SA man hits the jackpot in Silicon Valley

VINNY Lingham has followed in the gold-plated footsteps of IT posterboy Mark Shuttleworth by selling his two-year-old venture, mobile gift-card wallet Gyft, to a Silicon Valley company for more than R500-million.

Shuttleworth made headlines 15 years ago when he sold his company, Thawte, which he’d built from a garage in Cape Town, to US conglomerate Verisign for $575-million.

Lingham’s success underscores how Shuttleworth isn’t the only homebred boffin who can do this.

The 35-year serial entrepreneur, who was born in East London and studied at the University of Cape Town, revealed this week he had sold Gyft to First Data, one of the world’s largest payment technology companies.

Though neither party would disclose the price, it is understood that Lingham was paid between $50-million and $100million.

Gyft was launched only in May 2012, pioneering the idea of a mobile wallet for gift cards, but grew quickly to the stage where it was processing tens of millions of dollars worth of gift cards.

“[This deal] opens up a world of opportunities for us to latch onto the back of a giant in the payment space. We saw the ability to accelerate our growth and build a massive company with their support,” he said.

He said Gyft planned to launch internationally, and he was looking forward to its plans “in the mobile payments space in particular. But I can’t be too specific at this stage.”

Lingham, who lives in Silicon Valley, is already a highly respected entrepreneur.

He founded Yola, a company that enabled entrepreneurs to create their own websites for free. Before that, in June 2003 he founded Clicks2Customers, a paid search performance marketing provider that now accounts for sales of more than $100-million a year for its partners.

During that time, he also founded incuBETA, a search engine optimisation solution, with his wife, Charlene Troskie.

Lingham is also co-founder of the Silicon Cape initiative, a nonprofit organisation that promotes the Western Cape as an appealing IT hub for global business.

He said this week that he had no intention of returning to South Africa any time soon from Silicon Valley.

“I think it takes a while to get settled, but there are many reasons why I am staying in Silicon Valley. That said, half the team that built the company are South African, along with my co-founder, Mark Levitt. We used developers from Cape Town, and applied for them to get visas to work in the US.”

Lingham said the pace of deals in innovation in Silicon Valley remained a drawcard for him — as well as the fact that companies were willing to invest in innovative technologies such as Gyft.

“This is great for entrepreneurs. In South Africa, this culture simply does not exist and there is a tendency for corporates to try and build everything themselves [often with horrible outcomes],” he said.