Koos Bekker discusses his legacy & history of Naspers

I had a very good run. I started early. I was head of a company at the age of 32 and I've now been running a listed company for 22 years. We recently did a survey of listed media companies in the world and we can't find anyone who has had an executive that ran a company for that period. So I've had a good run.

Hopefully not, and that's the reasoning behind taking me out for a year. If you consider I've been with the board for a long time, I've worked with the current chairman for three decades. I've built up the management — in 1985 there was one, then we added my secretary, then we added five, and so we built the business. So the problem for a new guy coming in is that all those people could lobby around him. Let's say someone, some executive, proposes to Bob fake the new CEO, a proposal Bob doesn't like. So this guy works me over, tosses me a few ideas, I start biting on the bait, then he goes back to Bob and he says, 'You know, Koos likes this, what are you going to say?' So that becomes quite hard. Similarly at the board level, the board might turn to me and say, 'Do you approve this? Do you think it's a good idea?' So we thought the best way to structure this is for me to break away for a year and give Bob a chance to bond with the board and with top management. I'll still keep the Tencent connection — so I'll continue with Charles, the other director, on the board of Tencent — but hand over the Naspers bar to Bob. And in a year's time, it should be well enough established and I'll pop back onto the board. So it's all thought through.

Yes, I think we need to create a bit of space for the new guy to establish himself. But alongside that, first I intend to have fun. I've had a very interesting life and I'd love to go to exotic places, eat interesting foods, meet young people. I think older people are often boring — it's like crayfish, you know, they're hardly old but they form a crust and nothing penetrates that. It's sort of self-contained. Young people are open to influences, so I find they're much more stimulating. And most good things in the internet have been invented by people under 30. So my idea is to meet good, interesting people, go to places where the future is being manufactured. Korea is leading the world on online games and cell phone technology. In Europe, Berlin is starting to become the gravitational point for the internet, which is very surprising.

I think we can. If you consider why some place develops an internet hub — San Francisco has no special technology or minerals or whatever. Why did Silicon Valley develop there? It's basically good universities and a nice place to live. Berlin the same — cheap accommodation, a good night life. I think universities play a major role, young people want to be there. So I think Cape Town has the same — we have three good universities, we have possibly the most beautiful and diverse countryside in the world. So we can give it a go, and we should give it a go.

I was a remarkable local yokel. I went to one primary school, one secondary school, and I was 19 before I got out of town. That was the town of Heidelberg in Pongola, a small town. And that gave me a sort of solidity. I think it's actually beneficial to know your surroundings, to grow up in a fairly enclosed space.

Yes. I think the job I do is very close to farming. You have an element of interference — so you plant seed — and then you have an element of nature: it's a nice day, it rains. So in our business you do certain things and then the environment pops issues at you. You try to solve them. And I think being an entrepreneur is a little bit like farming. When you start, you do everything — you make the tea, you do the photostat machine, you do everything — and as the business grows, it diversifies. But certainly that improvisation of a farm is extremely useful in business.

To some extent, yes. The benefit we had is when we started M-Net in 1985, we were young people in their early 30s and we adopted a first-name policy. So everyone was informal, we dressed informally, and it pervaded the company. So even today MultiChoice, although it now employs thousands of people, has a certain informality. As you grow more established, a certain structure invades the company. You also start drawing different people — when we started, we attracted the cowboys, people who were very prone to taking risk. But as you grow, you get people who want to play it safe, who go for an established company with an established job. And your task as CEO is then to fight that, to try to keep a certain informality, a pioneer spirit, even though you're growing. And that's what we've tried to do.

I think there's always an element of luck and circumstance. I went to New York, to Columbia University, New York — clueless at 22, it sounded exciting — did an MBA. And while I was there, I discovered that the industry of pay television was being born in the US. No other country had it, it was totally new. I studied it and in one of my papers at the university tried to anticipate whether you could launch this abroad. The problem is abroad didn't have cable, so could you take this technology, encrypt it and send it over the air, and would it still work? And after I did the paper, I thought maybe we could. The only country I knew was South Africa, so I came back — which I hadn't planned; I left South Africa not to come back — came back. So that was a lucky break. We ran for six years, and then in 1991, one of our executives, a guy called Ian Wilkinson, went to America, and he came back and he said, 'You know, there's something you can put in the boot of your car and you can make cell phone calls to your secretary. This is wonderful stuff.' That led to MTN. We started the planning in '91 and we got it in '94. We took about three years to establish, and of course all our calculations were wrong — we estimated 300,000 subscribers went empty, and peaked. And now South Africa has more than 100% cell phone coverage — we have more cell phones than people. So we were totally wrong. And then again in '97, we had built up this pay television business in Europe, and French company Vivendi offered us $2.2 billion for the business, which was totally overvaluing it — it wasn't worth near that. So you should have sold.

So we sold the European part off. And then we had money and nowhere to go, because pay TV — the whole world was occupied. So we then went for internet, which had just been born — the worldwide web, two years earlier. So there was a certain amount of luck at each phase.

I think both, in a different way. MTN is today one of the great cell phone companies in the world and the leader in Africa, and it's been, I think, a remarkably diverse and successful company across so many countries. Pay television is very interesting — the problems it poses of technology, people, regulation, politics. It's an extremely — you know, when you open up your inbox in the morning you often say, 'Oh God, you know, there goes the business,' and then you start working through your problems. And I think one of the most delightful things is actually that element of surprise — that the world keeps tossing problems at you, and as an executive you've got to solve them. And I actually enjoy the process.

I think we'll do it. You're quite right that pay TV is maturing, and consequently you can't expect the growth rates that you'll get in the internet. But curiously enough, elements of pay TV are starting to look like the internet. So if you take a personal video recorder — do you have one of these PVRs? — it records movies without even asking you, it records the cricket test and summarizes it in 10 minutes without asking you. So in a sense it fakes the internet — you come home and suddenly the test is available on your PVR, you press two buttons and you watch. It feels like the internet. And as this move accelerates, pay TV and the internet are starting to integrate. So I think some years from now it'll be actually quite hard to tell apart some elements of what we do in pay TV and e-commerce, because they'll use the same technologies.

You're responsible for that too. But you know, that offers again opportunities if you think about it. Take the position some years ago before MultiChoice was available across Africa — you are the mine manager at a mine in Katanga, you receive your newspapers four weeks late, you're cut off from the world, your teenage daughter dresses like two years ago because that's the influence on her. Then MultiChoice comes and gives you 50 channels, you see CNN the same moment as someone sees it in New York, your daughter is exposed to Fashion TV — your whole life changes. So I think the opportunities are to connect people to the world.

That's a great opportunity. So if you think about it, Facebook connects you to your friends and then you find you spend too much time managing all this, and then there's an opportunity actually for new products.

True. But I think every situation lends itself to some improvement. So if you say, 'Okay, I need access to the world,' we can give you a cell phone to be available to the world. But then you say, 'This intrudes, I would like some privacy.' Then we can maybe create products for you that create privacy — that maybe refuse to tell people where you are, even refuse to tell people whether your phone is switched on. So access is one opportunity, and then when you've had too much access, privacy is a second opportunity.

What surprised me is how unpredictable it was. For example, just before Twitter was developed, would you have imagined that a service that gives you 140 characters would take the world by storm? It's very hard to predict, and as I've grown sort of older and more experienced, I've stopped trying to predict what will happen next. But rather, I think the best is scan the world and when something appears, try to pounce on it as quickly as you can.

Yeah. And I think it's much the same as science progresses. Science doesn't work by an individual sitting in a chair and having a great thought that's unconnected to everything else. It actually works by aggregation — you study what people are doing and what seems useful in your field, you synthesize it, and then you add something new to it or you take it one step further. Business works exactly the same. So Tencent would pick up an idea of, let's say, Twitter, introduce it in China, and then start to extend it — could we add to this games, or instant messaging, or some other refinement. And at some point you go beyond copying, you actually start to originate and to refresh. So I think the most productive way of working is actually to identify something that works in some market abroad, copy it as fast as you can — taking care not to infringe copyright and get into problems — and then to try to extend it and improve upon it. And maybe one day you'll become the world leader in some technology.