Insomniacs will be jealous to know that Hannes van Rensburg slept soundly before, during and after negotiating the $110 million sale of his company, Fundamo, to Visa.
Such a major transaction would leave many people fretting all night long, yet Van Rensburg negotiated by day and calmly slept at night.
Fundamo's technologies provide banking services to poorer people, and since there are an awful lot of them, the deal gives Visa an enormously expanded foothold. Visa has almost two billion cards in issue, but took 50 years to achieve that. The only way to issue the next two billion is by reaching people at the low end of the market, and that requires mobile technologies. So Visa will invest fresh cash to help Fundamo do more of what it's already doing.
“The potential market is going to be bigger and the stakes are higher so there will be more stress. The most important thing about stress is you have to sleep well,” Van Rensburg says. “As soon as your sleep patterns start getting messed up, you have problems. You have to switch off and not think about tomorrow. You have to say: 'I can't do anything about it now so I shouldn't think about it'. You can decide what you think about, so you can decide not to think either. It's difficult, but it's one of the things I have trained myself to do.”
As a young man, he spent weeks training his brain to think of gradually more trivial things at night, until they were so trivial, they were barely worth thinking about at all.
“If I had a complex problem or something I had to do, I couldn't sleep or I'd wake up shaking, and I thought, 'I'm going to die if I operate like this'. Sleep is not only important from a stress perspective, it also helps you solve problems and refreshes you. We think we should sleep less so we can get more done, but really, we should learn to sleep more.”
Van Rensburg is a large, imposing man, seemingly hewn from a typical Afrikaans block. But he's happy to take jibes at himself, saying Afrikaners can be very common. “I think we invented the caravan,” he says disparagingly. He chats easily, filling his conversation with opinions, memories and ideas to add colour to the bare facts.
He's balancing slices of chorizo on pitta bread smothered in a dip, with the phone at his side vibrating endlessly. Mostly he ignores it to focus on this interview, but takes the call when his colleague, Aletha Ling, rings from Pakistan.
“Pakistan is one of the nicest places to go,” he says. “Not if you want massive shopping centres, but if you want to understand ancient cultures and how the people operate and think and the food they eat and how they go about life, then Pakistan is an amazing country.” Fundamo has associates there, as well as in 33 other emerging markets.
Now, far from winding down at the age of 54, Van Rensburg is gearing up for growth opportunities through Visa. But as a youngster, it took him a while to figure out what he wanted to do.
“As a child I was a little bit uncertain - call it confused - about what I wanted to do. I don't think that's a bad thing because it makes you look at life differently and see more options. If you know what you want to do, you miss other options.”
Fancying himself a scientist, he studied physics and chemistry at university.
“I was good at maths and my parents couldn't pay for my degree so I got a bursary from the Nuclear Energy Corporation.” His job with the Corporation inculcated a fascination with computers. In those days, the capacity of a room-sized computer was less than the capacity now sitting on a SIM card, he remembers.
“The best solution to the energy crisis is nuclear power, there's no doubt about it. But the government was tinkering in things that weren't just about applying power, so in a way it was really bad that I was involved in that as a youngster. I lived in a country you could feel ashamed about and I was indoctrinated. As a youngster, you get told this is how things are supposed to be. Then I was fortunate to live through the absolutely amazing transformation and live in a country I'm very proud to be part of. And I'm doing stuff that is really helping people, so it's quite a transformation for me and for the country.”
He resigned to move out of science and follow the thrill of computing.
“I still enjoy complex mathematical problems and can get really engrossed in that, but it's only a part of life to understand complex puzzles. What's also important is to interact with people, and with science you don't do much of that. Science is lonely and there are a lot of mad people who work with you. Brilliant, but mad.”
Van Rensburg created a start-up computer company with some friends, which they later sold to IBM. Sanlam was one of their clients, and he joined as its CIO in 1994.
Fundamo began as a Sanlam project to investigate mobile payments, even though that wasn't core to the business. “When it got to canning the project because there was no application for it, I said I'd see if we could raise some money and spin it out. I was the CIO with a good job, stock options, a corner office, a secretary and a company car, but they wanted to can this project and I didn't want to, so I resigned.”
But Fundamo struggled, since the IT bubble was bursting and nobody really understood its concept. It was an idea ahead of its time.
“People didn't understand it and they didn't understand how much money there is. Poor people spend more money in absolute terms on managing their finances than rich people. If they want to borrow money, they get it at exorbitant rates; if they want to send money, they have to pay a truck driver to take it. Everything is expensive for them and poor people are locked into this cash society they will never be able to lift themselves out of.”
More than a decade later, Van Rensburg says it was a difficult journey, but worth every minute. Visa bought out Fundamo's shareholders, including Sanlam, Remgro and HBD Venture Capital, in June, and the management team is staying.
Van Rensburg says he's not a corporate person, but he's become one by default under Visa. “I think they're going to fire me at some stage,” he says, and this time you hope it's more deadpan humour than a genuine prophecy. But he won't stay there forever.
“I'm not locked in contractually although they have made it attractive to stay, but that will never lock me in. Visa is a great company and the management and executives 'get it' and there are amazingly brilliant people working there. So it's a great place to be. Will I be there for the long term? Definitely not. But will we make a difference? Yes, definitely.”
His style of leadership is to be a colleague, not a boss, since everyone is part of a team, and he expects everyone to take responsibility.
“We have a society that likes to say: 'It wasn't me, I don't know how it happened'. I hate that. I want someone who says: 'It was me and it was a mistake and this is how I'll fix it'. Or people who say: 'Give it to me, I'll do it'. These are people I can work with.”
As a Christian, he hasn't plotted his future too carefully because he's leaving it to God's will. “I'm very connected to God and I trust where I go is where I need to go. I believe there's a God who has a plan. I'm absolutely fallible but I try to get things right, so in a way I'm guided by God. If I don't feel good about something in terms of what I believe is right, I won't do it,” he says. “I don't think I'll ever retire. Or maybe I have always been retired, if retirement is doing what you want to do.”
Christianity permeates his entire life, including his belief that marriage is forever. He's already enjoyed 32 years of marriage to Annelei, so it's working well. They have two sons and a grandson, Arden, aged two.
Grandchildren are a revelation because they make you see yourself quite differently, he says. He expected Arden to look at his grumpy grandfather and keep quiet. And in a confession that completely destroys any pretence of being tough and no-nonsense, he adds: “You just totally lose it and sit and talk baby talk.”
First published in the November 2011 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
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