I received the following email from Justin Stanford, co-founder of the Silicon Cape Initiative, this morning in response to my blog post last week. I have asked his permission to publish it as I believe it offers valuable insight on the issue.

Hey Cath,

I had a chance over the weekend to read your blog post. I just thought I’d quickly touch base with you on it — I know that Andrew has already weighed in in the comments section. Just a few thoughts I thought I’d share for your interest though as it may answer many of your questions…

History

Before I address your comments, a bit of background might be useful. You might like to have a read of a blog post of mine from last year (http://www.justinstanford.com/2009/10/silicon-cape-reflections/), where I reflect on the launch of Silicon Cape and some of the history building up to it.

You’ll see that we originally never had any idea that it would turn out to be so huge, in fact we originally planned on having a small concept launch to no more than 80 people from within the industry, who we felt might be interested. We thought it might build momentum over the course of a year or two. Of course, as we now know, when word got out it became very popular very quickly, so we decided to step up to the plate, multiply the budget by 20 and try and include everybody. What started as a R20k commitment ended up as something more like a R400k commitment, with only a small percentage being covered by last minute sponsorships that we hastily cobbled together.

That said, we are glad we did it — it ended up being quite something, and was very special! But be assured it was and still is put together by a very, very small team, volunteering their time and effort, and it was and is an immense amount of work for some folks who are already very busy as it is.

Of all the founders (otherwise known as the interim steering committee), only two of us actually live in Cape Town, that being myself and my partner Erik. The others all live in Joburg or the US. So we pulled in what resources we could from within our companies and our marketing company, and have continued to do so in an attempt to keep things going while we structure a hand-over to a community mandated steering committee who will be better suited to carry things forward.

Despite these very tough challenges and most of us working far too much, we still managed to put together and pay for a great online social network, a brand, a world-class launch attended by 500 people, and then shortly thereafter a very successful first networking event at the Old Biscuit Mill which 400 people attended.

We caught the attention of the likes of Helen Zille, Rampele Mamphela and Johann Rupert, who chose to believe in our cause and represent it at our launch event. We spent countless hours negotiating and speaking to these people and their teams. We went to great lengths to make sure that at our launch and on the website, a wide spectrum was represented and felt invited, from universities to government to investors to the geeks.

We got the attention of national government, allowing us the opportunity to meet with the Minister of Science & Technology to present. We then researched and developed a 21 page positioning paper for the Minister at her request to share at national government level. We scraped together the time to meet with countless interested parties who heard about Silicon Cape; the IDC, NGOs, Silicon Valley contacts and VCs, South African expats, even the head of TATA Africa.

We organised the best democratic community election we could. We continue to field a lot of interest, manage and pay for the website, all of this with literally a small handful of people, who are trying hard to make a lot of other things work at the same time. Along the way, we’ve endeavoured to keep the community up to date where we can via the website, and encourage the community to go out and DO on behalf of the cause, rather than sit back and wait. SCI is most certainly not about handouts or waiting for somebody else to get something done. Everyone who is a part of the community is a community representative.

The point I’m trying to make is that while it may appear as if little is happening or has been happening, it has actually been quite a challenge and we feel we’ve rather done quite a lot in a somewhat short period of time (4 months I think it’s been?), with not inconsequential personal sacrifice from several people.

Why did we do it? Simply, because it’s something we are passionate about and something that we live daily, and because no one else bothered and it needed doing. Because if I didn’t believe in it I couldn’t have and wouldn’t have started a VC company focused on SA. Although it has been a serious labour of love, I for one am glad and feel we have actually pulled off quite a lot!

On to some of your points…

Demographics

I for one can’t really say why this tech-entrepreneur-venture-capital space is so white male dominated. I had this discussion with Marc Ashton recently too. Perhaps it is because young black citizens and other PDIs are presently being strongly encouraged to pursue corporate careers, with all the benefits of AA or BBBEE, leaving the somewhat marginalised “pale male” with little other choice but to consider entrepreneurship? Honestly, I have no idea, maybe white guys just like writing code more than anybody else, or maybe they are presently the ones more exposed to the Internet and computers which develops that early interest. I think that over time things may well change though…

So far as I am concerned personally though, Silicon Cape is genderless and colourless. The space that Silicon Cape operates in is by inherent definition a meritocracy, where all are welcome and all may compete evenly. For your interest, two of my CEOs are women and appointed purely on the basis of merit. I am certainly no sexist.

I think if you took a look in Silicon Valley you might find that the VC companies and the startups there are also pretty white male dominated, but again, I’ve no idea specifically why. That the Silicon Cape steering committee has ended up with just one female representative is unfortunate, but certainly not by design, because as you know the elections were held democratically. I suppose it is possibly just a numbers game based on the general demographic of the community. I would imagine we’re quite lucky in fact to have the one female VC that we do have in SA in the form of Andrea Boehmert!

Momentum

I think I’ve sort of covered this already above, but suffice to say that lots has still been happening in the background, particularly around the preparation of a steering committee and the handover to it by the founders. I think it’s fair to say that December is a dead month, and most of us have come back in Jan with a mountain of work and lots of new things starting in 2010 that we need to get on with, so it has indeed been challenging. If one takes December and Jan out of the equation, then there has been something like less than 2 productive months since the launch, although of course we’ve been trying to fit things in everywhere we can.

Steering Committee

The elections were of course only held in December, and since then, everyone’s come back from holiday and we have finally managed to nail down a date for the first meeting of the steering committee, that being Feb 10th as tweeted from the @SiliconCape account. Thus the steering committee, while officially voted in, have never met before nor ever discussed the Initiative nor set an agenda nor taken handover from the founders, which may explain why some of them aren’t even sure yet what the agenda might be!

That said it’s also important to understand that this is a steering committee. Not a final appointed board, it is a community mandated representative body that can act on the behalf of the community in steering the direction of this new movement in the early days of its birth. They have to act in the best interests of the community — now if that means creating a structure and appointing a board that is made up entirely of black females, then that is what they must do. My hope is that the steering committee will take all factors into account when creating and appointing the board and the advisory board, and apply their minds to putting the most applicable people and resources into the right places. This however remains to be seen!

Joburg

I am surprised that there should be some “backlash” as you put it from folks in Joburg who feel somehow excluded. The Silicon Cape launch and website is open to all, and indeed many people from Joburg have joined and many attended the launch. Several people from Joburg were in fact also a part of the speakers or panelists at the launch and are among the biggest proponents of SCI. I know of several folks who flew down just to attend the first networking event. All are welcome!

Precedent shows that for initiatives like this to work, geographical clustering is a must. In the US, there are several high-tech clusters in other areas such as Boston or Atlanta, but Silicon Valley is by far the epicentre of it all,  and the biggest, and with the strongest brand. That doesn’t mean there can be no tech clusters or activity in other cities, but it’s just a natural occurrence.

Thus it makes sense to focus on the most likely geographical clustering point. As put forward in the presentations at the Silicon Cape launch, there are many reasons why we felt that the Cape is the place in the SA context.

Joburg positions itself as the financial cluster for SA and so far as I know no Capetonian holds this against them. There is nothing stopping anyone from being a part of a tech hub in Port Elizabeth, Poffadder or elsewhere.

Indeed, everyone in the country will benefit from much of the work of Silicon Cape, such as regulatory reform initiatives. But it’s necessary to have a focal point, a geographic centre and a workable, marketable brand. And from our perspective, the majority of startups, VCs and startup culture seem to be naturally centred around the Cape. As in business, you have to start with the low-hanging fruit!

I hope that perhaps provides some further sense of perspective from our side to your thinking.

Cheers!

Justin

Thank you Justin, I appreciate the feedback.

It was my dad’s birthday yesterday and during dinner last night at Bardelli’s (if you haven’t been and you are into pizza, GO!) the inevitable discussion about time and how it seems to be passing at a more rapid rate each year, came up.

I’m one of those lucky people who has a dad that knows everything – and if he doesn’t know, he’ll find out. He reads everything from National Geographic to Scientific American, knows about supernovas and why, even though the earth is spinning at almost 100kmp/h through space, there is no resultant wind on the earth’s surface. Ask Joe, he now knows why too

According to my dad, one of the theories on why time seems to be moving faster (apart from the one that says time is like a toilet roll: the closer you get to the end the faster it goes), is because of dark energy.

Wikipedia describes dark energy as:

“In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to increase the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most popular way to explain recent observations that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 74% of the total mass-energy of the universe.”

Imagine that, 74% of the universe is potentially made of a hypothetical (i.e. as yet unproven) form of energy that we can neither see nor feel yet we experience it daily when we realise that 9am turned into 4pm and Monday merged into Friday before you could say: “What’s the time?”.

I’m getting that planet feeling again…

We went to see an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a few weeks back entitled Colours of the Night. The idea that painters such as van Gogh and Jean-Francois Millet could capture the light so perfectly  inspired me to start taking more pictures at night.

I have uploaded a whole album to my photostream but have included some of my favourites below.

Anton and Evelien

Lovers in Paris

<a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://bp3.blogger.com/_FTp9AMiQ8d8/SH4mO3egl_I/AAAAAAAAABM/BdLicmTjgi0/s1600-h/Social+networks+vs+age.jpg”><img style=”margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;” src=”http://bp3.blogger.com/_FTp9AMiQ8d8/SH4mO3egl_I/AAAAAAAAABM/BdLicmTjgi0/s320/Social+networks+vs+age.jpg” alt=”" id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5223654654648293362″ border=”0″ /></a>
Came across this study re. social network users vs. age on <a href=”http://uweg.typepad.com/uwe_gutschow/2008/07/social-networks-by-age-groups.html”>Uwe Gutschow’s</a> blog. Check it out, it’s rather interesting.

(Will figure out slide share shortly.)