Impressions from Johannesburg
While it has been over two months since I returned from my trek through Africa, I am eager to share my thoughts and reactions from this important experience before they have faded even further from my memory.
Over parts of January, February, and March of this year (8 weeks in total), I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg while working for a consumer products client of the Monitor Group. Unlike my experience in Riyadh, which was defined both by international travel and treks to parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia rarely seen by foreigners, my experience in Johannesburg was largely spent in the northern suburbs of that city, mirroring the lives of most of my South African colleagues. During those eight weeks I did escape for a weekend safari in Madikwe Game Reserve, and for a relaxing exploration of Cape Town, but even these were not uncommon destinations for locals.
While short, my experience in South Africa left me with several important and lasting impressions of the country:
Living the Good life in the Northern Suburbs
One of the striking elements of my day-to-day life in Johannesburg was its high quality. While it certainly didn’t hurt that I was there during the South African summer, escaping London’s dismal rain and chill, the quality of life went beyond good weather.
Diverse restaurants and lively night spots abound in what is described as the most “first world” of cities on the “dark continent.” While it is true that persistently high crime rates require most restaurants to be located in fortified centers, complete with fences and parking lot guards, the most popular are focused inward on well-decorated and lushly planted courtyards.
The threat of crime kept me on my toes while I was living there, but didn’t result in any real significant impact on my ability to enjoy life as I normally would. In fact, it was the car culture of living in the suburbs which caused the greatest concern. The need to drive everywhere, and the fact that people lived in apartments scattered all over the northern suburbs, led to many more risky situations of driving home after a few drinks than I was really comfortable with. This problem, however, is really no different than you experience in the suburbs of the US.
Beauty and Diversity of the Country
In my brief weekend adventures outside of Johannesburg, and in the planning I did for potential future trips, I came to appreciate the immense diversity and beauty of South Africa. Prior to arriving there, I had assumed that in order to go on safari I would need to take a trip to the middle of the continent - someplace like Kenya or Tanzania. The opposite was true.
South Africa in fact is a land of myriad environments. Its offerings range from tacky and exuberant gambling centers (Sun City) to sunny beaches and natural beauty (Cape Town) to metropolitan and suburban (Johannesburg). It contains desserts, lush mountains, grassy plains, and forests.
South Africa’s national parks, from the famous and massive Kruger to smaller private game reserves and the vast rural landscape of the middle of the country, host incredible populations of wildlife. When visiting Madikwe Game Reserve near the border with Botswana we encountered nearly every variety of native African wildlife we could have hoped for. The only creatures missing in our weekend safari were a Buffalo and a Leopard. From conversations with others who had traveled more of the country, our experience was not entirely unusual.
Unfortunately, in addition to wildlife and landscapes, South Africa’s diversity also includes a range of impressive wealth and devastating poverty.
Apartheid Museum and Race
One sleepy afternoon I took a trip south of the city to visit the country’s lasting testament to its dark past: the Apartheid Museum. The two hours I had to spend there were not nearly sufficient.
The museum starts by educating the visitor on the history of South Africa, and the long road to Apartheid. It explains the country’s initial inhabitation by the British, the conflicts of the Boers, and the discovery of gold in Johannesburg. It documents the injustices that were enforced through the system of apartheid, which echo elements of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and US oppression of African Americans and the Japanese in World War II. It goes on to explain the roots of organized opposition, the rise of Nelson Mandela, and the importance of the ANC political party.
The sad reality is that understanding many elements of Apartheid is possible without ever visiting the museum: its traces are etched in the racial divides of the city. Soweto (South West Township) was one of many ghettos into which Africans were forced to live after they were ejected from their homes in the center of the city. Even many years since the collapse of the apartheid system, this and many other townships remain densely populated with blacks who continue to live an impoverished and difficult life there. The Northern suburbs also remain much as they were during apartheid: enclaves of wealthy Caucasian life.
Concerns About the Future
Perhaps the most enduring memories from my experience in Johannesburg were related to the challenging questions raised about the country’s future. In the first two weeks that I was in Joburg, the city (and whole country) experienced a series of devastating blackouts, eventually causing the weeklong closure of the world’s largest gold mines, and causing the price of gold to skyrocket. As a professional, I became suddenly and painfully aware of my reliance on both a computer and communications technology to accomplish even the most slightly productive tasks. Several-hour-long blackouts wrought havock on our work schedule, despite the fact that we were unusually well protected because most of our work is done on laptops which bought us a couple hours of productivity before they too died.
Colleagues, clients, and newspapers were harshly critical of the government in failing to adequately maintain the electrical system. They blaimed the government of taking for granted the high quality of infrastructure that had been put in place under the Apartheid governments, and not investing in upgrades or its continued upkeep. These critiques mushroomed into speculation about what other elements of basic infrastructure might be next to collapse: water? sanitation? transportation?
While I was pleasantly surprised by the country I had encountered, few people who had been there longer had similar sentiments. They described growing crime and increased “white flight” to other English-speaking countries, in particular Australia. I only hope the comments were alarmist. South Africa and its people have an immense amount of cultural and natural wealth to share with the world.
Building the Zecco Bay to Breakers Float
Over the last week, I designed and helped build the Zecco.com float to be used in the Bay to Breakers race on May 18. It was fun to break out the skills I learned as a set designer and builder in high school and college theatre for an immensely more practical purpose: creating a mobile beer-keg-toting “Z” to push seven miles up and down San Francisco’s hills.
The most important step was finding a wagon to transport the whole device, because I knew building our own axle and wheel system would be far more trouble than it was worth. Ace Hardware in San Jose had just the vehicle for us: a large green wagon with pneumatic tires and a base just long enough to fit my planned 4-foot-long Zs and wide enough to fit a keg in between.
The sides of the Z were cut from 3/4 inch particle board, and provide the primary structural support. The Zs were then framed with square 1×1s, and joined together with lateral supports from the same material. We cut sheets of 5mm luan plywood to cover the Zs, and taped the seams for optimal painting. The bottom piece of plywood was cut out to allow space for the keg to rest directly on the bottom of the cart, with enough room for a bucket of ice around it to keep our beer nice and chilled.
We first sealed the whole vehicle with white latex primer, then covered the Z in bright pink, traced out the remaining letters of Zecco, and filled them in with the last of the pink paint.
The final result is a beautiful creation - I can’t wait to get a keg inside. Thanks so much to Zecco for the inspiration and funding, to Tony and Ellaine for helping build it, and to my family for lending a driveway, beer, and pizza for our construction efforts.
Tony has posted a whole series of photos on Flickr , and written about the float on his blog, Philotech .
Greystripe - Developing a Complete Mobile Phone Advertising System from Scratch
After attending a presentation yesterday by CEO and Founder, Michael Chang, and VP of Operations, Kurt Hawks, about their startup, Greystripe, I have a newfound appreciation for the challenges that face entrepreneurs innovating in a part of the market where there is so much uncertainty. Greystripe’s primary revenue stream is from the sale of visual ads placed on mobile phones, but the story of how they got there, and the challenges they had to overcome, was both inspiring and daunting. I want to share a condensed version of that story, although I apologize in advance if any of it has been mangled in the retelling.
Where they are today:
Greystripe is an advertising network, content publishing partner, and distribution network for mobile phones that is VC backed by Steamboat Ventures, Incubic, Monitor Ventures. Its most recent capital round, a series B, raised $9 million. Their free, ad-supported games are being downloaded at a rate of 250,000 per day, by users all over the world.
How they got here:
Chang’s presentation focused on how the company has evolved since getting off the ground in 2005, and the multiple iterations the company has gone through in creating its current business model. The company started with a focus on mobile advertising in a single vertical: location based services. Inherent from day one in this business were challenges of developing content for different screen sizes, across different phone manufacturers (e.g. Nokia, Samsung, Motorola) with different operating system software (e.g. Palm, RIM, Microsoft), operating on different telephone networks (e.g. AT&T, T-mobile, Verizon), with different wireless technologies (e.g. GSM, CDMA). The complexity would not stop there.
As it became clear that location based services were evolving much slower than they had hoped, Greystripe’s focus shifted to a different vertical, gaming and applications. Games were sourced from publishers (e.g. Digital Chocolate, Hands-on Mobile), modified with the company’s AdWRAP technology, which inserts additional blank screen pages for advertisements before and after gameplay, and offered for free to users to download on their mobile phones. The next challenge, then, was to find advertisers who would pay for the full-screen advertising real estate within these games. Their search for an advertising network which could effectively source those ads on their behalf turned up empty, and again the fledgling company was back to the drawing boards.
Developing an advertising network, which places ads on behalf of companies and advertising agencies, would require a larger sales force, and a different business model than Greystripe had originally envisioned. A sales team was hired, relationships developed, and the first ads were placed. As the network took shape, and advertisers began to take notice, two new challenges would emerge. First, visual modifications would have to be made to the ads to serve the multiple screen sizes and formats, and second, the games would have to be distributed to users for download. The second would prove to be particularly daunting: it became clear that there were no effective distribution avenues available to ensure that games could actually reach users.
The next iteration of the company therefore took on this challenge: developing a diverse set of distribution channels for publishers. These have evolved to include mobile providers’ own catalogs of games and applications available for download, the sites of the game publishers, and GameJump, a portal developed by Greystripe.
Greystripe today is fully functional end-to-end, and is revenue generating (though not yet profitable). The company is now in its fifth iteration of its business model, and both Chang and Hawks sounded optimistic that even if not the company’s last, that it offered their greatest chance for success to date. Chang acknowledged that future developments could include gathering more detailed profile information about the users of its ad supported games, layering on location sensing technologies, and using it to more precisely target ads to specific users, allowing them to demand a higher premium per screen view from advertisers.
For the potential entrepreneur’s in the audience, Chang offered several tidbits of advice - including the importance of this kind of iteration and evolution in the formation of a business: “Push things far enough to really test the business model, but without pushing them so far that you run the company into the ground.”
Reflecting on the Launch of Hilltop Consultants
I was recently asked to contribute to a guidebook for new student members of Hilltop Consultants, a student nonprofit consulting organization that I started while I was at Georgetown University. I thought it would be appropriate to also post my thoughts here:
Starting Hilltop Consultants was an exciting part of my university experience at Georgetown. I had heard of other student nonprofit consulting organizations on other campuses, and was surprised to see that none existed in Washington, DC. Given the plethora of nonprofit organizations based in the area, the potential client base was huge. My peers, other undergraduates at the McDonough School of Business, were an ambitious bunch who were eager to find ways to gain real-world experience early on in their university careers. These same ambitions had led many to join The Corp and the Georgetown University Alumni and Student Federal Credit Union, and I saw no reason why their energies couldn’t also be directed toward nonprofit consulting projects.
After returning from a semester abroad, in January 2004 I began working on the plan in earnest. A group of three other students answered my calls for assistance to start a new student business organization. We drafted a mission, vision, and business plan, applied for recognition as an official student organization, and recruited the first leadership board for Hilltop. By April of 2004, Hilltop Consultants was a reality. By the time I graduated in May 2005, we had served four clients over the course of two semesters, and hosted the first ever business strategy case competition at Georgetown University, the Business Strategy Challenge.
As a member of Georgetown’s case competition team, I had experienced first-hand the excitement of student case competitions, and saw a great opportunity to expand Hilltop Consultants’ activities into that area. By choosing a local nonprofit organization as the subject of the case study, we were able to further build upon Hilltop’s mission of both serving the DC nonprofit community and enhancing Georgetown students’ opportunities to learn about business by advising the managers of local organizations as they struggled to tackle real-world business challenges. Our first Business Strategy Challenge, in April 2005, focused on the obstacles facing the United Way as it adapted to a fundraising environment in which donors demanded greater transparency about how their donations were being put to use.
After graduating from Georgetown, I spent three years as a management strategy consultant for the Monitor Group. I was lucky to not only gain experience serving many impressive businesses in the United States and abroad, but also served several nonprofit organization. It was incredibly stimulating to work in a place where I was constantly surrounded by a group of people with such incredible intellectual horsepower.
Consulting is a valuable first-step out of an undergraduate education not only for business students, but students from all academic paths. It provides a strong analytical foundation which is valuable to employers in nearly all reaches of the economy. It also provides opportunities to build presentation skills and enhance a person’s professionalism as he or she is put into meetings with more and more senior clients. Finally, it provides excellent opportunities to explore a variety of industries and practice areas (e.g. marketing, finance, operations) to see where your passion lies.
I hope that Hilltop Consultants not only helps students find a way to contribute to the nonprofit community through a higher impact investment of their time than might otherwise be possible, but that it allows students to “test the waters” of a career in consulting. The long hours, the often grueling travel schedule, and your status as “advisor” rather than “decision maker” mean that consulting certainly isn’t the perfect career for everyone. As a first dive into the professional world, however, I can think of few better options available to a recent Georgetown graduate.
-Mitchell Fox
Founder and President, Hilltop Consultants, 2004 - 2005
Consultant, The Monitor Group, 2005 - 2008