Open letter to my 10 year old - Happy Birthday YOUKNOW

It’s a little fuzzy as to when YOUKNOW Technologies was actually born. The company was registered in November 2013, but any official, external activity only started in early 2014. For the first few years we always celebrated it’s anniversary on 1 January, which is a bit silly, because people have more important things to care about or reminisce about on the first day of their new year.

When we realised that this year we would be completing our tenth year of being legal, we decided to put a stake in the ground and officially announce that 1 November is our company’s birthday.

Which makes today YOUKNOW’s 10th birthday!!

I started typing a sentence here on how quickly time flies, but that’s lazy actually. Because all I need to do is take a few minutes to flash through to points within that journey to understand the incredible moments that have shaped what we’ve built or added colour to who we are as a business.

For those that don’t know the story, YOUKNOW (originally youKnow) began - in a big part - because my family needed me closer to home and more accessible. But the other angle to this origin story was the need to scratch an itch. An itch that was bugging me when I watched my peers and colleagues struggle to achieve what they wanted to achieve because of internal company politics, processes and inferior tools. In theory it was all so simple!! Just get the best technology for the job, train up smart people to use it and incrementally use increasingly more bits of the information your customer was sharing with you to create a better experience for them.

So we got to work. Initially partnering up with Lithium (now Khoros ) to offer Social Customer Care technology at a time when social was still thought of warm and fuzzy PR fodder for interns to handle. Here it’s time to send a massive shout out to Casey Monteiro , Russel Smit , Ronelle Cain and Roland Naidoo for looking into the future and investing in this space before it was mainstream.

Also - massive shout out to Phindile Magadla , who somehow allowed me to become a part-time recruiter for DSTV and get paid for it, while waiting for the business to make enough money to sustain itself. That was a company-saving moment, and I hope you understand the impact that had on us making it to this point.

While I feel like it swished past, if we think of the minutia there is a lot that went on: At least 4-5 different websites; the evolution of a logo; the constant revision of a value proposition and the yearly internal battle of:

• “do we pivot now?”,
• “is this going to last one more year?”,
• “am I still the right person to grow this thing?”

The technology partnership path that our company undertook, steered us towards some incredible partners and people. Here’s a quick rundown of the ones that made the biggest impact on our growth: Lithium (now Khoros ) Crimson Hexagon (now Brandwatch ), Hootsuite , GlobalWebIndex (now GWI ), Domo (still Domo ), Audiense , mParticle by Rokt , Mixpanel and most recently, Braze .

It is only through the tight knit community that is Martech and SaaS, that we’ve been able to foster these relationships. It’s quite an incestuous little industry with talented people moving from one industry to the next. And it’s because of the people there that we’ve been given our opportunities to work with these global powerhouses.

So growth doesn’t come from business - in my opinion. Growth comes from people. And we’ve had the most incredible people be a part of and influence our story.

One of the things I’m so glad that we started doing was to create avatars for everyone who stuck with us for longer than 6 months. The result is this beautiful wall of colourful icons of the personalities that have helped create this unique culture that I think we all feel at the company. I think another factor that led to that “YOUKNOW feeling” which is evident if you spend enough time around the team is that we learned early on that we won’t tolerate assholes. Won’t hire them, won’t partner with them and won’t work with them as clients. Life’s too short and there are better ways to spend our days.

Special mention has to be made to the old-timers who’ve been with the company for more than 5 years, Ryan Brunyee , Bianca Lance , Meghan Holmes and Johanna. You’re tattooed on my heart.

I can think of a handful of people who have watched and supported us from the beginning, either as partners, colleagues, clients or friends (but they’re all friends, aren’t they?): Jacques Naudé (thanks for giving us our first office space, amongst many other things), Tiaan de Kock (thanks for pointing me in the right direction so many times), Pierre Cassuto , Marius Greeff (our first actual license client), Jessica Wheeler , Rammiz Omar , Maz Hussien , Nelson Camara

From the start though, before there was anyone else, there were two people who I could not have done any of this without:

1. my wife Candice, who supported me through the dark times and was my cheerleader in the bright times. Thank you!
2. and Lee Kuyper, my high-school basketball teammate, my friend, best man at my wedding, godfather to my kids and then my mentor, trusted advisor and FD in YOUKNOW.

And now, here I am typing this with our growing Cape Town team sitting in the other room, while the Gauteng team is struggling to find places to sit in a warehouse-style office that we never thought would be fully utilised.

Things are good. I’m happy. Building a company like this has had it’s downs (Lee calls it my Q3 blues) but it’s definitely had WAY more ups - and it’s because of the people I get to do it with. No assholes.

Fin.

For those that read this far, check out a few memories from the last 5 years.

https://youtu.be/56ysqyXIYpc