@khathutshelo Ndouvhada: I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my life. I reckon once you’ve tasted that freedom it’s difficult to be happy in a corporate construction.

@Ross: Thanks for your thoughts, but I reckon it’s relevant here. To my mind Tech Leader is about the industry. The people, the technology and everything that moves around and between it.

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I don’t mean to come across arrogant and I may be wrong, but this whole topic is becoming a little “old” and irrelevant. Shouldn’t we be concentrating on technology rather than this race issue. Perhaps more suited to thoughtleader? The magic of hyperlinking will keep it in the family.

Just IMHO.

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Maybe I am nuts for choosing this route, with the costs of bandwidth, its hard for anybody who does not have any back-up. So my team and I started building sites, designing graphics at Wits so that we could finance our Web Ventures.

It all comes down to the passion and the drive. Most people are content with their corporate gigs and that is ok. But some of us want more, hence we bear the brunt of terrible bandwidth and march on.

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I love fly fishing, even teach people how. One of my lessons is to suggest to my student that they fish where the fish are.

So if to want to reach a target group talk in the language they understand and to them where they are, if they aren’t on the internet talk to them somewhere else.

The future of all the social media industry is Mobile isnt it see Seth Godin’s blog today. The clowd at http://tinyurl.com/4zw6sc so maybe we will be looking for this diversity sooner than we all think.

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[insert mundundu’s standard rant about the high cost of telecoms in this country.]

bill gates is an exception, as he comes from a very wealthy family. [his father is the richest person in the state of washington that is not an employee of either microsoft or nintendo.]

but most up and coming computer people, worldwide, come from solidly middle class backgrounds. as a solid middle class does not exist in south africa, and what little of it there is remains very white, it just goes to reason that most people in the it arena would be white.

put another way — all of those people who are the first in their family to go into tertiary education aren’t going to go into companies that are start-ups. for start-ups you need to have your own money or an angel investor — and many of the relatives of someone who is a “first” would put enormous pressure on them to be a wage slave at a big company, which often will not give them the free time to code and come up with interesting net-related ideas.

[and if they’ve gone to school for this and get a job in the field, many firms put nice things in contracts saying that anything you invent while an employee is their intellectual property. so if you invent something on their equipment; it’s theirs, not yours. nifty, eh?]

to sum — worldwide, very few people who are big in new media or anything else IT-related grew up “poor” in their local context. nearly everyone, no matter what race, grew up at least “middle class” in their local context. i cannot stress this enough.

[and, to be honest, see also: why “proper transformation” in sa rugby will happen long before “proper transformation” will happen in either cricket or swimming. it is all about social class. but that’s for sportsleader, and not techleader]

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In South Africa (and Africa) you need to market brands that speak to black urban people, or even disparate communities throughout Africa. As a young, white male how can you understand and communicate to that demographic if you have absolutely no understanding of it?

Another example which is perhaps more germane to your demographic. There’s a huge opportunity for marketing and promoting luxury brands online. However how can a 21 or 24 or 28 year old white male effectively understand how to market to a “Black Diamond” or a mature, wealthy man in his sixties? That is the market for luxury or haute goods in this country.

I don’t have a problem with young white men, per se. This is not an article attacking them at all. Rather an article appealing for diversity in the industry.

I believe diversity would add enormous value to the web, new media and related industries.

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Race is in my opinion not an issue. The whole essence of social media is that it is “user generated”

Its also new.

The people involved would be the people who this brave new world excites - a personality characteristic, not related to race or gender.

Race is actually a pretty useless variable which describes very little. It is however a variable that excites much emotion.

Once the pioneers have opened up the market the followers will follow.

As a white male over 50 who is involved in this space - should I ask how well my demographic profile is represented?

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