire, as well as bracelets and earrings. The items are all handmade, each unique so that the client has a one-of-a-kind piece.

AM Y S LAT EM SECTOR: ART

I’m an illustrator with a background in fine art,

working as a graphic designer. I grew up on a farm outside Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape, where my love for nature and beauty flourished. After graduating from Rhodes University in 2013 with a Bachelor of Journalism degree in Communication Design, majoring in Fine Art Painting, I exhibited works at Pretoria’s Market on Main, which was a good learning experience. Having free time after work and on weekends has enabled me to focus on developing my illustrations and take on personal and freelance projects; I’ve been experimenting with different techniques and subject matter.

Product

I love drawing (especially in ink) and making things by hand, which usually forms the basis of my works—which I then often digitise and apply colour to. I like to produce work with personality, a subtle South

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Product

African touch, bold delicacies and outspoken line work. Art and drawing are not only expressive from a creator’s personal point of view, but something that should be shared. For this

reason, I’d like to include a number of illustration-based products that give the buyer a starting point and autonomy to create further, or just to enjoy the opportunity to be a little creative.

Emerging Creatives BERYL DINGEMANS SECTOR: JEWELLERY

I’m a typical ‘girly girl’, with a passion for beautiful things. My background is in fashion and art, so I have finally found my perfect niche for my creativity in designing and making jewellery. I love working with all the incredible materials and using different techniques, which I am constantly learning and adding to, which enhances my scope of design capabilities. I love wearing my jewellery, and it makes me

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My designs reflect my personality and eclectic sense of style; “retro glamour” is the phrase that has been used to describe my jewellery—luxurious, beautifully made unique pieces, inspired by my love of Africa, nature, my travels and the 1970s

happy to see other people love wearing my creations too! I have recently returned to South Africa after living in the Netherlands for six years. That is where I set up my jewellery business and attended the Schoonhoven academy in Amsterdam, where I learnt goldsmithing and other jewellery-related artisan skills. My business there was small-scale, basically a one-man show. I supplied a few shops and sold through my

when I was growing up. My main inspiration comes from combining natural materials, shapes and patterns with more glamorous, dramatic, retro and contemporary objects. Creations continuously reinvent themselves, finding

website, but mostly I had buyers visiting my studio. Now, back in South Africa, I am determined to get my business up and running, build my brand properly and take things to the next level. So far, I have done everything myself: design, manufacturing, sourcing, marketing, photography etc., and it would be great to get some expert help, advice and the right exposure.

new ways to incorporate various elements with silver, gold-plated silver and gemstones. I use the same artisanal techniques and tools used for centuries, and combine them with a fresh, modern approach in order to create jewellery with

a distinctly hip and stylish twist— exceptionally fun and easy to wear. Everything is done by hand, from making the initial model from wax, soldering, stamping, cutting, filing, polishing as well as setting.

KOBIE NIEUWOUDT SECTOR: ART

Having studied graphic design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, I gained experience and exposure to the creative, commercial side of the design industry and the opportunities available for young designers in South Africa. In my final year, I had yet to develop my own ‘voice’, and at that stage illustration was not my primary focus— although it was a strong personal outlet for me to break away from the formal

requirements of commercial design briefs. A lecturer encouraged me to apply for the postgraduate illustration course at the University of Stellenbosch, which offered me much-needed room for experimenting and personal development as an artist. I hope one day to do collaborative work with great South African artists, and aim to launch my own range of pillow cases to gain experience in the textile and home

décor industry. I was runner-up in the TFG Gift Card Design Competition of 2012. From 2013 to 2014, I did illustrations for MARK Studio, which were published in The Foschini Group magazines. Recently, spreads from my children’s book, Pippa en die Woud, for the Worldwide Picture Book Illustration Competition were chosen to represent South Africa as part of the global exhibition.

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I enjoy making people laugh; humour is such an integral part of life. I am always on the lookout for ways in which I can apply my work to give it a functional quality, so I have printed my illustrations on mugs, as they are objects I use daily. Recently, I had my illustrations printed on fabric for the first time and was really satisfied with the results. I now sell pillows as well as greeting cards and wrapping paper.

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HELÉ DE BEER SECTOR: FASHION & ACCESSORIES

I specialise in designing prints and patterns for textiles. I learnt at an early stage about the interdisciplinary possibilities of design and, as a result, I often struggle to identify myself solely as a textile designer, because I am aware of how broad design is and how intrinsically linked the various fields are. Design is essentially a way of thinking; it is problem solving. And this way of thinking is relevant in different fields. I see myself as an emerging visual arts practitioner who aims to embrace

Product

My work consists of a range of ‘florals’ reminiscent of the floral patterns on the Sunday school dresses that my grandmother used to make for me and my sister. The actual flowers have been substituted with food items that played a significant role in my childhood as an Afrikaans person

the ‘messiness’ of the design process. My goal is to contribute to the creative landscape of South Africa by giving form to the creativity that is inside me. I would like to add my voice to the multitude of other South African voices by creating work that speaks to the culture of my contemporaries. My work explores the obscure memory space of nostalgia in relation to contemporary Afrikaner identity, in which I use my own memories as an archetype.

growing up in the ‘90s in South Africa. These are translated into printed textiles that are intended to surprise viewers when they realise the florals are more than what they appear from a distance, and so to question their significance. These printed textiles are made up

into men’s and ladies’ apparel. For the ladies: contemporary yet conservative, simple silhouette dresses that speak to Afrikaner identity. In the same fashion, the menswear consists of chino-style shorts with matching short-sleeved buttonup shirts—a new kind of khaki suit.

MIEKE VERMEULEN SECTOR: FASHION & ACCESSORIES Product I graduated as a fashion designer from Tshwane University of Technology in 2014, with a background in fine arts. I exhibited at the Pretoria Art Museum with the 2012 Sasol New Signatures art competition, and was a finalist in both the 2013 ELLE Rising Star Design Awards and in the 2016 PPC Imaginarium Awards. Currently, I am a pattern maker by day and a ‘sidepreneur’ by night. After two years of product development, market research and whittling away at my

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business plan, I am establishing my label on a condensed business model that I believe to be both profitable and innovative in the South African market. I have a desire to learn more about the online marketplace and would benefit immensely from guidance and mentorship in this regard. Continuously seeking out new design skills and techniques, I would appreciate the opportunity to learn from industry professionals from a variety of disciplines.

I am creating a line of handcrafted products to express a fresh, minimalist South African look with a rustic touch, by designing and sampling ready-to-wear garments and accessories, home and body products, inspired by my high-fashion 2016 collection. I favour clay and leather as mediums, and have a fondness for the traditional methods of embroidery, batik and weaving. Employing these in a contemporary way gives my new line an artisanal element. Techniques include ribbon weaving, freestyle hand embroidery, bead making, traditional West African batik dyeing, and tolletjie brei (spool knitting).

Emerging Creatives

TSHEPO DUNCAN MOKHOLO SECTOR: ARCHITECTURE & SPAT IAL D ES IG N

My first-year lecturer once told me that “before anything, you are a designer.” I have carried this with me and it has defined my career objectives. I came into my studies with the sole objective of becoming an architect, but as my academic career progressed, I began to expand my exposure beyond the paradigm of spatial design, and began identifying myself as a ‘designer’—of architecture, of graphics and of furniture. Though my primary focus is architecture, my objective is to run a broad-based design

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One of my design works that I feel represents the range of my design talent is this spatial image of an honours project I

company that expands to multiple fields. By doing so, I aim to create a strong design culture that is interdisciplinary and that amalgamates ideas into a new and fresh approach to design. Notable exhibitions: In 2014, as part of the International Union of Architects (UIA) World Congress in Durban, I was selected to chair a design committee whose main undertaking was to design a pop-up exhibition that represented what we, the students of the University of Pretoria, considered to be special.

did, set in the Capitol Theatre in Pretoria’s central business district. My project aimed to redefine the theatre and

reinterpret it as a film school and theatre, in response to current sociopolitical conditions.

ISHAARAH ARNOLD SECTOR: ART

I’ve always liked drawing, much to my father’s annoyance because my sisters and I would draw on everything in our house—from his work papers to oranges. No surface was safe! Sadly, my sister passed away one year before she finished her BA (Visual Arts) in Visual Communications Design. Creation, design and art were things that bonded us when we were together. So throughout high school, I honed my skills in the hopes of following in her footsteps. In 2010, I was accepted into the University of Stellenbosch for the same course, and graduated with full distinctions. During my studies, I fell in love with and focused on graphic design

and illustration, which I now consider two of my strongest creative disciplines. However, I constantly seek out new learning experiences and styles. I am neither a traditionalist nor a ‘digital kid’, so I began blending the two to create original works. In 2015, I was a paid intern at M&C Saatchi Abel; after six months, I was made a permanent designer. My dream is one day to be a speaker at Design Indaba. I want to inspire people through emotive work. It’s this emotion, this passion, that I put into every piece of advertising—no, art—that I create. Becoming one of Design Indaba’s Emerging Creatives is one step closer toward living my dream.

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I believe Design Indaba would be the perfect space to showcase my illustration works. These drawings are made using Pentel brush pens, originally drawn on off-white Moleskine sketchbook paper. The images are then scanned in and dressed up with a touch of colour in Adobe Photoshop, and turned into limited edition prints on 115gm Munken smooth uncoated paper.

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Conference, festival, publication and beyond In its 21-year history, Design Indaba has grown to be the largest creative platform in South Africa

The Design Indaba held its first conference in 1995, one year into democratic South Africa. This inaugural event hosted 11 speakers over two days; in 2015, it had 35 international design rock stars including Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey, alieninspired Senegalese fashion designer Selly Raby Kane, acclaimed

South African artist William Kentridge, and graphic design titan Michael Bierut. At its inception, Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo was driven by a desire to help build the new South Africa and to show the world that Africa was a place of inspiration. Its purpose has always been to create an ideas economy and celebrate design that serves society rather than the corporates. Even the company’s mantra is, “A better world through creativity”. Since that first conference, Design Indaba has grown into a full festival of

More often than not, the audience is treated to presentations with a performative element, or the premiere of new work by one of the acclaimed international speakers.

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Over the last 21 years, the conference has hosted speakers from all over the world, and from all disciplines of design and creativity

design and creative thinking in all fields. In its 21-year history, it has grown to be the largest creative platform in South Africa, and one of the best and most experiential design conferences in

Innovation, inspiration, information and transformation are at the heart of this multitiered platform.

the world. From South African artist Nicholas Hlobo descending onto the stage in a silken cocoon, to a spontaneous snippet from Kentridge’s opera and a surprise onstage set from Massive

Over the last 21 years, the conference has hosted speakers from all over the world, and from all disciplines of design and creativity.

Attack’s Daddy G, Design Indaba has never been shy of a four-dimensional conference presentation. For the 2016 iteration, the conference moves back to the Artscape Theatre Centre—expect more talks with a performative element. The festival has expanded over the years to include simultaneous live

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A variety of exhibitions are curated, including the popular Most Beautiful Object in South Africa and Africa.Now.

broadcasts of the conference talks to venues around the country, with music events, performances and a FilmFest; an expo that lasted 10 years (ending in 2015 to make way for a different form of support for local design) and which showcased the best of local design; as well as various impactful social activism projects that fall into the Design Indaba Do Tank, such as the 10x10 Low-Cost Housing Project and the Your Street Challenge. As part of the festival, Design Indaba has initiated a number of projects that have been incredibly successful. The first is Emerging Creatives, now a year-long programme of mentorship and support for young South African designers. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has

The Design Indaba Emerging Creatives Programme offers young South African designers mentorship and education, and has helped launch the careers of some of the country’s hottest up-and-coming designers.

Design Indaba has also been involved in making dreams a reality through its Do Tank. Projects include creating colourful learning environments for schoolchildren, and street art with a social purpose. As well as the spectacular presentations on the conference stage, the Design Indaba has expanded over the last two decades to include music events, a film festival and various exhibitions.

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helped launch the careers of vibrant young designers such as Laduma Ngxokolo, Katherine-Mary Pichulik, Daniel Ting Chong and Andile Dyalvane. A second project is the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa, for which Design Indaba invites South Africans to think of how they define beauty, and cast their vote to determine what represents that idea in our country. Nominations are chosen by influential commentators in South African culture. The third is Africa.Now., an exhibition that began in 2014 and now exists in both a digital content series and travelling exhibition. The emphasis is on putting African design back into a local context and helping the world to understand Africa as a continent of 54 unique countries—each with its own cultural identity, and varied and profound creative offerings. All of this sits alongside a fast-growing 365-day-ayear online publication that features inspiring creativity and design from across the world in original videos and articles. Innovation, inspiration, information and transformation are at the heart of this multi-tiered platform.

“THE ISSUE W I T H E X I S T I N G BATTERIES IS THAT THEY SUCK” Elon Musk, the CEO who made electric cars sexy and commercial space travel a reality, is venturing into the messy battery business. Here’s why it’s his boldest bet yet By Max Chafkin

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The 44-year-old CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX (and the chairperson of the solar energy provider SolarCity) is wearing a dark shirt, a satin-trimmed sports coat and, at this moment, a knowing smirk. An admirer of Steve Jobs, Musk is an heir to the Silicon Valley titan in some psychic sense, but in a setting like this, he’d never be mistaken for the Apple founder. Jobs worked the stage methodically, with sombre reverence and weighty pauses, holding tightly choreographed events on weekday mornings for maximum media impact. Musk’s events, which are generally held at the press-unfriendly hour of 8 p.m., have a more ad hoc feel. His manner is geeky and puckish. He pantomimes and rephrases, rolls his eyes and cracks one joke after another—his capacity for expression barely keeping pace with the thoughts in his head. Musk begins by showing an image of thick yellow smoke pouring out of a series of giant industrial chimneys, contrasted with the Keeling Curve, the famous climatechange chart that shows more than 50 years of CO2 levels soaring toward a nearcertain calamity. It could be mistaken for something out of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “I just want to be clear,” Musk says, with a nervous giggle, his accent betraying his boyhood in South Africa. “This is real.” His comments on this April evening last year, in front of a raucous crowd of Tesla owners (and some reporters) at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, are quintessential Elon Musk— weighty but also a bit cheeky. They’re also just preamble. His electric-car manufacturer has launched a new product line: large batteries that store

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energy in homes and even larger batteries that do the same for utilities and businesses. The Powerwall, a slender appliance designed to be mounted in your garage, comes in five colours and starts at $3 000 (around R50 000); the Powerpack, a 2.5-metre-tall steel box that looks a bit like a utility transformer, is aimed at the energy industry and costs roughly $25 000 (R412 000). These prices are roughly half of what competing battery manufacturers charge. Dako Power offers the Powerwall kit in South Africa, at a cost of R225 000 (dependent on the rand-dollar exchange rate). It will begin shipping the kits in February this year. “The issue with existing batteries is that they suck,” Musk says. “They’re expensive. They’re unreliable. They’re stinky. Ugly. Bad in every way.” The idea is to pair the new Tesla products with solar panels—either on the rooftops of homes or in large-scale solar farms—that will store energy during the day when the sun is shining, so that it can be used in our homes, for free, at night instead of energy from power plants that produce greenhouse gases. Musk thinks it just may be the key to solving the problem of global warming. He explains that if the city of Boulder, Colorado—population 103 000—bought a mere 10 000 Powerpacks and paired them with solar panels, it could eliminate its dependence on conventional power plants entirely. The United States could do the same with only 160 million of them. Then he offers even higher figures: 900 million Powerpacks, with solar panels, would allow us to decommission all the world’s carbonemitting power plants; 2 billion would wean the world off gasoline, heating oil and cooking gas as well. “That may seem like an insane number,” says Musk, but he points out that there are 2 billion cars on the road today, and every 20 years that fleet gets replaced. “The point I want to make is that this is actually within the power of humanity to do. It’s not impossible.” If there’s something a little crass about a save-the-world pitch that ends with a plan to sell the general public $50 trillion (R825 trillion) worth of a new, unproven product—well, then, that’s Musk, too.

GUTTER CREDIT TK

Elon Musk walks briskly onto the stage as hard rock blasts in the background. The guitar riff, which sounds like entrance music suitable for a professional wrestler, fades out and Musk surveys the crowd, nodding his head a few times and then sticking his hands in his pockets. “What I’m going to talk about tonight,” he says, “is a fundamental transformation of how the world works.”

GUTTER CREDIT TK

Tesla’s Gigafactory 1, being built outside Reno, Nevada, will be the second-largest building in the world by volume. “It will blow your mind,” Musk says by way of warning.

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Musk estimates that 160 million Powerwall batteries, combined with solar panels, would wean the US off conventional power plants entirely.

Nevada which will produce battery packs for both cars and homes. Over the six days following Musk’s presentation, which was posted on YouTube and the company’s website, Tesla reportedly received reservations for $800 million (R13.2 billion) worth of Powerwalls and Powerpacks—which is about what it makes in almost three months selling cars. “I think we’ve really struck a note, without salespeople or advertising,” Musk tells me. “With that you can do anything.” “Do you know the difference between power and energy?” “Uh,” I start to respond. “Do you know the units?” I’ve asked Musk a question about improvements in battery technology, but instead of an answer, he’s decided to give me a pop quiz. When I offer the right answer for energy—“Joules?”—Musk smiles. “Hey!” he

As Musk puts it archly, “The sun doesn’t shine at night.”

says. “Not bad. What’s power measured in?” Silence. “Watts,” he says and then adds, admonishingly, “I mean, those are very important. Power is how fast you can run. Energy is how far you can run.” Musk is saying this to make a point. Unlike computer chips, which have improved wildly over the past decade, batteries have proved stubbornly resistant to huge jumps in performance and cost efficiency, in part because we ask so much of them. Today’s lithium-ion batteries must fit into tight spaces—either stuffed in

Photograph by McNair Evans

Opening spread: Scott Olson/Getty Images

After founding two successful Internet companies during the dot-com era (the latter of which, PayPal, was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion), Musk has made it both his mission and his business to help us save ourselves from ourselves. In doing so, he’s become one of the most successful startup founders of the past two decades. His rocket company, SpaceX, may one day provide an escape hatch should Earth ever be destroyed, as Musk loves to boast; for now, among other revenue streams, it has a nice $5-billion (R82-billion) business launching cargo (and soon, astronauts) to the International Space Station. Tesla may be on a mission to rid the world of fossil fuels, but today it’s a luxury-car manufacturer with a wildly successful product. The company’s Model S sedan outsold the Mercedes-Benz S-Class in the US during the first half of 2015 and ended up selling 50 580 cars for the entire year. Tesla’s rise has been stunning. Musk was widely mocked in the mid-2000s when he began describing a plan to build a highend electric sports car that would be cheaper, better and faster than a petrolpowered one. Electric cars were known for being slow, impractical and dorky, and no American entrepreneur had successfully established a car company of any kind since Walter Chrysler did it in 1925. Musk spent years deflecting criticism from pretty much every serious automotive expert, and nearly went broke in the process. And yet, Tesla’s designs not only made it onto production lines—they turned out to be amazing. Better than amazing, even. The latest edition of the Model S, created by a team far removed from Detroit and led by a guy whose previous claim to fame was being fired from PayPal in a boardroom coup, received a score of 103 from Consumer Reports—which was a problem only in that Consumer Reports ratings are typically scored out of 100. (The magazine had to revise its scale in response to the record-breaking result. It has since tempered its enthusiasm after raising questions about the cars’ reliability, sending Tesla’s stock price plummeting.) The Model S holds the highest safety rating ever from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Now, Musk is doubling down, expanding the capacity of the company’s main car-assembly plant in Fremont, California (which will produce hundreds of thousands of cars a year), while building a factory-to-end-all-factories outside Reno,

a pouch behind an iPhone screen or, in the case of the Model S, lined up by the thousands in a battery pack that reportedly weighs more than 1 000 pounds (about 450 kilogrammes) and runs the length of the chassis. They must last for years. And they must be stable enough to perform well in extreme temperatures (and not burst into flames). Moore’s law, the principle that holds that computing capacity doubles every two years, does not apply. “The nature of battery innovation is that it tends to be incremental,” says Musk. “It’s really rare that there’s a big breakthrough, because there are so many constraints. You can easily improve, say, the power, but then it’d make the energy worse.” Musk generally relishes the role of sustainable-energy schoolmaster, but he seems more irritable than usual on this occasion, perhaps because he has spent the day at a Los Angeles County courthouse. Most people regard jury duty as an inconvenience; Musk, whose schedule requires him to split his time between SpaceX and Tesla while sharing custody of his five sons with his ex-wife, Justine Musk, looks like he just survived a natural disaster. “It’s a staggeringly inefficient process,” he says, frowning. Jury duty had taken all day, so rather than meet at his SpaceX offices in Hawthorne, California, he’s invited me over to his house. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he pads into the piano room of his 1 800m2 chateâu-esque mansion, offers me a large refillable water bottle and collapses into an armchair. Musk shares this home, which he bought in 2013, with his wife, the British actress Talulah Riley. The place is wellappointed—there’s a watercolour behind Musk’s chair that looks like a Chagall and a Mad Men–style bar across the room— but it also seems barely lived-in. The only personal touches I can see are a coffee-table book about Nikola Tesla and a large piece of SpaceX’s rocket engine mounted in a niche on the wall. When I mention that the rocket part, which Musk tells me is a turbopump, looks almost like a work of art, he’s pleased. “It’s sort of meant to be,” he says, putting his hand on a small aluminum turbine and turning it slowly. “On the engine, this goes at 30 000 rpm and uses 10 000 horsepower. It’s kind of amazing it doesn’t explode.” There’s a fine line between speed and death, and it’s one that Musk seems compelled to walk. He had cancelled our

T HE GIG A-ECONOM Y Tesla’s new battery-making facility, known as the Gigafactory 1, is going to be big. But did you know how big?

June 26, 2014

Early 2016

Ground broken

Battery production expected to begin

R 82 000 000 000 Estimated cost of Gigafactory

200 Sites considered

1 200 000 Planned area, in square metres

100 Backhoes used to level the site

3 000 Total acres of land area

550 Construction workers

6 500 Employees (at full capacity, estimated)

50 Total storage capacity of the battery packs produced each year (by 2020) in gigawatt-hours

3 2 5 1 0 0 m2 Area of One World Trade Center

4 5 5 2 0 0 m2 Area of the Mall of America

4 9 2 3 0 0 m2 Area of Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California

30%

Decrease in kilowatt-hour cost that Tesla’s new battery pack will provide

Amount of fossil fuels that will be used at the factory. Giga is 100% electric.

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first meeting several weeks earlier, because he needed to leave town unexpectedly. I later learnt he’d taken Riley wing walking on a biplane in Hampshire, England. (Musk lives big, even in matters of the heart. He and Riley have been married twice and divorced almost twice— they reconciled last summer before their second divorce went through.) “It felt like the closest to flying to anything that I’ve experienced,” Musk says of the adventure, noting that he was strapped into a harness while he stood on top of the plane’s wings. “There’s no danger that you’re going to fall off. The danger is that you’re flying in a plane that was literally built in the 1940s. It has one engine, and it’s made of wood. In fact, I Googled ‘wing walker’, and the top result was something like ‘Famous wing walker dies in horrific accident’.” Musk did it anyway, of course, posting a triumphant picture on Instagram. “Went for a nice wing walk today,” his caption read. “What could possibly go wrong?” Musk has always had an appetite for risk. Tesla’s original plan, as conceived by founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, had been to commercialise an electric sports car developed by a small Silicon Valley research shop, AC Propulsion, using low-cost, off-theshelf components including inexpensive laptop batteries. Musk, who initially joined as an investor but quickly took an active role in the vehicle’s design, described it as “an electric car without compromises”, announcing that the Roadster would sell for $89 000 (R1.4 million) and that the company would use the profits from the sports car to fund cheaper cars as lithium-ion battery prices inevitably fell. There was one problem: There were no profits—not even close. The cost of the original Roadster wound up totalling nearly $200 000 (R3.2 million) , causing Musk to fire Eberhard, the company’s first CEO. “Everything in that business plan was wrong,” Musk says. (In a 2009 lawsuit, Eberhard claimed that Musk had forced him out in an attempt to take over the company. The lawsuit was settled in mediation.) Musk would cycle through two more CEOs, pouring what was left of his PayPal fortune into Tesla and SpaceX—which also struggled to stay afloat after the 2008 economic collapse—eventually taking over day-to-day management himself. “It just made sense,” he told The New York Times at the time. “We’re going through a very difficult economic period, and I’ve got so many chips on the table with Tesla.” Musk adopted a joint-custody-style arrangement with Tesla and SpaceX—Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, he would be at SpaceX

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in Los Angeles; Tuesdays and Wednesdays were Tesla days in Palo Alto. He redesigned the Roadster’s motor and transmission to bring costs under control and went on a marketing blitz that helped convince customers to accept a price increase. He raised $50 million (R820 million) from Daimler and another $50 million from Toyota, and managed to score a $465-million (R7.6-billion) loan from the US Department of Energy. (Tesla paid the government back in 2013.) In addition to serving as CEO, Musk was Tesla’s product architect, moving the company’s design studio to LA and obsessing over small details like the Model S’s light switches and door handles, while two teams of engineers worked in shifts around the clock. Tesla went public in 2010, and the Model S was greeted with rapturous reviews when it debuted in 2012—but the company nearly went bankrupt again the following year when customers were slow to embrace an unproven car company offering unproven technology. That the orders for the Model S eventually came in helped transform Musk from a sort of Silicon Valley eccentric—someone who was able to captivate the press but wasn’t always taken all that seriously by investors or his fellow CEOs—into someone who was seen, in the words of Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as “America’s most adventurous industrialist”. Vance’s book, which came out in early 2015, paints Musk as the lone entrepreneur willing to apply Silicon Valley thinking “to improving big fantastic machines”, and who had created “the automotive equivalent of the iPhone”. Musk seems uncomfortable with this portrayal. When I suggest that getting into the home-battery business seems like an odd departure, given that Tesla is a car company, he seems exasperated. “The goal has not been: Let’s make cars,” Musk says. “The goal has been: We need to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.” Musk also serves as chairperson of SolarCity, the solar panel installer. (His cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive, started the company after he pitched them on the concept while the three were driving to the Burning Man festival in 2004.) SolarCity and Tesla have collaborated for years in small ways such as marketing solar panels to electric-car owners who want to charge their vehicles using sunlight. But Musk has long seen Tesla’s batteries as having applications beyond cars. Starting around 2007, he instructed his CTO JB Straubel to begin researching the idea of using Tesla batteries

attached to solar panels in people’s homes. “This has been something that has been in the back of our minds,” says Straubel, who uses a hackedtogether solar panel and battery system of his own in his home. Musk sees his foray into home batteries as an inevitable extension of Tesla’s mission— and a necessary response to the basic facts of alternative energy. Solar power accounts for less than 1% of the total electric production in the US. Coal is still South Africa’s dominant power source, accounting for 88% of electricity supplied in the first half of 2015. Solar and wind together accounted for a mere 1.8%. Solar power has a significant limitation. “The sun doesn’t shine at night,” as Musk puts it archly. Starting in the late afternoon, when a typical household is using a lot of electricity to run air conditioners, televisions, computers and maybe the oven, the energy production of a solar panel plummets, falling to zero by sunset. This gave Musk an idea: Why not just use the same batteries that power Tesla cars in people’s homes? People could charge the batteries when the sun shines brightest and then use them at night to drastically reduce their dependence on their energy company. “It’s pretty obvious really,” Musk says. “In fact, that’s what my 9-year-old said: ‘It’s soooo obvious! Why is that even a thing?’ ” The drive from downtown Reno to the site of Tesla’s new battery factory takes 30 minutes or so, along a mostly empty stretch of Interstate 80 that heads west through the high desert of the Sierra Nevada foothills. You pass the smokestacks of a power plant, the exit for the Mustang Ranch, Nevada’s first legal brothel, and wide expanses of brown scrub. On the day I made the trip, the landscape was covered in a thick haze from wildfires that were burning in California to the west, giving the place an eerie quality and making it hard to spot the herd of 1 400 roaming wild horses that still graze in the hills. “It’s very romantic,” Musk had told me a few weeks earlier. I don’t think he had only the horses in mind. Northern Nevada’s high desert is an ideal place for the technology industry, with its low wages, cheap energy and a climate that may not be especially hospitable to foliage but is nearly perfect for data centres—and, as it turns out, for the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries. (Battery production requires very low humidity.) Moreover, there’s lots of room to expand, and Musk has already acquired around 3 000 acres of land, all of it previously unbuilt. The Gigafactory opens this year, but won’t be completed until 2020. No

Photograph by McNair Evans

journalist had ever before visited the site. (And not for lack of trying: In October, a photographer from a Reno paper was arrested after sneaking onto the property and allegedly assaulting security guards as they tried to eject him.) Musk had warned me that the scale of the place would be overwhelming. “It will blow your mind. You see it in person and then realise, Fuck, this is big.” He was right. It was impossible not to feel awestruck by the sprawling 21-metretall structure stretched out, mirage-like, before me as I drove into a shallow canyon. The building—which is so long that it has to be broken up into four distinct structures with four different foundations so that an earthquake can’t tear it apart—comprises more than 176 000m2 of factory space. That’s pretty big. It’s the size of a major shopping mall but, as I was told by a senior Tesla executive, it accounts for only 14% of the total planned floor space, which will reach 1.2 million square metres. When the Gigafactory is finished, it will be only slightly smaller than Boeing’s plant in Everett, Washington, which is the world’s largest building by volume. The Gigafactory will be the second largest, and Musk has hinted it could grow bigger. Despite all this, the Gigafactory is not some extravagance. Musk’s team is currently designing a much lower cost Tesla car, the $35 000 (about R575 000) Model 3, which launches at the end of 2017 and promises the performance of a similarly priced petrol car and a 320km range. But to offer that car in Toyota-like quantities, Tesla will need many more of the 18650 batteries used in its cars, as well as in its Powerwalls and Powerpacks. A 18650 lithium-ion cell is 6.6cm long and 1.7cm wide, a stubby little cylinder encased in brushed metal. Hold one in your hand and you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for something that may go into your TV remote control. In fact, 18650 batteries still power many laptops. However ubiquitous they may be, there aren’t nearly enough of them for Musk’s needs. “One hundred thousand is roughly the limit,” he says, referring to the maximum number of cars Tesla could make each year if it bought all the world’s batteries—one-fifth of his goal. “So it’s either build a whole bunch of little factories or one big factory. And a whole bunch of little factories sounds like quite a bother. Why not just have one big one and

maximise your economies of scale?” I ask Musk why he didn’t simply make this a problem for Tesla’s main supplier, Panasonic. Battery manufacturing is not a high-margin business—Panasonic’s automotive division makes 3.1% margins— and it also happens to be one in which Tesla has no experience. He looks at me as if I were a California jury commissioner. “Why would they believe us?” he asks. “It’s hard to convince people from consumer industries that you’re going to make 15 times as many cars as you’re currently making. That sounds pretty implausible. We just had to say we’re going to do it, and you’re either on the ride or you’re not.” (In 2014, Panasonic and Tesla signed an agreement that essentially makes Panasonic a tenant in the Gigafactory,

manufacturing the cells and passing them to Tesla employees to put in battery packs.) It does indeed sound implausible, and it shows just how precarious the coming years will be for Musk, assuming he wants Tesla to remain independent. The company has lost money in every year of its existence and has had only one profitable quarter (nearly three years ago). The company’s output for 2015—50 500 cars—means it is producing basically five cars per employee. BMW, by comparison, shipped more than 2 million cars last year, 17 for every person who works there. The new Tesla Model X, a $132 000 (R2.1-million) crossover SUV with improbable gull-wing doors and a third row of seats, is drawing raves; the hope within Tesla is that it will attract more women to the

“The biggest leverage we have in making electric vehicles more affordable for everyone is reducing battery cost,” says Tesla CTO JB Straubel.

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brand. But there are only so many people who can (or want) to spend that kind of money on a family car. (Cheaper versions of the Model X will eventually be released, but those will still cost around $75 000/R1.2 million.) Electric cars won’t become cheap by magic because, unlike petrol cars, they are limited by their batteries. The only way to make a cheaper electric car has been to drastically reduce how fast and how far it can go, by offering cars with batteries that provide less power and less energy. This is why the Nissan Leaf, with a retail price of R474 900 in SA, has a range of only 135km (onethird that of the Model S) and takes three times as long to get to 100km/h. There’s no way to put the Model S’s current battery, which analysts estimate costs about $15 000 (R245 000) to manufacture, in a $35 000 car and not lose your shirt. “The biggest leverage we have on making electric vehicles more affordable for everyone is reducing the battery cost,” says Straubel. As a big breakthrough in battery technology is unlikely, there’s basically one way to reduce the costs: Make and sell lots of them very efficiently, taking advantage of epic economies of scale. Dan Dolev, an analyst with Jefferies, recently predicted the Gigafactory’s huge volumes will help cut the cost of Tesla’s batteries in half— essentially making the Model 3 possible. That’s why Musk is pitching home battery packs. “If we can create huge demand for batteries,” Straubel continues, it will create “this virtuous cycle of reducing prices further.”

but it’s hard to escape the sense that however proud he is of his accomplishments to date—the creation of several world-changing startups, the rehabilitation of the electric car, the rekindling of interest in space travel—it’s not enough. Jobs never talked about the distant future or what the iPhone may look like in 2050; for him, the iPhone of today was worth celebrating. Musk talks about the distant future incessantly and seems halfway ashamed by his past and current accomplishments. PayPal made him rich, but Musk has often suggested the company could have been much, much bigger. Last year, at a conference, Musk suggested that key decisions regarding the Tesla Roadster had been “dumb” and that the company had erred by not designing the first version of its electric car from scratch. “It’s like if you have a particular house in mind and instead of buying that house, you buy some other house and chop down everything except one wall in the basement,” he said. Musk does not feel that the world would be okay if he died tomorrow in a horrific wingwalking accident. When I ask him what would happen if petrol cars simply continued to improve in efficiency, he says, “I think people should be a lot more worried than they are,” explaining that even if CO2 levels remained what they are today, we wouldn’t feel the ill effects until at least 2035. “Life will continue, but it will be a train wreck in slow motion,” he says, perhaps resisting the temptation to note that no, we won’t all have to go live on Mars yet. “Millions of people will die; there will be trillions of dollars in damage—that sort of thing.” Musk believes that the key to avoiding this fate will be inexpensive batteries like the Powerwall and Powerpack. In 20 years, he predicts, at least 10% of the world’s fossil-fuel power plants will be mothballed thanks to the batteries alone. After all, battery power would obliterate the need for so-called peaker power plants that utilities run—almost exclusively on fossil fuels—mostly on summer afternoons to avoid brownouts when everyone turns on their air conditioners. “We have these big engines that we might run for three hours a year,” says Mary Powell, CEO of Green Mountain Power, a

“It’s either build a whole bunch of little factories or one big factory. And a whole bunch of little factories sounds like quite a bother.”

In 2005, during a commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs suggested that graduates always be mindful of the brevity of life. Jobs, who had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, told the class that since his teenage years he had “looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ ” He continued: “And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” In the months before his death, in 2011, Jobs seemed to regard his life’s work—the creation of the personal computer and then the iPhone—as complete, telling biographer Walter Isaacson, “I’ve had a very lucky career. . . . I’ve done all that I can do.” Musk is more restless than Jobs ever was,

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Vermont utility. “They’re expensive to build and expensive to maintain.” And if Green Mountain can’t make enough energy to meet its customers’ needs, it is forced to buy electricity from other states on the spot market—meaning it pays as much as 10 times the normal rate. To try to avoid this in the future, Powell plans to offer the Tesla Powerwall to her customers as an add-on. For $30 (around R500) a month, Green Mountain customers will get a Tesla battery that would save them in the event of a power outage while allowing Green Mountain to tap into the batteries rather than using backup generators when demand spikes on hot days. Eventually, she thinks the savings from this approach could allow her company to give the batteries to customers for free. But things really get interesting once Musk’s batteries are paired with solar panels. “In five years, solar panels will have three times the capacity and half the cost—and the storage will be much more efficient,” says Ernesto Ciorra, head of innovation and sustainability at Enel Group, the Italian energy giant. He predicts a wave of disruption akin to the advent of mobile phones as consumers in rich countries increasingly use solar panels and batteries to reduce their utility bills and those in poor countries use them to stay off the grid entirely. “The energy companies that follow this track will get more money,” he says. “The ones that do not evolve will close.” Musk, never one to shy away from the social implications of a marketing message, says in rural parts of Africa and Asia, having a solar panel and batteries “is the difference between having electricity and not having it”. He also believes his new battery packs will appeal to Americans. “I suspect after a natural disaster, the appeal of the Powerwall will increase substantially,” he says. “You’ll know who has the Powerwall ’cause he’ll be the one guy in the neighbourhood with the lights on.” Tesla employees say that in addition to making batteries cheaply, Musk has given them another directive: Make the factory beautiful. Tesla’s cars distinguish themselves by their performance, but Musk has always been attentive to the curve of a windshield or an intuitive door handle. Additionally, the Gigafactory must be attractive because Musk sees it as a product—something that has been carefully planned, where everything fits together with a certain harmony. He wants it to be beautiful, in part, because he plans to build more than one. “We’re going to need probably, like, 10 or 20 of these things,” he says. He pauses, raises his broad shoulders toward his ears, and smiles. “Somebody’s got to.”

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THE

A 20-week pop-up social innovation curriculum for aspiring social entrepreneurs culminated in an ‘idea auction’ where teams pitched their innovative business ideas By Evans Manyonga and Andrea Weiss

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UCT Upstarts was a 2015 joint initiative between the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (a specialised centre at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business), Super Stage and the Office of the Vice-Chancellor. The Vice-Chancellor’s Social Innovation Challenge, “Imagine A New Africa”, led to an Idea Auction that launched teams’ revolutionary startup ideas into action. The challenge was not limited to any specific faculty or discipline; students could be studying commerce or law, medicine or engineering, film or psychology—they could even be first-year or MBA students.

t the outset, students from across the university were invited to create multidisciplinary teams and participate in a programme that would help them become problem-solvers and bring their social entrepreneurial ideas to market. Social entrepreneurship essentially creates innovations that address a problem with a market-based solution—by either creating something to sell, changing a system, or developing a business model that is sustainable rather than donation-driven. In February last year, the call was simple: Imagine a new Africa? By September 30, 12 teams had reached a point where they could pitch their innovative proposals at an idea auction at the Labia Theatre, attended by family, friends and potential investors and supporters. During the course of the evening, they raised a combined R110 000 in cash for their ideas, along with donations in kind and commissions to the value of over R300 000. During each of the 20 weeks spread across the academic year, there were three lunchtime events that took place in custom-built innovation hubs (one of which was made out of yellow crates that sat alongside UCT’S Jammie Hall during the first term), followed by a yellow-curtained ‘change room’

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‘We are watching’

An idea that attracted both interest and investment at the auction was Jonga, which means ‘we are watching’. It is a low-cost alert system “dedicated to getting [township] communities connected and getting them protected”. It comprises a sensor that sends a signal to a transmission unit if a perimeter is breached. This transmission unit in turn alerts residents and neighbours, who can then take action to secure the property. “The idea came about when one of our team members was burgled at his aunt’s house in a township in Witbank, and his laptop and cellphone were stolen. Five other houses in the same vicinity were burgled by the same person. Nobody knew anything about the burglaries until the following morning. This event sparked an idea for a system that could alert the close community as soon as a perpetrator triggered a sensor in a house. This would notify the neighbourhood and prompt a response before any police or security personnel reached the scene,” explains team member Ntandoyenkosi Shezi. “The sad reality is that modern security systems are very expensive and come with hefty maintenance costs. The average household income in township communities is around R3 200, so it is unrealistic to get such expensive systems into the townships. “One of the problems is that neighbours aren’t always aware of what is happening until it’s too late. It is this that allows burglars to rob six houses in the same neighbourhood and get away with it,” he adds. Working on Jonga has inspired Shezi. “I would

A class of their own Meet the 2015 teams of social entrepreneurs who are solving real-world problems, from campus

RE:FRESH This team hopes to shift attitudes around energy and sustainability, and help challenge the throwaway culture that is globally pervasive by encouraging large retail stores to brand and market sub-grade fruits and vegetables. This produce is turned into juice, using a bicyclepowered blender. Sarah Melville Julia Hampton Chad Willenberg Tessa Chittenden

CLASSKIT The environment in which a child learns influences his or her learning experience, specifically impacting the ability to grasp and understand concepts. Environments that provide sensory stimulation aid children, as these allow for a more engaged and creative learning experience. ClassKIT aims to create affordable, multifunctional, DIY school furniture using a combination of low-cost materials and upcycled old furniture to create a stimulating environment that is more conducive to learning—enabling all children to produce first-class results. Matseliso Photolo Bonolo Thomas Katleho Poonyane

Safe saving Another standout project on the evening was Stokvella, a mobile platform that allows members of a stokvel savings group to track and rate their own stokvel. An estimated 11 million people in South Africa participate in stokvels, estimated to be worth R45 billion. “By putting trust back into stokvels—one of the few methods of improving financial security within lower

income communities—Stokvella aims to increase financial security, stability and education,” said the group in their pitch. “We’ve always had a passion for social entrepreneurship, and looked for opportunities in which a successful business could be developed, while also providing a product that could really improve the lives of millions of South Africans. “We truly believe stokvels are one of the best ways for communities to pool their funds and improve financial stability; however, after much research, we discovered that there are numerous problems facing the current stokvel industry. This has led to many families being taken advantage of through Ponzi schemes, loans sharks and theft, resulting in families being debt-trapped from one generation to the next. We believe Stokvella can help South Africans financially empower themselves through creating a transparent, secure and accountable system.”

Food, inglorious food Team Re:Fresh has set out to ‘trendify’ Cape Town’s rejected fruits and vegetables that would otherwise contribute to the 44% wastage in our country.

B U T T E R F LY E F F E C T This team will be giving township artists commercial exposure and a new source of income, by providing them with an exciting platform that will enable them to use their artistic skills to transform the downtrodden walls of township houses in order to help uplift the community. Resources for the art materials and remuneration for the artists will be sponsored by companies (via corporate social investment) or crowdfunded by individuals who want to give back to the community. The artwork produced on the township houses will be photographed and made into wallpaper. The Butterfly Effect Wallpaper will be sold to generate annuity income for both the artists and the project. Thabiso Dlamini Gcinisizwe Dlamini Janine Ritchie Keleabetswe Langa Siphumelele Khomo

COOL SHACK

GUTTER CREDIT TK

This team has found affordable ways of reducing the temperature inside shacks, but also includes establishing an interim solution in housing for managing drainage, waterproofing, fire retardation and passive lighting—which they call the ‘Cool Shack’. Zinhle Novazi Gregory Makama Andre Ntema Ndabezinhle Ndebele

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ENTRII ENTRii is designed to help entrepreneurs at university and highschool level to share and discuss their startup ideas, and to learn from each other in an environment where transparency and failing fast is encouraged. The project will also give young startups an opportunity to interact with other entrepreneurs, investors and consumers—anytime, anywhere—and to market and sell their product/service via ENTRii. Transparency and constructive critique are absolutely necessary for entrepreneurs to develop and sell their ideas, and thus ENTRii aims to shift the mindset of keeping ideas to oneself and never implementing them. The platform is in the form of a web app currently under construction on Entrii.com. Rema Afullo Buhle Manana Duwa Mvula

REACH A pop-up programme that travels around to less fortunate schools in Cape Town, Reach promotes and helps one to achieve self-development and a growth mindset, and fosters the habits successful people have been found to have. It offers a fun space for students to really engage with the content by providing an interactive self-organised learning environment (SOLE) that allows them to learn through group work and research. The programme is based on research by Stanford psychologist Professor Carol Dweck on successful versus unsuccessful people, as well as the SOLE concept by award-winning TED speaker Sugata Mitra.

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Melissa Karluk Thando Coka Tinotenda Masondo

“WE WANT TO CREATE A NEW GENERATION OF UPSTARTS—UNIVERSITY STUDENTS WHO LEARN TO MERGE PURPOSE,PROFIT AND PASSION TO CREATE A RIPPLE EFFECT OF CHANGE IN AFRICA AND BEYOND.” 62 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

Stokvella member Sebastian Daniels (a secondyear business science student) says they are intent on developing their idea further. “Stokvella will, without a doubt, continue into the future. We never thought of the process as a competition but rather as a way to build a business that could make the difference in South Africa which we wanted to see. He adds, “The biggest challenge, I found, was the constant pivoting of different ideas. Throughout the process, we came up with numerous different ideas, but eventually agreed on the idea of improving the stokvel market. The truly difficult part came in when we tried to solidify our idea. This is because your idea is never concrete, it is constantly changing. This makes it difficult to believe in what you are doing, as you don’t have anything solid to hold on to.”

Solving real-world problems

“The idea behind Upstarts is to create a ‘student startup nation’ by igniting a social innovation culture on campus, so students can graduate as both professionals and social entrepreneurs who start to solve real-world problems,” explains Gina Levy, the driving force behind the concept.

Clockwise, from left Step it up Team Cool Shack say their project is more than just retrofitting informal settlements; it’s also a chance to create jobs for the community.

Three by three By using videos, projects and activities, Team Reach will teach kids basics in leadership, self-confidence and people skills.

Wall-to-wall changes Team Butterfly Effect is helping unknown township artists create income while uplifting their communities and allowing companies to improve their CSR efforts.

TIPS-E Tips-E is a money management system based on a virtual wallet service for the student community. The virtual wallet reduces the length of queues at ATMs and provides students with access to their funds without financial-services deductions, which is a subtle way of saving. The pre-ordering system reduces the length of queues at campus food stores, and provides a self-employment opportunity for students to deliver food orders to students or staff on campus. Mkhuseli Bruce Mkhaliphi Tawanda Rodney Gora Nzuzo Mvelo Ndwandwe Ronny Erasmus Boadzo

INSIDE OUT This project will create positive, inspiring quotes and personalised messages that can be printed onto transfer paper and ironed onto clothes—thus ‘relabelling’ them from the inside out. These messages will reinforce that self-worth is not derived from how one looks but rather from the person one is—‘Brand Me’. Lauren van Haght Tsepa Seqebo Jolando Njati

JONGA This alert system consists of a transmission unit and a sensor. It notifies your neighbours and the people around you when an intruder has breached the security of your house. The system is communitybased, which eliminates the need for vast security networks that are used by bigger security companies. After the system has been purchased, there are no subscription costs. Installation is simple and doesn’t require a trained technician. The sensor can be strategically placed anywhere on doors and windows.

Your money is my money “We want to create a true sense of Ubuntu, which will enable communities to work together to save, invest and improve the lives of those around them,” say the two members of Team Stokvella.

REPLICART This team aims to provide a gallery experience for children, in conjunction with intriguing, informative and thought-provoking presentations. The reality is that most South Africans do not have the opportunity to be exposed to either local or international arts and culture, nor to learn about these in interesting ways. ReplicART exposes children to art from an entirely new point of view. The aim is to improve art education while raising awareness of international artwork within South Africa and the greater southern African region. Bianca Hansen Omrit Sarangi Kunaal Maharaj Katlego Nkoana

UMTHENTE Umthente is a 10-day holiday programme that aims to teach high school students (grades 10 to 12) from previously disadvantaged communities to become entrepreneurially minded and to understand the concepts of earning and saving. Sinenhlanhla Mdluli Keitumetsi Hendricks

Kabir Prema Ntasko Mgiba Ntando Shezi

STOKVELLA “Our currency is opportunity: We insist youth isn’t wasted on the young, because we want to create a new generation of upstarts—university students who learn to merge purpose, profit and passion to create a ripple effect of change in Africa and beyond.” One of the main goals of the challenge was to get student ideas ‘market-ready’, which is why Upstarts partnered with Thundafund, a crowd-funding platform. Teams could test the market’s appetite for their solutions in real time, as well as raise funds and awareness to help turn their ideas into reality. “We are a research university, but research is also about figuring out how to do things differently and better. And that’s the innovation: taking ideas and seeing how they can change the world,” says UCT vice chancellor, Dr Max Price. Dr François Bonnici, director of the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship, believes “Upstarts speaks directly to the centre’s desire to inspire and challenge individuals, organisations and systems to question what is, reimagine what can be, and to get behind and deliver those solutions that have the potential to transform the world we live in.” The 2016 UCT Upstarts programme is being developed and will be offered in collaboration with the new University of Cape Town d.school.

Stokvella looks to help roughly 11 million people, in an industry worth R45 billion, as there is a lack of trust and security in stokvels/group savings. It plans to run a platform that each member of a stokvel will be able to use and understand. This application allows users to view how much money their investment is worth, how much the entire stokvel is worth, what their possible returns are, as well as when they are entitled to receive payment. It also prevents any one particular member from running off with all the funds. Tuskan Owen-Thomas Sebastian Daniels

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Fast Company promotion

The future of modern medicine Par t of Ecsponent Limited, S al veo S w iss Biotechnolog y is a leading s tem-cell s torage bank that af fords families the oppor tunit y to collec t and s tore potentiall y life-sav ing cord blood s tem cells

Ecsponent currently operates through its subsidiary companies in South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Botswana. The overriding objective of the group’s business model, irrespective of country of operation, is to leverage high growth business potential by providing capital prudently. The predominant focus of the group is on financial and financerelated products and services, high-tech, high-growth investment businesses and other investment opportunities that meet the required investment criteria. As a subsidiary of Ecsponent Limited, Salveo forms part of the group’s investment strategy to acquire interests and develop technology businesses with high intellectual property and high barriers to entry. Salveo Swiss Biotechnology is a leading stem-cell storage bank that provides local families with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collect and store potentially lifesaving cord blood stem cells. Salveo provides South African clients with international, industry-leading

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Collecting cord blood is an easy, painless and risk-free process

technology and is an example of the success in combining Salveo’s technical excellence with Ecsponent’s capital provision and local business expertise. Blood stem cell transplants have been performed for more than 50 years and are the standard of care for certain blood disorders and blood cancers. To date, more than 30 000 cord blood stem cell transplants have been done globally both in the private and public healthcare setting. Finding a donor for blood stem cells in SA can prove challenging, because no public cord blood bank exists and the local SABMR contains only 70 000 donors. Your chances of finding a donor is 1:100000 in your own ethic group—and with 211 ethnic groups in the country, the dilemma is clear.

Committed to stem cell storage

Blood stem cell transplants (bone marrow transplants) have been used extensively to treat more than 70 diseases including numerous types of malignancies, anaemias, inherited metabolic disorders and deficiencies of the immune system. Cord blood stem cells are a perfect match for the child; siblings have up to a 75% chance of being an adequate match, and biological parents have the option of a haploidentical transplant. The first successful blood stem cell transplant from umbilical cord blood was performed in 1988. Since then, the potential uses for cord blood has grown. The most significant advantages of using cord blood stem cells for transplantation are that it does not have to be a 100% match, and the risk for developing graftversus-host disease (GVHD) is lower than when utilising bone-marrow blood stem cells. Further advantages include the fact that the stem cells are immediately available, and that collecting cord blood is an easy, painless and risk-free process. And due to the presence of placental barrier, umbilical-cord blood stem cells are at lower risk of being exposed to viral

infections than those isolated from bone marrow and peripheral blood. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been used for about 10 years in laboratory studies and clinical trials. They are thought to be responsible for cell growth, wound healing, and replacing cells lost through daily wear and tear and medical conditions. Because of these functions, they could be effective in the treatment of tissue injury and degenerative diseases. Currently, there are more than 500 registered clinical trials worldwide aimed at evaluating the potential of MSC-based cell therapy. Although this therapy has been shown to be safe and effective, there are still challenges that need to be tackled before it can be widely applied in the clinic environment. Currently, the only MSC-based

Salveo's well-trained, passionate team are always ready to assist future parents to make the right decision for their family.

therapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration is for GVHD. Umbilical cord tissue is the richest source of MSCs and has significant advantages over those obtained from bone marrow or fat. Going forward, storing cord blood and tissue stem cells are something all families should take advantage of.

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BANGALORE, INDIA

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DALLAS

BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA

SANTANDER, SPAIN

Light painting and photograph by Christopher Noelle

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO

PAVLODAR, KAZAKHSTAN

M E N D O C I N O C O U N T Y, CALIFORNIA

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Photograph by Vivek Singh

CHINA IN INDIA Chickpet Market

India is now officially the world’s fastest growing economy. By 2017, it will surpass the US to become the second-largest smartphone market. But the majority of Indians don’t yet have a ton to spend on phones. Beijingbased electronics maker Xiaomi—which sells high-end devices nearly at cost, generating profits from web services—is moving quickly to meet the country’s need. Since toppling Apple earlier in 2015 to become the largest smartphone vendor in China, Xiaomi has bet big on India, partnering with Foxconn to assemble its first India-made phone: the $100 (R1 600) Redmi 2 Prime, thanks to recent

tax laws that lower manufacturing costs. (The phone is now Xiaomi’s top seller in the country.) Meanwhile, the company is corralling superfans like 32-year-old IT–firm owner Guru Hangala (centre), who helps moderate its bustling user forums as beta testers for locally tailored features such as a button that stanches data flow to prevent bill overages. To Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s global VP, the opportunity is clear: “In India, a lot of [young people] won’t have a PC. They’re only going to experience the Internet through their mobile phone.” In other words, there’s a new generation of Xiaomi fans in the making. —JJ McCorvey

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Vivek Singh/Global Assignment

Bangalore, India October 9, 2015

Photograph by Melissa Golden

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CYBERSECURITY IBM Security Operations Centre Dallas October 7, 2015

These computer experts are monitoring real-time global threat activity and possible attacks against IBM’s corporate clients: more than 12 000 businesses in 133 countries. The “Threat Globe” graphic, second from left, combines historical data—attack origin and method—with current intelligence to help pinpoint and evade perpetrators. Lately, security firms have been responding to a rise in waterholing— hacks by organised crime or foreign operatives into systems used by mobile

business executives (such as free Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, or a favourite news site). In the future, they’ll develop more ways to protect employees’ laptops, email, servers and mobile devices that include software, subscriptionbased services and even physical hardware. One company, Norse, has launched an appliance that plugs into a company’s network, tracks attempted intrusions, and can create ‘honeypots’ (fake servers that trap and profile potential infiltrators). Research firm, Cybersecurity Ventures, predicts nearly $170 billion (R2.8 trillion) will be spent on cybersecurity worldwide in 2020. —Neal Ungerleider

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GENETIC EDITING Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Science Institute Blacksburg, Virginia October 8, 2015

These little swimmers are mosquito pupae. But not just any mosquito pupae: They are transgenic mutants created by researchers at Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Science Institute, using an extraordinary new geneediting tool called CRISPR/ Cas9. Developed contemporaneously in 2012 by separate teams at the University of California, Berkeley and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (and subject to an ongoing patent dispute), CRISPR/Cas9 allows researchers to cut and paste DNA with unprecedented

accuracy and speed. And unlike earlier gene-editing tools, CRISPR/Cas9 is species-agnostic—working in insects, fish, mice, monkeys and, most controversially, humans. CRISPR/Cas9 is already being applied toward cures for diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis to cancer; it could also open the door to the precision engineering of human embryos, prompting calls for regulation. Research on mosquitoes will affect human health more indirectly, but with no less impact. Scientists hope to impart permanent genetic changes in wild mosquito populations, such as rendering them sterile or immune to pathogens like malaria—which killed more than half a million people in 2013. —Adam Bluestein

Photograph by Andrew Tingle

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CONNECTED CITIES Santander, Spain October 10, 2015

Since the northern Spanish city of Santander installed more than 12 500 sensors downtown between 2010 and 2013, it has

become a hotbed of smartcity experimentation. Now, officials know when streetlights aren’t working, when dirtbins are full, and when people face higherthan-normal levels of pollution. The European Union–funded project heralds a new era of urban

responsiveness and cost efficiency. Santander is already spending 20% less to light its downtown parks, for instance, because lamps now come on only when people are actually present. The city’s high-tech infrastructure has attracted innovators

from all over the world. Recently, it piloted an LED streetlight from Ericsson and Philips, which doubles as a Wi-Fi and 4G antenna. This should allow residents to function as part of the city matrix so they become nodes of intelligence as well. —Ben Schiller

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Photographs by Noel Spirandelli

FEEDING (AND FUELLING) THE WORLD Cookhouse Test Kitchen South San Francisco October 7, 2015

In addition to sugar and eggs, this Meyer-lemon cake contains a surprising ingredient: microalgae. As the world struggles to figure out how to feed 1.5 billion more people over the next 20 years, algae— which can be grown in the dark with relatively little land, energy and w ater—

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is emerging as a viable, sustainable substitute for some fats in foods such as ice cream and salad dressing. Solazyme, a leader in manufacturing algae for food, was founded as an algae-based fuel manufacturer (it’s currently a supplier to UPS). In 2011, it spun off a cosmetics company called Algenist, which had $24 million (almost R400 million) in revenue in 2014. Eating algae is the next frontier. —Adele Peters

Photographs by Noel Spirandelli

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Elyor Nematov/Global Assignment

Photograph by Elyor Nematov

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AUGMENTED REALITY KSP Steel Factory Pavlodar, Kazakhstan October 13, 2015

At a steel mill in Kazakhstan, a worker uses an augmented-reality ‘smart helmet’ created by LA–based tech company, Daqri, to assess machinery

by combining data projected before his eyes (prompted by his gazing at a black-and-white image) with his real-world observations. Daqri, which is developing hands-free tools so that factory workers, oil-rig employees, firefighters and others can access real-time metrics without needing to fumble

with tablets or laptops, is one of a swarm of nascent augmented-reality efforts targeting industry. APX Labs is developing ways for users to control factory equipment with eye motions, and Google is updating Google Glass for the industrial crowd. Research firm, Markets AndMarkets, predicts that

augmented reality will be a $659-million (R10billion) business by 2018. Although smart helmets won’t be commonplace for another decade, they do, like any new data-driven technology, raise privacy concerns. After all, one thing they inevitably track is the employees who wear them. —NU

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MARIJUANA Cannabis farm (name withheld) Mendocino County, California October 5, 2015

Until recently, scenes like this—of marijuana farmers harvesting their annual crop—would be shrouded in secrecy, but marijuana is coming out of the shadows as laws criminalising it topple one US state at a time. The end

of prohibition is opening up an industry that’s expected to reach $8.2 billion (R136 billion) by 2018—hardly surprising, given that half of Americans already report consuming the substance. A raft of new startups are capitalising on this market, offering marijuana-infused food and skin-care products, pharmaceuticalgrade concentrates, genetic testing and analysis for growers and more, while

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farmers are developing high-quality strains. (The New Age family farmers, pictured, are the exclusive suppliers to Oakland medical-cannabis dispensary, Harborside Health Center.) The federal government has yet to legalise the plant; until then, marijuana entrepreneurs must walk a tricky line between building their business and staying clear of federal drug officers. —Elizabeth Segran

GUTTER CREDIT TK

Photograph by Alessandra Sanguinetti

Wanted

From sea to land The Roamer, handmade from yacht sail, was designed as a go-to backpack for a full-day adventure.

Surf and turf Sealand aims to rid our shores of rubbish by turning waste into wares

Believing there’s no better time than now to become environmentally conscious, designer Jasper Eales and big-wave surfer and businessman Mike Schlebach teamed up to create Sealand, a brand that produces items made of hemp, organic cotton and waste materials such as old stretch tents, sail cloth and advertising billboard mesh.

“Mike and I have worked on a few collaborative projects together over the years, and through them we identified mutual visions for a brand that existed for the right reasons,” says Eales. “Mike ran a bagmanufacturing company, which solely used upcycled yacht sail cloth as the material. With the creative direction I bring

82 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

to the table, and the combination of our business knowledge, we envisioned a brand that appealed to a broader market and encouraged environmentally responsible production further than we had both looked before.” All the upcycled products have a lifetime warranty, which will reduce the amount of

waste ending up in landfills. Each piece of material is chosen for its colour or pattern, and no two products are the same. In addition, the items are all durable and weatherproof. Eales won Design Indaba’s Most Beautiful Object in South Africa 2014 with his surfboard rack, and was a 2013 Emerging Creative.

With their shared passion for the water and creating environmentally friendly products, he and Schlebach are hoping Sealand will help keep rubbish from littering South Africa’s shores. The products are headed to France and New Zealand this year, and Eales has been working on new designs for hemp and cotton apparel.

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FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 83

My way

Architect of a new creative future Thomas Chapman’s Local Studio is leading urban transformation in Joburg’s inner city BY EVANS MANYONGA

“I believe that architecture can only be effective as such when it works in support of more fluid instruments of social change, like education and entrepreneurship. Within these parameters, I believe the most effective tool we have is the creation of responsive public space.” In 2011, Thomas Chapman founded Local Studio, an architecture and urban design studio located in Johannesburg’s historical Brixton suburb. It is largely focused on creating public buildings and urban design schemes that promote social development—as evidenced in Hillbrow, an inner-city residential neighbourhood in Joburg that’s regaining its prime historical and economic significance. Chapman, one of the main speakers at the 2016 Design Indaba, sat down with Fast Company SA for a brief chat about his work.

Fast Company: How did you entrench yourself in architecture as a line of business? Thomas Chapman: I wasn’t a particularly good student at architecture school, but fairly



84 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

early on I was drawn to running my own projects outside of university. These projects started as small, often free commissions, but taught me great lessons about professionalism and communicating with clients. I worked for a firm after university, but continued running my own projects on the side. These gradually increased in size and scope, and enabled me to leave my job in 2012. Since then, we have grown to 10 people and there are around 20 live projects in the office at any given time. What attracted you to architecture? Up until the age of 16, I thought I wanted to do something corporate, like accounting or finance, but I was lucky to have a great art teacher who encouraged me to pursue a more creative career. He convinced me by telling me how much money an architect called Silvio Rech was making while doing great design and architecture. (Incidentally, I ended up working for Rech for seven years before starting my own business.) I now believe the architectural profession has a far more significant role to play in Africa than in more developed contexts. We have a lot of real spatial problems to solve here, and it’s great to feel needed. 

standing of the construction industry and was fortunate to collaborate with some brilliant engineers and contractors who should really be credited for most of our early achievements. Apart from that, I find that working in Johannesburg always brings the most extraordinary set of opportunities and constraints that always result in unique design solutions.  What have you done your way to get to where you are today? I believe heavily in teamwork, and because of this I’ve built a great team around me. There’s very little hierarchy in my office, and I think this contributes to the energy and output that makes our practice unique and competitive.

How do you keep the creative juices flowing? I read a lot and try to expose myself to as much art, music and film as possible.



How has it unlocked your creativity? To me, architecture is a very collaborative occupation, and I’ve found that by developing my communication skills, I’ve achieved far greater creative goals than I could ever have done alone. When starting out, I had a very narrow under-



 Can you tell us more about Local Studio’s core ethos? We place the creation of inclusive and responsive public space at the forefront of any design process; we are bold in our experimentation with new construction technologies, in our pursuit to find lasting, cost-effective solutions to urban spatial problems; and we are deeply concerned with the role that a

Going public Two of the projects completed by Local Studio include the Outreach Foundation Community Centre (left), one of the first new social infrastructure projects to be built in Hillbrow since the 1970s; and The Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, with its modern interpretation of traditional Sophiatown building typologies.

THOMAS CHAPMAN

Tit l e Founder, principal, Local Studio

30-SECOND BIO

Fa m i ly

from maybe Israel/Palestine). The legacy of apartheid is inherently a spatial one, and we continue to feel the effects, from Sandton to Soweto. It’s often up to the architect or urban designer to engage and challenge this condition—or to carry on blindly, like most commercial practices do. What are your thoughts on the Design Indaba? How do you feel about being one of the local speakers? I’ve been coming to Design Indaba since 2006, so this will be my 10th attendance of the conference. I consider it to be the foremost design conference in the world, and have seen many of my heroes speaking here over the years. Obviously, it’s a huge honour and I hope I don’t disappoint.



building’s form and materiality can play in underdeveloped and under-managed contexts such as former apartheid townships and the Johannesburg CBD. You have successfully completed a project for an independent community centre in Hillbrow, an area notoriously avoided by Joburgers. Why build there? A minority middle-class in Joburg mostly avoids Hillbrow, but it’s a magnet to almost a million other people, because it offers affordable housing and social services. Our client [Outreach Foundation] had been offering social and cultural services in Hillbrow for over five years by the time we were introduced to the project. What’s more, the client is a product of the Hillbrow Lutheran Church, which is on the same site and which has had a presence in this suburb for over 100 years.

What can we expect from you and Local Studio in the future? We have a pipeline of inner-city affordable housing projects in the office which should all be completed over the next year. I like to think these projects are taking forward the thinking around housing by considering public and communal space as importantly as internal apartment layouts. Apart from this, we’re involved in two new pedestrian bridges in Johannesburg and a plan for a linear park in Braamfontein.



What sets the South African architectural landscape apart from the rest of the continent—and, indeed, the world? South African cities were, for the most part, planned for segregation on such a large scale that they’re incomparable to anywhere else in the world (apart

 Anything else you’d like to add? We have an exhibition of our work opening in February at First Thursdays at The Architect [pop-up gallery at the Cape Institute for Architecture] in Hout Street, Cape Town. If anyone has an interest in the architecture of social infrastructure in Johannesburg, they should come along.



His parents are “former hippies” who met at Rhodes University. His brother and sister are both chefs, and he’s married to a fellow architect.

B a c kg r o u n d Chapman has master’s degrees in Architecture and Urban Design from Wits. He has nine years’ experience working in the public and private built-environment sector.

B u s i n e s s i nte re st s Apart from Local Studio, he has an interest in a small property development company currently working on a mixed-use development in Brixton.

Li ke s Brie and green fig preserve; Joburg

D i s l i ke s Gated communities; driving

Favo u rite q u ote

“In this world we are living in, 98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else. They are damn buildings and that’s it. Once in a while, however, there’s a small group of people who does something special. Very few. But good God, leave us alone!”—Frank Gehry

Favo u rite boo k Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by Reyner Banham

U nw i n d i n g Whisky and Netflix

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 85

The Great Innovation Frontier

4 innovation habits to cultivate in 2016 H O W TO T R A I N Y O U R S E L F TO B E M O R E AT T U N E D TO F I N D I N G B E T T E R WAY S O F B E I N G I N N OVAT I V E

OUTH AFRICAN BUSINESS confidence is low,

the rand is weak, and recession seems imminent. If ever there were a time for business leaders to adopt the habits of innovative thinkers, this would be it.

It was one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, who said that most people miss opportunity because it shows up in overalls and looks a lot like work. The same can be said of innovation. The word has cachet, conjuring up images of cool gadgets and clever ideas—but in practice, innovation involves a lot of hard work to generate and capture good ideas, and it is often more practical than sexy. Another popular misconception about innovation is that it is the work of creative geniuses, working alone—and not everyone can be a creative genius, right? Wrong. By adopting a few basic habits of mind, business leaders can train themselves to be more attuned to finding better ways of doing things, which is a different way of saying ‘being innovative’. So, as South Africans brace themselves for a tough 2016, here are four of my top innovation habits that business leaders can cultivate to help them ride out the storm. 1

Don’t throw money at the problem.

Instead of paying consultants or getting outsiders to tell you how to fix problems in your organisation, ask your people for suggestions. Employees are the ones at the coal face, after all, and they will often have the answers. “The knee-jerk reaction is to say the problem is a lack of budget, or skills, or training,” says Emeritus Professor Norman Faull, director of the Lean Institute Africa. “But this is not a sensible way of thinking.” He recommends you first take stock of what you have and then reorganise, eliminate waste, and liberate the capacity that is already there to unlock innovation. The acknowledged innovation giants (Google, Apple etc.) all have at their core an innovation culture that motivates and encourages staff to step forward with their ideas. 2

Keep one eye on the future.

Always think ahead. No matter how stressful the present, there will always be opportunities. History is full of

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Walter Baets examples of innovative thinkers who were able to run successful businesses in hard times because they saw things coming. Take, for instance, Floyd Bostwick Odlum: a US investor who became one of the country’s wealthiest men during the Great Depression after seeing how markets were behaving before the crash, and selling stock instead of buying it. Applying your mind to the future is a key habit of innovative thinkers, says Gareth Reese, senior manager with the Deloitte Strategy and Innovation team. Reese recently told students at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) Business Tomorrow Conference: “If you are focusing on responding to current trends, it’s already too late.” 3

The time for innovation is right under our noses—and it may make the difference between success and failure in tough times.

Think how you can add value.

There is a global shift in business toward social innovation. In emerging market economies like South Africa, there is a need for social venture entrepreneurs who are able to come up with viable business plans to solve social and environmental challenges—from education and health to water scarcity. Lakheni is a new social venture established by two MBA students from the GSB, which has won awards and big venture capitalist funding for its bulk-buying grocery-shopping service for parents and crèches in underprivileged areas. This simple idea makes people’s lives easier and saves them money, while crèches benefit and the business makes a decent profit as well. “What was critical for us was looking into a system; not to fix what we thought to be broken, but to find what is working and building on its strengths,” says co-founder Nokwethu Khojane. 4

Always look for efficiencies.

Khojane’s words highlight another truth for innovation today: The world does not necessarily need more products or new technologies but rather better services and more efficient ways of doing things. The secret of the success of Airbnb and Uber is not just that they are clever products/ technologies; it is because they give people something they need in a more convenient and cost-effective way. The future may look more challenging that we would like it to, but there are dozens of industries and organisations that are crying out for new and better ways of doing things, to which these aforementioned principles or habits could easily be applied. Don’t wait for better times. The time for innovation is right under our noses—and it may make the difference between success and failure in tough times. Walter Baets is the director of the UCT Graduate School of Business and holds the Allan Gray Chair in Values-Based Leadership at the school. Formerly a professor of Complexity, Knowledge and Innovation and associate dean for Innovation and Social Responsibility at Euromed Management—School of Management and Business, he is passionate about building a business school for ‘business that matters’.

MARK ZUCKERBERG FAC E BOOK C E O LOOKS

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R AV I N A IDOO

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TO AI, VR—AND DRONE S

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How Ravi Naidoo has turned the event into a movement

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M OST I N N OVAT I V E CO M PA N I E S

05 Instagram

FOR ITS BE AUTIFUL REL ATIONSHIP WITH THE FASHION INDUSTRY

During New York’s Fall Fashion Week in 2013, Instagram erected massive digital screens around town that showed posts tagged with #nyfw. Then came 2014: “Did we need screens again?” recalls Sara Wilson, who manages Instagram’s fashion and lifestyle brand partnerships. “Absolutely not.” The photo-sharing app had a bigger way to mark its place in the R1.4 trillion–plus global fashion industry: The September cover of Vogue, one of the business’s most valuable pieces of real estate, featured social-mediasavvy models Cara Delevingne, Joan Smalls and Karlie Kloss—dubbing them the “Instagirls”. Back in 2011, when Oscar de la Renta and his peers were Instagramming backstage at Fashion Week, the platform’s involvement was pure luck. But now it actively positions itself as the fashion world’s infinitely scrolling newsreel, one sign of how it stokes its hypergrowth and is creating a premium product inside Facebook. In 2013, when industry doyenne and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour Instagrammed herself reading her own September issue, Wilson “encouraged” Vogue to challenge its fans to make the same pose. Thousands did. Many involved babies and dogs. “I call it the moment Anna blessed Instagram,” Wilson says. Within months, Instagram had hired its first dedicated fashion and art community leader: advertising agency vet Kristen Joy Watts, who had previously co-launched Lens, the photo blog of The New York Times. Their team spotlights the most creative fashion houses, off-duty models, professional photographers, bloggers and tastemakers to inspire others to see Instagram as having the power to transform their popularity. Last year, for example, Marc Jacobs put out a call for models for an upcoming ad campaign using the hashtag #CastMeMarc, and 70 000 non-professional models posted photos, hoping to secure a spot. When Wilson approached the Council of Fashion Designers of America to pitch a Fashion Instagrammer of the Year award, it was an easy sell. The organisation chose eight nominees for a

FA STCOMPANY.CO.Z A DECEMBER JANUARY 2015/16

public vote. Inaugural winner Patrick Janelle (@AGuyNamedPatrick) got to Instagram the annual CFDA Awards. “It always evolves from a conversation,” says Watts. “It truly doesn’t work unless the person we are working with gets inspired and runs with it.” Instagram’s growing fashion clout has also influenced the features it develops. “Explore” once pulled up random posts popular across the entire network, but it wasn’t a hit. Last year, it relaunched as a tailored survey of user interests: handbags if you follow Rebecca Minkoff, couture gowns if you follow Dior. In August 2014, Instagram introduced Hyperlapse, an app that generates time-lapse videos. Runner-up for Apple’s 2014 App of the Year award, it’s another gift to the fashion world—ideal for a makeup artist applying

eyeshadow, say, or the final adjustments to a photo-shoot tableau. Now fashion companies are seeing Instagram as not just a place to promote their wares, but to advertise them as well. Instagram’s first ad launched in November 2013; it was with Michael Kors, and subsequent campaigns have been with the likes of Levi’s, Macy’s and Burberry. Users are liking and sharing the ads just as they do with other content, and that’s proved Instagram’s worth in a big way: It made a deal in 2014 in which global ad giant, Omnicom, promised to buy a reported $40 million (R564.8 million) in advertising, and the photosharing app is a major component in Facebook’s multiyear ad deal with Publicis Groupe. And with that, Instagram’s fashion partnerships come into full focus: The industry brought intrigue to the platform, and now it’s going to bring the revenue, too. —Emma Whitford

Added colour Instagram’s Hyperlapse app could be used for making time-lapse videos of the final adjustments to a photo-shoot tableau, for example.

I T IS MORE THAN A M AG A ZINE, I T'S A MOV EMEN T The Digital version of Fast Company South Africa is now available on Apple iPad and Android tablets

Fast Bytes Fast Company SA takes a look at the innovative new ideas, services, research and news currently making waves in South Africa and abroad

Now that you Mentions it… Since Facebook introduced Mentions for iOS, thousands of public figures have used the app to connect and interact with millions of fans. With the addition of Live, musicians, athletes, actors, journalists and other influencers have used Mentions to share live video with their fans. Facebook has now introduced Mentions and Live to public figures using Android. You can use Mentions to do the following:  Go live—Give your fans a behind-the-scenes look with live video.  Talk with followers—See what people are saying about you and the topics you’re interested in.  Stay in the loop—Get posts from the people you follow and see trending stories in one place.  Tell your story—Start conversations directly from your phone by posting updates, sharing photos or videos, or hosting a live Q&A.

500 REASONS TO JOIN AN ACCELERATOR

A PERFECT FIT FOR THE GUILD Lifestyle-genetics pioneer AV I L A S A R O W H A S B E C O M E T H E F I R S T S O U T H A F R I C A N T O B E I N D U C T E D I N T O T H E C I T Y O F L O N D O N ’ S E S T E E M E D G U I L D O F E N T R E P R E N E U R S . The founder of the British life-sciences company, DNAFit, and an Honorary Consul for South Africa in the UK recently won Innovation of the Year in the prestigious 2015 Lloyds Bank National Business Awards for his genetic test that helps people boost their athletic performance and lose weight. D N A F I T U S E S A M O U T H S WA B T O T E S T 4 5 G E N E VA R I A N T S S C I E N T I F I C A L LY L I N K E D T O A B O DY ’ S C A PA C I T Y T O R E S P O N D T O T R A I N I N G A N D N U T R I T I O N . It then provides detailed reports

on how to alter one’s diet and exercise to meet one’s goals. The Guild of Entrepreneurs promotes entrepreneurship, and comprises people who have invested their own money and time in setting up and running successful businesses. “ E N T R E P R E N E U R S A R E T H E L I F E B L O O D T H AT F U E L S A S U C C E S S F U L E C O N O M Y, A N D I H O P E I C A N E N C O U R A G E O T H E R S T O T U R N T H E I R G R E AT BUSINESS IDEAS INTO SUCCESSFUL AND DY N A M I C C O M PA N I E S , ” said Lasarow.

88 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

Home-cleaning platform SweepSouth, which recently returned from the four-month 500 Startups in San Francisco, believes more local entrepreneurs should be getting into international accelerator programmes. Aisha Pandor, CEO and co-founder, says SweepSouth will be working with Silicon Cape to support other local startups apply to 500 Startups. SweepSouth was matched with companies and mentors with years of experience. “We have already been able to use this support to improve how we approach our next funding round and our growth strategy.” Local startups are in an excellent position to take advantage of international opportunities. “There are opportunities in Africa and other world markets that don’t exist in the US, so the smart investors are starting to look outside America,” Pandor adds.

Fast bytes

GET UP AND GET ACTIVE In January, Virgin Active South Africa released its latest television commercial, “Get Off Your Ass”. The new ad conveys a simple message to South Africans to Get Up and Get Active in 2016, and not let procrastination and lethargy ruin wellintentioned resolutions to get fit. It culminates in the message that Virgin Active has everything in its clubs for people to get and stay active. Zeyad Davids, chief sales and marketing officer at Virgin Active SA, says: “It was

crucial that the tone of the campaign came across as motivational rather than judgmental—

so in conjunction with our agency, Ogilvy & Mather Cape Town, we purposefully set characters in everyday scenarios. The result, we hope, will encourage people to, firstly, have a laugh, and then take charge of their well-being.” Executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather Cape Town, Tseliso Rangaka, adds: “ We were very

Watch this space programme The Meta Economic Development Organisation (MEDO) launched an ambitious Space Programme last year to encourage young women to enter STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) related fields. In January this year, MEDO announced that Africa’s first private satellite, MEDOsat1, will launch in the second quarter of 2016. Once in space, all learners who took part in the various initiatives will be able to participate in experimenting with communication and data gathering with the satellite while it is in orbit. The MEDO Space Programme is run in partnership with Morehead State University in Kentucky, United States: a highly recognised research and development centre involved in nano-satellite technologies. MEDO developed the space programme in response to its observation that many corporates experience a lack of skilled STEM employees. “This South African Women in STEM programme aims to make a sustainable, measurable impact in Africa, and understands that South Africa’s future depends highly on people with STEM-focused careers,” says MEDO CEO Judi Sandrock.

particular about casting ‘real’ looking characters to really

bring home the message that Virgin Active wants to encourage South Africa to get active and just a make a start—no

Grotech intends to raise between R50 million and R100 million, with the option to increase to R200 million by February 15, 2016. It will invest in, build and exit a portfolio of high-growth disruptive-tech companies.

matter how big or small.” The TV ad will

be supported by in-club and print advertising as well as a digital and social campaign. “Gif Off Your Ass”, an element of this social media campaign, will allow individuals to download and share gifs of the various characters in

the commercial which reflect their current mood.

INVEST IN DISRUPTIVE-TECH COMPANIES AND SAVE TAX South Africans looking to pay less tax may consider investing in Grotech, a fund of Grovest Venture Capital Company in which investors are entitled to deduct the full amount of their investment from their taxable income in the tax year ending February 28, 2016. The tax relief is 41% for individuals and trusts, and 28% for companies.

EXAMPLE OF TAX DEDUCTION Taxable income Initial investment Income tax relief Net after tax cost of investment  Attributable share of Grotech’s establishment costs (3%)  Net investment amount    

R500 000 R100 000 R41 000 R59 000 R3 000 R97 000

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 89

Fast Events Upcoming events Fast Company will be attending

Design Indaba 2016 Date: 17 to 19 February Time: 08h45–17h00 Location: Artscape Theatre Centre, Cape Town www.designindaba.com T H E D E S I G N I N D A B A F E S T I VA L A I M S T O I N F U S E F I V E C I T I E S , O V E R 1 0 D AY S , W I T H T H E W O N D E R O F C R E AT I V I T Y.

For 2016, the festival has a renewed format. Building onto the flagship conference and simulcasts, T H I S Y E A R S E E S T H E F I L M F E S T S C R E E N E D I N A L L F I V E C I T I E S F O R T H E F I R S T T I M E , as well as the addition of T R AV E L L I N G E X H I B I T I O N S and a high-voltage programme for the Emerging Creatives. R E C O G N I S E D A S A C O R N E R S T O N E O F T H E S O U T H A F R I C A N C R E AT I V E C A L E N D A R , the Design Indaba Conference has been a sold-out event every year since 2004—and the 2016 edition will likely be no different. T H E E X C I T I N G C H A N G E O F V E N U E , T O T H E A R T S C A P E , will see the conference substantially enhance its production elements, creating an even more immersive experience. With all the devices and apparatus of the Artscape’s stage at their disposal, T H E FA N TA S T I C L I N E - U P O F S P E A K E R S W I L L B E A B L E T O P O R T R AY T H E I R C R E AT I V E I D E A S A N D P R O C E S S E S T H R O U G H D R A M AT I C D I S P L AY S A N D A N I M AT E D , multidimensional presentations. S P E A K E R S I N C L U D E U K T Y P O G R A P H E R M A R G A R E T C A LV E R T; T W I N C A R T O O N I S T S M O H A M E D A N D H A I T H A M E L- S E H T F R O M C A I R O ; AWA R D - W I N N I N G B R I T I S H D E S I G N E N T R E P R E N E U R B E N J A M I N H U B E R T; A N D S W E D I S H C R E AT I V E A G E N C Y S N A S K , among others. T H E C O N F E R E N C E W I L L B E B R O A D C A S T T O VA R I O U S C I T I E S V I A L I V E S I M U L C A S T: to a second venue at Artscape (The Theatre),

the University of Johannesburg Arts Centre, Durban Art Gallery, North-West University Potchefstroom Campus and the Ford Little Theatre in Port Elizabeth.

2 0 1 6 C O N F E R E N C E R AT E S

Individual ticket prices  Full Indaba (three-day ticket)  One-day ticket  Two-day ticket  Early Bird/Directory discount  Alumni/Academic discount

R7 900 R3 065 R6 130 R7 110 R6 715

SIMULCAST TICKET PRICES

Cape Town  Over-25s R1 600  Age 25 and under R1 400 JHB, KZN, PE, Potchefstroom  Full event ticket R1 030  One-day ticket R380  2x full event tickets R1 880

eCommerce Africa Confex 2016 Date: 17 & 18 February Time: 07h30–19h30 (until 18h00 on 18 February) Location: Cape Town International Convention Centre www.ecommerce-africa.com T H E E C O M M E R C E A F R I C A C O N F E R E N C E & E X H I B I T I O N I S M O R E T H A N J U S T A N O T H E R E - C O M M E R C E E V E N T. Leaders in the industry have been consulted to tailor an agenda that is both current and topical. T H E C O N F E X P R I D E S I T S E L F O N B R I N G I N G AT T E N D E E S T H E L AT E S T T R E N D S A N D I N D U S T RY D E V E L O P M E N T S , giving a deeper understanding of what is happening in the world of selling online, in a topical blend of compelling conference sessions, W H I L E I N T R O D U C I N G P I O N E E R I N G S U P P L I E R S AT A N E X H I B I T I O N S H O W C A S E . All sessions will be led by some of T O D AY ’ S K E Y I N D I V I D U A L S W H O ARE SHAPING THE E-COMMERCE LANDSCAPE IN AFRICA.

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Fast events

Modern Alchemists: Drones Date: 24 February Time: 18h00–21h00 Location: KAT-O, Cape Town www.kat-o.net A group of makers calling themselves the Modern Alchemists meet regularly in Cape Town. I T ’ S A S H O W A N D -T E L L O F A L L M A K E R P R O J E C T S — F R O M A R T, G R A P H I C S , B O A R D G A M E S , C O D E T O E L E C T R O N I C S — A N D B R I N G S together all skill sets

e.g. artists, gamers, artists, engineers and coders into one physical space to make and create. In this edition of Modern Alchemists’ drone series, T O B I A S G E O R G O V E R B E C K E X P L A I N S H O W H E B U I LT H I S G L O V E - F L O W N D R O N E F R O M S C R AT C H ; while A L A N B A L L , F O U N D E R O F F LY I N G R O B O T, TA L K S A B O U T F P V (first-person view) racing.

Smart Procurement World (Western Cape) Date: 1 to 3 March Time: From 07h30 Location: Cape Town International Convention Centre www.smartprocurementworld.com T H E 3 R D A N N U A L S M A R T P R O C U R E M E N T W O R L D W E S T E R N C A P E E V E N T , hosted in partnership with the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply, is the ultimate procurement and inbound supply chain conference and expo in Africa. I T P R O V I D E S A N O P P O R T U N I T Y F O R P R O F E S S I O N A L D E V E L O P M E N T A N D U P D AT E S I N S U P P LY C H A I N M A N A G E M E N T , with a two-day conference and interactive workshops on the third day. I N A D D I T I O N T O A C O M P R E H E N S I V E P R O G R A M M E , THERE ARE SEVERAL SPECIAL SESSIONS PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN FROM AND INTERACT WITH OTHER PROCUREMENT THOUGHT L E A D E R S , industry experts and peers, as well as top solution providers.

Blockchain & Bitcoin Africa Conference 2016 Date: 3 & 4 March Time: 08h00–17h00 Location: Focus Rooms, Sunninghill, Sandton bitcoinconference.co.za This conference will I N V E S T I G AT E T H E U P C O M I N G C H A L L E N G E S A N D O P P O R T U N I T I E S provided by B I T C O I N A N D B L O C KC H A I N T E C H N O L O GY as well as their impact on the current social, economic and political order. B L O C KC H A I N T E C H N O L O GY I S D I S R U P T I N G N O T O N LY T H E W O R L D O F F I N A N C E B U T A L S O A N U M B E R O F O N L I N E A N D O F F L I N E S E C T O R S . The Bitcoin Africa Conference will convene experts and leaders across these sectors to D E B AT E R E A L- W O R L D P R O B L E M S A N D F I N D T H E S O L U T I O N S T H AT D I G I TA L C U R R E N C I E S S U C H A S B I T C O I N A N D B L O C KC H A I N T E C H N O L O GY C A N O F F E R . Speakers include, among others: V I N N Y L I N G H A M , one of South Africa’s most well-known technology entrepreneurs; M A R C U S S WA N E P O E L , co-founder and CEO of BitX; and K AT H RY N H A U N , a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice.

rAge Expo Cape Town Date: 18 to 20 March Time: 10h00–19h00 (Friday), 09h00–19h00 (Saturday), 10h00–16h00 (Sunday) Location: GrandWest Casino and Entertainment World, Goodwood, Cape Town www.rageexpo.co.za rAge is AN ANNUAL VIDEO GAMING, COMPUTER, TECHNOLOGY AND GEEK CULTURE EXHIBITION. Developers and manufacturers meet avid gamers and fans, who GET FIRST ACCESS TO THE LATEST GAMES, COMIC BOOKS, DIGITAL LIFESTYLE GEAR, COLLECTIBLE CARD GAMES, TRENDS and more. Visitors can also join the wildly popular NAG LAN for 5 2 H O U R S of truly epic gaming.

FEBRUARY 2016 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 91

Trend Forecast

Dave Nemeth

Make or break I N T H E F U T U R E , I T W I L L N OT N E C E S S A R I LY B E T H E F O R M A L LY T R A I N E D AT T H E F O R E F R O N T O F G R O U N D B R E A K I N G D E S I G N A N D I N N OVAT I O N

ECHNOLOGY IS ADVANCING at a rate of knots, and keeping up with all these advances is an almost impossible task for even the best analysts and forecasters. In a similar way, it is hard to predict what the physical design of items will look like. What is perhaps easier to predict and forecast, however, is how the physical process of design will change and evolve, as well as who will be doing the real innovative design. Will it be trained professionals, or weekend hobbyists who are part of a maker group?

I’m currently of the belief that due to the speed of technological advances, the education system within many fields has been caught on the back foot. Design, in particular, is one of those. In a 2014 presentation at London’s Design Museum, Jonathan Ive—head designer at Apple—had this to say about design institutions and the hiring process: “So many of the designers that we interview don’t know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and computers are cheaper. That’s just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three-dimensional objects and not make one.” As we venture into 2016, not much has changed within the design syllabus bar the fact that some (and very few at that) might have added a couple of 3D printers and scanners—which are more for experimentation than focusing studies around. I recently addressed 200 final-year architecture students from the top universities around the country, only to find out that a grand total of three were experimenting with 3D printing and scanning. With such statistics, Ive’s statement rings true. So from where will the design gurus of the future emerge, if not from the high-profile and established design schools? In my opinion, we will start seeing truly innovative design taking place by an assortment of individuals who are tinkering away on a variety of

92 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A FEBRUARY 2016

Due to the speed of technological advances, the education system within many fields has been caught on the back foot. Design, in particular, is one of those.

machines in warehouses and basements. Maker spaces are springing up all over. It is estimated that in South Africa alone, there are approximately 30 to 40, between the variants such as maker spaces, hacker spaces, FabLabs (Fabrication Laboratories), private group meetups and design-based spaces. With these new collaborative spaces offering a novel outlook on creating, making and designing, it is clear that it will not necessarily be the formally trained who will be at the forefront of groundbreaking design and innovation. Another dynamic within these new hubs is that many of the projects are based on an open-source approach: The development of products can be worked on by a host of different people. Just like open-source software that is available for constant improvement, so too is the philosophy of these ‘labs’. Hands-on mentorship is also key, and probably the largest facet currently missing from formal tertiary education. The continual development of software has always aided the design process, as is evident in the fluid and futuristic works by visionaries such as industrial designer Karim Rashid and contemporary iconic architect Zaha Hadid. The augmented reality and virtual reality we are already seeing from Google and Samsung will not only be used for gaming and entertainment purposes but to design within a full 3D virtual space that will allow the designer to get completely immersed within the process. Augmentation allows designers to see their creations in a real-world environment, where the ‘walkabout’ views are just as they would be in real life. This means an office chair design, for instance, can be viewed in an actual room—and the proportions, lines and aesthetics can be evaluated before a physical prototype is actually created. With the headset in place, the designer will be able to virtually walk around the item, and with interaction tools be able to manipulate the design with hand gestures in real time. Although the future of design is guaranteed to be exciting and produce revolutionary innovations, the way great design will be envisioned and created remains the biggest unknown, as the barriers to entry will no longer be reserved for those with formal training. Dave Nemeth is a qualified designer with 20 years’ experience, and the owner of Trend-Forward: a trend forecasting and consulting business. He has often been referred to as one of South Africa’s leading trend gurus by a host of publications and online media. His annual trend forecast, focusing on design within business, has become a soughtafter report. Follow Dave on Twitter (@davenemeth) and Facebook (dave.nemeth).

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