When Alan Knott-Craig Jr unexpectedly resigned from iBurst, something seemed a little strange. The Internet access provider was talking up a storm about big plans for rapid growth, yet the young MD suddenly bailed out and practically retired to Stellenbosch.
Four years later, Knott-Craig explains and apologises in this candid interview as an honest, open and chastened man. He's been shaped by tough experiences and mistakes, chiefly stemming from his high-profile status as the son of Vodacom veteran Alan Knott-Craig. He's shared not only the name but also the headlines, often unwelcomed or unjustified. He's wised up nicely now, without losing his charm or his boundless optimism about SA, despite carrying a couple of personal grudges.
Knott-Craig grew up in a busy home where his parents fostered a succession of abandoned kids, in a rural area where he jokes that 'if you get divorced, you're still brother and sister'.
He was schooled in Pretoria, then went to the University of Port Elizabeth to study accounting. Not by choice, but under some clever coercion by his father. “My father said, 'You have a choice in life - you can study or go somewhere else. If you study, I'll pay for you. If you go somewhere else, you are on your own. If you study accounting, I'll pay for you. If you study anything else, you are on you own. If you pass, I'll pay for you. If you fail, you are on your own.' I wasn't doing anything of my own volition, but I'm grateful because I wouldn't be where I am without him. My father sold his car to pay for me, which gave me an appreciation for money.”
After graduating, he served his articles with Deloitte and was posted to New York, taking his wife, Sibella.
“Then we sold everything we had, which was basically a car, and travelled around the world for six months on a shoestring,” he remembers.
I almost ruined my relationship and I almost ruined my life. It was more important to be at work than with my family.
Alan Knott-Craig Jr
Such freedom made Knott-Craig balk at the prospect of corporate life and he itched to start his own business, except he had no money. So he started going for job interviews, until businessman Gavin Varejes phoned to discuss a potential venture. Knott-Craig was well qualified, with a head for figures, and with a respected father who gave him instant contacts in the cellular industry. The job was to head CellFind, which Varejes was launching after licensing UK technology to track the whereabouts of a cellphone user.
“I was given the opportunity of a lifetime,” Knott-Craig says. “I wouldn't have got his attention if it wasn't for my dad.”
He took the job, and after two years, CellFind almost went bust for failing to add new customers. Yet the board still supported him, and he was appointed to iBurst, which shared some mutual investors.
“iBurst was a mess and needed someone to fix it. I was very young at the time, but they didn't have any alternative so I went in as the MD and chief operating officer.”
Hindsight
It doesn't matter how much money they have or how important they are, if they're not nice people, I won't hang out with them.
Alan Knott-Craig Jr
He admits to making some bad judgements in both businesses. “I definitely went through a phase when I got too big for my boots. You let it all go to your head. It was a massive learning curve and I made lots of mistakes. I benefit every day now from having done that and don't make the same mistakes.”
The gravest error was neglecting his private life, eventually triggering his shock resignation in a belated bid to save his marriage.
“I almost ruined my relationship and I almost ruined my life. It was more important to be at work than with my family,” he says.
“In April 2009, we had just had our first child and I woke up thinking, 'That's it, I'm going to get divorced. My wife isn't supporting me, I have all this pressure at work and she's not helping me.' And she's saying, 'You're not helping me, you're not supporting me.'”
Confused, angry and unhappy, Knott-Craig went to his father. “I asked him, if he could go back, would he change anything, and he understood what I was saying. He said, 'When you are old, your company isn't there - all that's there is your family.' He said, 'Look at your kids and look at your company and choose.' When you put it like that, it's not a choice.”
Knott-Craig told iBurst chairman Brett Levy he knew he hadn't finished the task expected of him, but he couldn't do it because he needed to rescue his marriage. Levy backed his decision and agreed to let him go.
Knott-Craig looks contemplative for a moment, and it's an odd expression on a face that's a young-looking 34. “A lot of the board still isn't speaking to me,” he says. “I betrayed a lot of people. You take them into a battlefield, then say, 'I've cocked up my personal life so I can't be with you, but good luck guys, don't f*** it up.'”
Even after resigning and moving to focus on the family, salvaging the marriage was difficult and he feared his entire world was collapsing.
“From August until March, I locked myself in the house and read books. I was quite depressed. I was thinking I had made the worst decision in my life leaving iBurst, pissing off my staff and my shareholders when it didn't seem like my family situation was getting better. I thought I was never going to work again.”
Knott-Craig had been lauded in the press in 2008 when an e-mail he sent to iBurst staff went viral. It urged people not to panic because of exasperating incidents like load shedding, and encouraged them to look at all the wonderful things SA had to make them stay. The e-mail led to Knott-Craig writing the book Don't Panic and hitting the best-seller lists.
Two years later, the good publicity turned bad when the Sunday Times let rip with articles accusing his father of mismanagement at Vodacom, and specifically of nepotism for having Vodacom buy a stake in iBurst to help his son build the business. “The Sunday Times attacked my dad and I was in the crossfire. It's not lekker to wake up on a Sunday morning to 48 messages and to read allegations that were crap. It wasn't pleasant.”
That's clearly a massive understatement because Knott-Craig is still smarting about it now.
His life turned around in March 2010 when he took a course at Harvard through the Young Global Leaders World Economic Forum, which invited him because of the impact his 'Don't Panic' message had made. On the flight home, he had 'an epiphany', realising that what he wanted to do for the rest of his life was to develop smart applications for dumb phones through the World of Avatar, which he set up as an investment company to spawn start-up enterprises.
“I literally landed in SA as a new person. I told myself to stop feeling sorry for myself. I'm blessed with a beautiful family, have more money than most people will ever have and am very privileged.”
Within six months, World of Avatar had invested in 10 start-ups. On 12 August,Knott-Craig re-proposed to his wife, and she accepted. Then she announced that she was pregnant with their second child. “The most important thing in my life is my wife, and we are back to where we were when we fell in love. I'm never going to let that go again,” he says.
Take two
Money was running out by now, so Knott-Craig began making calls to keep the business afloat. Then his old friend Francois Swart, a former top financier with Goldman Sachs, asked if there was space for him in World of Avatar. He joined as the CEO, finally giving Knott-Craig an experienced operational partner instead of staff who needed leading.
“He saved me,” Knott-Craig says. “But in many ways we saved each other. He wasn't really happy. On his first day, he phoned to ask if it was okay to wear baggies, and I told him if he ever asked me a question like that I'd give him his money back and send him away.”
After months out of the limelight, Knott-Craig was back in the headlines recently when World of Avatar bought MXit, the hugely popular social messaging service. Murmurings occasionally predict that MXit will fizzle out as smartphones muscle in with their free messaging services, but right now MXit has a staggering 44 million users across 126 countries including Nigeria, Kenya, the US and the UK.
“The target market is the middle to bottom end of the pyramid. That's always been World of Avatar's market - to help people who don't have smartphones get access to the Internet. Twitter does 200 million messages a day and MXit does 800 million. That's four times as many, and it's growing by 15% every three months.”
Knott-Craig says the only reason MXit founder Herman Heunis sold it to him was because they are both based in Stellenbosch, and vaguely knew each other. “Herman wanted to move on, but he wasn't going to hand his baby over to just anyone. He could trust me to give it the best shot and keep it South African and take it to the next level.”
Short-term plans are for African growth, with an overall aim of making MXit the biggest digital communicator in the world. “We have some serious competition from BlackBerry Messenger and WhatsApp and Facebook, but our advantage is that everybody isn't using iPhones yet. The world isn't Silicon Valley, the world is Soweto and we have a lock on that market. It's going to give us a footprint in India and Latin America.”
Another aim is to enhance MXit's performance on more sophisticated phones, so it can grow with its existing customers when they climb the socio-economic ladder. “The engine is world-class but the paintwork needs a touch-up,” Knott-Craig says.
“Cellphones are going to connect everybody in the world. We are not necessarily doing it for the money, we are doing it to help people connect and get access to information so they can try to make money themselves.”
That sounds very altruistic for a businessman, but making a strong recovery after the almost terminal disaster of his personal life has changed his attitudes.
“I've made a resolution that I will never lie to anybody ever again,” he says. “I'll never leave anybody behind. I will not tolerate mediocrity. I'll only hang out with nice people. It doesn't matter how much money they have or how important they are, if they're not nice people, I won't hang out with them,” he says.
“When the whole Sunday Times thing went down, it was interesting to see who was still around. It was a lesson that there's absolutely no loyalty out there except for your family and really close friends. Now I'm in a good space in my life. I've got my issues but everybody's got issues, and if I compare myself with 99% of the world, I'm very blessed.”
First published in the February 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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