It was a very humbling experience. It was a great experience because I learned a lot about entrepreneurs, but now I was an entrepreneur. There wasn't that kind of salary anymore. It was, how to make a living, how to build a brand, how to kind of go and sell yourself. When you're in a corporate, you never have to sell yourself but when you're an entrepreneur you have to. It's quite a humbling experience, it was quite funny.

If you look at our current fund, we started the fund at 20 million rand. Now if you  calculate 2.5% of 20 million rand -  that was our management fee. So a lot of us didn't take a salary for a year because we knew we couldn't go into consulting. We needed to raise funds and start doing investments and really getting into that space. 

Venture capital is risk capital. There's always risk. So what it means is that you give a company money in return for getting a stake in the company. But if the company fails, you lose it all. So you take a joint risk.

I always loved the pitch decks, when they say, "This year, I'm making 1 million. Next year, I'm making 10 million", the hockey stick is like, whoa, it's just magically going to happen like that? It's not. Growth strategy is about understanding the fundamentals of your business, perseverance, sticking to it and challenging your thinking all the time. To grow, you need to do something better.

If you want to accelerate, you really need to sit there and say, okay, so what can I do that makes me better than anybody else? And that means you have to really get up, go and sit there and do some research. Understand the market - what do your customers want? And you need to do something different. Slow growth means you can just go with the flow. Fast growth means you need to be different and better.

If a big client comes to you and says, "Okay, give me a hundred thousand of them", or, "Can you implement it across all continents?" That is your lucky moment, that could be your defining moment. But if you are not ready, that goes 'poof'!

Akubu was an engineering company in technopark, Stellenbosch with nine people into radar technology who were part of our grants and accelerator and were doing well. They told me very proudly that they were hitting their budget every year. So I told them that the budget is too low if they're hitting it every year. They decided to develop their own product and then wanted to take it to market. They did a fantastic crowdfunding campaign in the US to do this and one of the companies that they were really wanting to work with was Gammon.

Unrealistic expectations and not knowing how to deal with them - that, I think, is a big problem that we can see all over with entrepreneurs.

The first thing, actually, is you need to build a brand. You need to be known. The world is not waiting for you. So, to be honest, if you want to be successful, you need to build a profile. But you also need to build a profile in the target markets that you want to be known at. It's not about Google ads for the sake of Google ads. 

So when should you take money? You should take money if you're in there for the long run. If you really want to build a scalable business. If you understand the responsibility of taking somebody else's money and that there's an expectation of return. And if the time is right, if you can grow your business through great sales and achieve the same outcome for you, then do it without taking anybody else's money. It would give you a different sense of freedom. It's a complex decision to make.