Mark Shuttleworth made his first couple of billion long before he was 30. If you think the slump in the Nasdaq affected the shares in VeriSign he received as payment for his certification company Thawte, you need only look at where the rand stands to the dollar.
Shuttleworth made a quick fortune on the Internet, so listening to what he has to say might be advantageous. The hundreds of IT professionals who attended his various speeches at the Tel.Com Africa 2000 exhibition certainly thought so.
Looking to the future during his speaking slot at the Tel.Com conference, he called expectations about e-commerce into question. "E-commerce may not be able to generate long-term abnormal economic gain," he told the crowd. In the near-frictionless world of the Internet, customer retention becomes difficult. American companies spend relatively vast amounts of money to acquire a single company, he said, and then spend nothing on retaining customers.
"I would advise people putting together an e-commerce strategy to put customer retention and satisfaction at the centre."
But don`t think you can use business process patents, like the attempted Amazon one-click shopping patent, to force that retention. "Intellectual property protection is no longer going to be a possible or feasible way to lock in your customers or channel, or your business," Shuttleworth noted. Low barriers of entry make it almost impossible to stop anyone else from cloning your model; you just have to stay ahead of the pack.
But the bad news is that he doesn`t have a recipe to recreate his own success. "The world has moved on since my own success and it is the same challenge for me to figure out what comes next." However, he did have a few tips.
Tips for success
The first is to engage in aggressive, and possibly risky, short-term projects, and then to build up tolerance to failure. "If you are going to fail, fail fast and learn quickly." Failure is part of evolution, he said. "Be careful of stigmatising people who have tried and failed."
The second is to change the rules. "The businesses that you guys are starting now have a huge advantage in that you can change the rules," he told an enthusiastic entrepreneurial group at the May First Tuesday meeting held at the Tel.Com exhibition. "Smarter is better than being bigger or better capitalised."
The third tip is to make use of obvious advantages, such as the rand-dollar exchange rate or, as in his case, the export control the US government imposed on companies that allowed Thawte to become a billion-rand fish in a small pond.
The fourth is to make money now. "A series of short-term profitable leaps that all fit into a long-term strategy," is how Shuttleworth described the growth of Thawte. Have long-term vision, but don`t forget profit in the present.
And the fifth is to keep your head and not be too adaptive. "There is a temptation to reinvent yourself all the time to keep up with the Jones`. You can`t be all things to all people."
Africa`s time to bloom
Africa will blossom, Shuttleworth said. "Africa stands to benefit more from the Internet than anyone else. The lack of information and the control of information are fundamental to the state of Africa today.
"Have you seen that picture of Microsoft back in the 1970s?" he asked, referring to a picture of the handful of hippy staff the software giant then boasted, posing for a group photograph that was recently widely seen on the e-mail circuit. "I am quite excited that we in Africa could be those long-haired guys that succeed in the future."
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