An Employee Share Option Scheme can be an effective long-term incentive for employee loyalty and productivity to really turbo-charge your tech startup, but is it for you, and when is the best time to introduce it? Share options gives an employee the right to buy a certain number of shares in your ...

Investors have been putting billions of dollars into AI startups every year for several years now. But they’re focusing on the wrong type of play. The large number of AI startups they’ve been funding are building vertical solutions, often from scratch, putting themselves in competition with tech...

The technopreneur’s equity at exit will vary widely depending on the cash requirements of a particular kind of tech business, the capital efficiency of the business and the valuations that can be achieved. Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy owned a combined 37% of Snapchat bef...

Is it wise to analyse data or to train machine-learning models without the understanding, context and reality checking of domain expertise? And is it important to actually understand the relationships between the variables that are exposed through data analysis, in order to apply them? I attended a ...

AI investment will set a new record in 2019, but with slowing growth. The sector is starting to mature, and with an ever growing list of AI unicorns, there are great acquisition and IPO opportunities in the sector. What is AI (Artificial Intelligence) again? Generally we are talking about machine le...

On 16 July, I saw a news article about the potential cost of a cyber attack on London’s electricity networks – £111m daily. “Wow”, I thought. And left it there. And then, Thursday 25th July, headlines and broadcasts in Johannesburg, my home city – a tweet from City Power, the municipa...

The stage of your company will have the greatest impact on both the valuation of your company and the valuation methodologies that can be employed. Beyond that, the supply and demand for investment in your industry and sector plays a big role. It is definitely not an exact science and requires a cus...

Should InsurTechs partner with traditional insurance companies as underwriters, thereby just providing distribution to them based on their tech innovations, or can they leverage their position to participate in the insurance risks and profits, and be more like the insurance companies? Insurance is a...

When the inevitable question comes up at an investor pitch “who is your competition”, it is almost always a good thing to have identifiable competitors, even though the technopreneur may think and feel otherwise. Investors go where there is competition. Competition validates the category There i...

Willie Pienaar, Group CE of legaltech company, NuvaLaw, reflects on his experience working with legal and insurance companies, examining what it will take for meaningful industry transformation to take place. As the digital economy became entrenched in the outside world, 2017 saw the legal industry ...