“Spending 10,000 hours on something is supposed to make you a master—if you’re talented at it. Growing up, I must’ve spent 10,000 hours tuning and fixing our TV, figuring out how it works. We had one of those TVs with the set-top box, and all that time spent tinkering with settings and signals to get a clear picture must have inspired my engineering mindset. I’ve always been inquisitive about how things work. I studied Electronic Engineering, then worked in the telco space. But I had always wanted to travel out of Johannesburg, so I quit my job to go travelling. I was in Majorca, Spain, when a mate was working on a big, Russian-owned, 80 meter superyacht—and he got me a job on it. Two months later, I was in charge of the electronics on a different super yacht: Microsoft’s Paul Allen’s. 18 months later, I was doing IT and AV on Steven Spielberg’s superyacht. Working on superyachts is completely mind blowing. As an engineer, it’s a giant puzzle. You’re faced with tech problems everyday—problems you’ve never seen before and you have no idea what certain things do, but you need to make it work, now. There were some crazy moments—once, we were crossing the Atlantic and there was an electrical issue. So, there I was in the 40 degree engine room in a puddle of sweat, desperately trying to fix a problem I’d just encountered. I loved applying engineering philosophies and learnings from university, and I still have that mindset in the startup world today. I’m always wanting to fix things, to make them bigger and better. I like to see a problem, or have an idea, and be able to quickly prototype a solution. It’s not like you know exactly what you have to do when you’re problem solving, but you ideate, iterate, and improve—and I love that. I’m really grateful for the chance to use these skills daily.”
Tradable is a startup that designs and develops proprietary digital asset trading, portfolio management and market-making software.