Capital decision by one smart apple

19 June 2016 - 02:00 By DUNCAN McLEOD

Justin Stanford, co-founder of 4Di Capital, came to the "big city" to realise his ambition of becoming an internet entrepreneur. He was "straight off the farm" when he arrived in Cape Town in the early 2000s, he said this week."I grew up on a farm in Elgin, in the Western Cape. My dad was an apple farmer. I was the archetypal village farm kid coming to the big city with a backpack and nothing else."Although he grew up in a rural setting, the technology bug had bitten early and Stanford desperately wanted to build an internet start-up."I spent a few years very poor," said Stanford, recalling that there wasn't much of a tech scene in Cape Town at the time.Eventually, he achieved success with an online security business called ESET Southern Africa, which secured the regional distribution rights to ESET, antivirus software designed in Slovakia.block_quotes_start The initiative acted as a catalyst for the whole community and brought everyone together block_quotes_end"We had some early successes, and this led to other young people looking for advice and funding. I was only 23 or something at the time."Businessman Erik van Vlaanderen, a friend of Stanford's father, became his mentor and angel investor early on and they went on to co-found 4Di Capital."I did some trips to Silicon Valley at the time. It became clear there was something going on in the Cape."Cape Town has similar DNA to San Francisco. Both are coastal and both are liberal, with strong computer science and engineering universities. It attracts a similar mix of people - and innovation comes out of that."But there was no real tech community in Cape Town like there was in Silicon Valley. Although there were pockets of start-ups and entrepreneurs doing interesting things, they didn't know about each other, Stanford recalled.story_article_left1He spent time in San Francisco "hanging with" his friend Vinny Lingham, the South African who founded Gyft and later sold it to First Data for a rumoured $54-million or more.As they chatted, the pair realised there was an opportunity to try to "catalyse" the start-up ecosystem in Cape Town."I came back and in 2009 we launched the Silicon Cape Initiative. It absolutely exploded. The initiative acted as a catalyst for the whole community and brought everyone together," said Stanford.Herealised that there was an opportunity to create an investment vehicle to provide capital to the promising start-ups "crawling out of the woodwork".Stanford said: "I went to see Johann Rupert, who was the best person I could think of to discuss these ideas with."Johann is a helluva patriotic guy. He just loves the Cape and Stellenbosch and young people, and he really enjoyed the idea. We started some early experiments together that would become 4Di Capital in 2011. He became our first anchor investor [through the Reinet Fund]."Since then, 4Di Capital's first fund has raised additional capital from E Oppenheimer & Son, an investment vehicle belonging to the Oppenheimer family...

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