1 Min. with a Superhero: CEO and Founder of Skyrove Henk Kleynhans

by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg on 25/06/10 at 8:55 am
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We chat to entrepreneur Henk Kleynhans about his company Skyrove, a prepaid wireless hotspot service that’s taking the world by storm. We at Ideate love Skyrove for all the opportunities it can offer entrepreneurs. So, we asked Henk a few questions about this innovative service and here’s what he had to say:

Henk, what first gave you the idea to start Skyrove?

I moved into a student digs in 2003 and couldn’t afford to get ADSL myself (at that stage R1200 for a 3GB cap on a 512 kbps line). About the same time, Wi-Fi was becoming a mainstream technology and was being built into all new laptops and a variety of other devices. I realised that I’d be able to afford Internet access if I could share my ADSL connection with neighbours using Wi-Fi. I couldn’t find any solution that would enable me to do this so decided to build it. I needed to solve my own problem. “Scratch my own itch” so to speak.

Since Ideate is a blog for entrepreneurs, and you fit the mould of the quintessential entrepreneur, could you give us your definition of an entrepreneur?

I’d say an entrepreneur is someone who is able to take raw talent, convert it into a valuable product and solve a problem in the marketplace. I’ve been thinking about how often Skyrove has hired talented people without having placed adverts or by first creating job descriptions.

It is crucially important for entrepreneurs that more educated young people enter the workforce. You don’t need “jobs first”, but rather “workers first”, the entrepreneurs will create the jobs.

Right now there is a shortage of entrepreneurs in South Africa. As a result, young educated people are leaving the country in droves. The only way to see a reversal of this is to create an an environment where entrepreneurs can flourish. The Silicon Cape Initiative has made great strides to raise awareness about this and I hope we’ll get buy-in at the highest levels.

Skyrove is a model that targets both end-users and resellers to provide wireless hotspots – is this not a dangerous model in the ever-changing environment of African Internet provision? With mobile Internet becoming more pervasive and end users empowering themselves with their own Internet devices on the move, is Skyrove’s model under threat to the mobile networks?

Internet provisioning is a highly competitive field with many players with much bigger pockets than ours. That being said the market is very, very far from being properly serviced by current solutions. Skyrove currently uses Wi-Fi which is the fastest, cheapest and most stable wireless technology and is open for anyone in any country to deploy without the need special licencing. I think Skyrove is potentially more complementary to mobile networks as opposed to being a threat to them as their networks are struggling to provide the services expected from subscribers.

How fast will the net be in the next 2 years?

I’m hoping that consumers will be seeing 20 Mbps to-the-home. However, I think with the recent flood of “uncapped” offerings we are seeing a trend of South African Internet being slowed down, rather than speeding up. When an ISP gives you an uncapped Internet package, there is no incentive for them to deliver Internet traffic to you as fast as possible. I think we need something like a “Bandwidth Grading Council” to grade different ISPs’ service levels w.r.t. shaping, contention, local & international speed tests. That way we can at least see competition between different ISPs’ uncapped offerings.

Any spectacular predictions in the next 5 years for your industry?

I’m hoping to see a variety of payment systems such Vodafone’s M-PESA and Zain’s ZAP becoming the predominant payment mechanisms in South Africa. There really is no good reason for your Internet service provider not to offer you payment services except SA’s ill-conceived obsession to protect an old-fashioned banking monopoly. Besides, if banks can provide Internet access, ISPs can provide banking services. Bill Gates said many years ago: “Banking is necessary. Banks aren’t”.

Thanks a lot Henk for chatting to us and telling us more about your great service and also, for looking into the crystal ball and painting a picture of what we can expect in the near future!

Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels and runs Autofemme, a blog about cars. Our Ideate sub-editor is also the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative. You can follow her on Twitter @Yolandi_JvR View more articles by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg.

Tags: 1 Minute with a Superhero, Internet, superhero interview

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