Mark, thanks for joining CEOwise. Thanks for having me.
Now in 2015 when you are running your own successful businesses you took a step
back in you wondered how you can make a difference in South Africa and that's
when you thought to disrupt the education sector. Is that where
Suits & Sneakers was born? So Suits & Sneakers has like a handful of ways that it
kind of came about. To be brief, one my own educational process was a bit messy,
so that's always stuck with me. Two, I became a public speaker by accident
and I got into the line of training people almost by accident to solve a
debt issue, which is a story I won't go into for now, but as I started speaking around
the country I started to realize a handful of gaps and problems and I
realized that as we've moved on in the world knowledge acquisition and skill
acquisition has changed. We used to only have to go to formal educational systems
to be able to hack the system and upgrade ourselves, but I started to
realize, largely through my own experience, that informal education was
becoming a thing. If you want to learn something about the world there are many
ways you can do it including going online to acquire that knowledge.
So I started kind of predicting, without being that guy, I started predicting
in 2015 we've got a bad skill base in the country, we've got high levels of
inequality and education is expensive and not quite doing its thing, how do we
fix it? So, that was the kind of origin for Suits & Sneakers. I just knew there
was a problem, I didn't quite know how to solve it, but I really felt the need to
try do something about it. Yeah, well you've done a great job in trying to
educate South Africa and you say informal education is the way of the
future, all people need is an internet connection. Now is that your
vision for Suits & sneakers? Well I actually believe that the future of
education is a blend between formal and informal. I believe they are coming to
one. That's actually where we got the name from, Suits & Sneakers, is kind of
coming together right, and I don't want to bash formal and make it sound like we
need to get rid of it, because every good thing that we have right now you would
have to argue came from the formal education system. I just think it's
outgrown itself, and so with that in mind I think that
the future, it just it needs to blend into one and we need to seriously
upgrade education and we can't ignore that tech is the great leveler to help
us scale education, whereas right now most quality educational systems are
predicated on scarcity. Take Harvard, if we added a hundred thousand new people
graduating a week would Harvard have it's the same allure?
No, it works on scarcity, but the world doesn't need a scarcity of education it
needs a democracy of education and that's why I think tech therefore
informal education has to mel with the formal. Yeah, well I think you've got a great
model, because I went to the Suits & Sneakers 5 and it was an awesome event and
what I really enjoyed about that is the entrepreneurs are telling their story.
Certainly what I've tried it get them to do is I think telling their story is
great, because people can relate, but it's also trying to get them to have a
balance of thought leadership in it at the same time. In fairness my idea
stemmed from the idea of TED Talks. I can't kind of hide that,
in fact in the beginning of Suits & Sneakers I pushed it as, Hey we are like
the South African version of TED, because at least what we had there was
some people could relate to TED, they had watched a few talks on.
And companies are investing quite a bit on development and training, now we at
Druff interactive, we encourage training, online training at lynda.com, now which
is a great way, and what I've realized is that, from over the years of my staff, the
guys who are actually dedicated to it, and to even do it in their own time, they far outweigh
the other guys that are not and maybe just doing it once a week, what have you,
and it definitely pays dividends in the end. We need to educate ourselves.
The bugbear was informal education is that it's hard to measure and part of what
Suits & Sneakers is trying to do is create a formalized version of informal.
So, I can't encourage people enough to kind of get on that train, because
it's a viable way of hacking your life and upgrading your value. And there's so
much great content out there, really. Dan, so much! It's a crime not to.
It's such a crime, but a lot why people don't, because I've thought about this for quite a while,
why is it with such incredible access to so much
content, why aren't people taking it up? and it's because of a conditioning
that we've kind of gone through from young and specifically within the formal education system.
One of my flaws when developing my own products over the
years is I try and make it perfect in order to go to market, where you realized
with suits because you realize it wasn't perfect, but you're going to build on it,
but you had a clear goal in mind. Now how do entrepreneurs, how do we know when
to take things to the market because that I think, one doesn't know
if you're really ready? Such a good question. I think I guess it's an
individualistic style thing, but for me I've gotten so used to just going,
Let's get something out, so for example recently we launched the
Suits & Sneakers membership. I actually landed up mentioning it at the Suit & Sneakers
that you attended, but only, so that was May and now we're in August, I put
it out there and then people like "what's happened to it since", but I felt the need
to just put it out there let people know even though I had nothing really. And then you have to commit to it
anyway. And then I committed to it and it really did force me and just
in the last week or so we've really started pushing now. You hit the nail on the head
it forced me to commit to it. So I say there is a value
but there is also a value, I learned this from watching a talk once from Peter
Diamandis, there's massive value in launching something above the line of credibility.
So, you know, people expect, they're expecting this from you, you know, a very
low base for example and you come at them and they're like wow that is, you
guys really put some thought into this, so I guess there's a feel for both as to when
you need to be either. Here at Impello you created a co-work environment
and where did that come about and how did that originate?
I started Suits & Sneakers and it started to gained traction and the ultimate goal of
Suits & Sneakers is to eventually offer free education to the masses. A very high
quality free education. One of the problems that you have to solve to make
it free is how your campus operates and it you'd need your campus to cost you
nothing, so this idea came about where I thought what happens if we could have a
co-working space that becomes profitable in its own right, but the co-working
space doubles up as the campus that you offer education from, and I did this
really crazy thing where I signed the lease without really having money, but my
feeling was, without sounding like a cowboy entrepreneur, was that if I
came to you as an investor, potential investor, if I came in with an idea hey I think we
could do it like us maybe, you might say to me, cool idea come talk to me when it's a bit
more solid, but if I came to you and said I've got a building and this is what the plan
looks like, are you in or are you out, I'd probably get a lot easier way of
getting you in or out. Yeah. So, that was the thinking behind it was a little bit
mad as I look now. Sorry to interrupt, but my entrepreneur from
last was last week, William, he also said, you know, capital follows passion
and can clearly see that you're passionate about this project.
So a lot of young entrepreneurs are becoming young entrepreneurs because they have no
other option, but they come from a really low skill base and they come from a
really low social capital base. When they walk in here they don't really have the
money to afford to sit here from a co-working perspective,
so we started looking at other funding models and how do we, how do we allow
people, young people specifically, who you can just see are passionate, they
want to have a go, they're driven, but they just need a hand, and not a hand out,
just a hand up. So that's what Impello's starting to turn into, is not
just a co-working space, but actually the incubation hub for people who can't afford it.
Yeah, no I think it's a great thing you've got going here. Thank you.
You also said the sharing economy is coming. I mean, if you just look at Facebook,
Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb, I mean all of those companies are the biggest in their
industry, but they don't own any inventory or products. How do you think
that's going to affect us as entrepreneurs?
Yeah, the gig economy as they're starting to refer to it. What you have is that
innovation is starting to occur more frequently on the back of the speed at
which human beings share information with each other, and what you're seeing
with technology Bitcoin, the Blockchain, it's allowing people to decentralize
where the power is. That's kind of what happened with Uber, they said, instead of
one entity controlling the taxi industry, the people own the system and the
same thing happen with Airbnb and Bitcoin's happened in a similar way, so technology
is simply starting to enable individuals to have more power and
capacity to connect with each other. If you spread that out, you compound that
across the world, people won't, once they get a taste of being able to do things
that they've never been able to do before they'll never go back. So the
sharing economy is here to stay for those reasons
and more. You can't out regulate it. You can try,
but you can't out regulate people coming together, so, fascinating times
ahead for those who understand the exponential future. I would say fairly
worrying terms for people to use simply don't train their brains to think ahead