Built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs

I co-founded and spun out Custos Media Technologies and ran companies through scale-up. I have sat in the room when an idea with genuine commercial potential died on the vine — not because the science was wrong, but because the founders did not know what to do next, and nobody gave them the right tools at the right time. I am talking from experience.

I have seen what happens when founders get structured, evidence-based support: they move faster, waste less capital, and make better decisions. Not because they are smarter, but because they know what question to ask next. And I tap my network for others who have been through the journey to help curate the data and frameworks that power SpinUp.

SpinUp is my attempt to systematise that support. Not as consulting, not as a course, but as a set of practical tools that embed the research — about what actually works, at what stage, and why — directly into the founder's workflow. I want every research spinout founder in South Africa to have access to the same quality of structured support that the best-funded founders take for granted.

South African research institutions produce world-class science. The University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Wits, and others generate IP with real commercial potential across medtech, agritech, cleantech, and deep tech. The gap between that science and a commercially viable business is where most spinouts get lost — and where SpinUp operates.

The challenges founders face here are real and specific: a smaller domestic market, limited access to early-stage capital, a talent market that is hard to navigate without the right networks, and far less access to the kind of hands-on mentorship that founders in better-funded ecosystems take for granted. SpinUp is built with those constraints in mind. It is not a Silicon Valley tool transplanted to a different context — it is built for this one.

The tools in SpinUp are not invented from scratch. They synthesise findings from GALI's database of 23,000+ ventures, Startup Genome's global scaling research, McKinsey's high-growth company studies, and South Africa-specific ecosystem data. Where the evidence says something clearly — about when to raise capital, what unit economics benchmarks matter at each stage, how team composition affects outcomes — that finding is embedded directly into the tools as benchmarks, red flags, and decision frameworks.

The goal is that founders interact with the frameworks, not the papers. The research should shape their decisions without them needing to read forty academic studies first. The tools do the translation work.