Looking back, technology had always been my thing. Whatever was new, I wanted to be the first to have it — CompuServe, the internet, a website, e-commerce, the lot. By this stage I found myself at MPS holding something I'd never quite had before: a product that was genuinely, demonstrably better than the giant it was up against. PSNext ran rings around Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Project was the giant — the safe brand name the big banks and the big mines reached for without thinking, because nobody ever got fired for buying the obvious thing.
We were such a tiny outfit that I did everything: generated the leads, gave the presentations, ran the implementations, and did the training when Francois or, later, John Cartwright couldn't do it. Francois had a training room with a dozen computers in it, and once we'd landed a customer we'd bring their people in and teach them the software. The bigger players had the budgets and the brand, and it was left to me to get into the room and show a client, face to face, that the small South African company had the superior product — made by a similarly small American one. I won a lot of those, because I found I had a real knack for technical presentations: for demonstrating exactly how PSNext could solve their specific challenges.
The highlight of all of it was the invitation to Los Gatos.
Sciforma — the Californian parent company behind PSNext — held what they called Sciforma Days, gathering their distributors from around the world: the French, the British, the Israelis, a contingent from South America, and us. Francois announced that three of us would go — him, Ian and me. Ian I've already introduced; what I haven't said is what he was actually doing back in Johannesburg, which was quietly extraordinary. He was building interfaces between PSNext and the ERP and legacy systems that big corporates typically ran on, getting our software to talk to everything around it. His masterpiece was something Francois had sold to Sasol as PSTimeSheets. Sasol was a vast oil-from-coal parastatal south of Johannesburg, and their bandwidth in those days was so dire that the only way to get an employee to fill in a timesheet was this: he received an email with an attachment, clicked it, an interface loaded up right there, he filled it in, and sent it back by email. No connection required. It was clever in a way that made other clever people sit up, and Francois was itching to show the Americans.
Soon enough I found myself in Silicon Valley — Los Gatos, to be precise.
We met the developers — the fifteen or twenty core people behind the entire product — and for me it was genuinely awe-inspiring. These were the people who built the thing I'd spent years mastering, and here we all were in the same room. They looked after us beautifully. We hired a car and did the whole circuit around San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito — that improbable little town on the other side with its own Mediterranean microclimate, warm and bright while the city sat under fog — and took the ferry back across the bay. And in among all of it, meeting distributors who'd flown in from every corner of the world, something started to shift in me.
It crystallised when Ian gave his presentation.
I will never forget the looks on the American developers' faces when they saw what this young South African had done with their own API. The Sasol timesheet trick had no real application in America, where broadband was already everywhere and only getting bigger — but that was beside the point. What it demonstrated was the sheer level of the man's talent, and they knew it when they saw it. I remember thinking, quite clearly, that Ian deserved more than to be stuck in South Africa. He was destined for greener pastures, whether he'd worked that out yet or not.
And, almost in the same breath, I started thinking the same thing about myself. Mikey was on his gap year in Copenhagen and had already enrolled at a graphic design college, so it didn't look as though he was coming back; Angie and Olie were in Nigeria, and Niels and his family were long gone. I was the only member of my family left in the country. There was a small, persistent voice suggesting that maybe I oughtn't to be in South Africa anymore either — that maybe I could be part of something bigger than a four-person agency at the bottom of Africa.
By the time we went again, in 2011, the world had changed. The great financial crisis had bitten hard, Francois was cutting back wherever he could, and in the end it came down to just Ian and me. And, crucially, I now had a British passport. When it became clear Francois wasn't keen to pay for me to go, I dug my heels in. "Francois," I said, "I've put five years into this product. I have to be at the cutting edge of it. If you won't send me, I'll pay my own way." And I did. As it happened, a small and entirely unexpected windfall had just landed in my lap — a story for another chapter — and it gave me just enough of a cushion to be brave, or reckless, depending on how you look at it.
On that trip I did a proper number on Ian. I told him, more or less, to stop thinking small — that a talent like his belonged at Sciforma itself, working directly for the people who built the product, not buried in an agency in Johannesburg. It sounds disloyal to Francois to admit it, but the truth is I was making the same argument to myself. I'd grown deeply frustrated with him. Every bright idea I brought him — and I was full of them — was met with the same archaic thinking, the same instinct to do it the way it had always been done: endless user manuals instead of YouTube videos, that kind of thing.
I came home in the back end of 2011, fired up, and put a marketing plan in front of him. He flat-out squashed it. And I looked at him and heard myself say, "You know what, Francois? I resign."
He was taken aback. He recovered enough to tell me I'd need to work my thirty-day notice. So I did. I told him I was going to go into web design — I'd already rebuilt the entire MPS website in WordPress and picked up a couple of side jobs on the strength of it, so it wasn't pure fantasy. But sitting here now, I can see it for what it was: a man giving up a secure job, at the bottom of a global recession, on a hunch and a hope and a watch I hadn't yet lost.
It was, by any sane measure, reckless. Although there was one other thing. Sciforma itself was in the process of being bought outright by what we'd taken to calling the French Connection — that is, Yann Le Bihan. In Los Gatos, Yann had taken me aside and told me that once the purchase went through, and provided I was no longer at MPS by then, he'd have a senior consultant position for me. So I did have a kind of backup plan. A deeply insecure one, but a backup plan all the same.