OPUS

Alderman James Vos Mayoral Committee Member for Economic Growth put Cape Town's numbers on the record. Business licensing runs 78% faster than it did. UK companies are nearshoring there instead of Bangalore or Warsaw. If an Africa move is on your radar, he lays out the talent pipeline and where the city is headed by 2030. Episode 1 of Why Cape Town, produced by Salt and powered by OPUS. Link in the comments.

This is the kind of thing that happens in the Founderverse. OPUS member Jimmy McLoughlin OBE just put the Prime Minister in front of a mic. PM Andy Burnham on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future this week, talking technical education and the three unglamorous years that came before the career everyone thinks they know. Only his second sit-down interview since taking the top job, and he gave it to Jimmy. Proof the path is messier than the highlight reel. Episode link in the comments for release tomorrow. One of ours, doing exactly what our members do. Crushing it in the Founderverse.

Khwezi Kondile is sorting out one of the harder problems in African education finance. He co-founded Knit to fix the money bit. AI revenue ops that check parent affordability upfront, then handle collection over WhatsApp, SMS and email. Live with some of South Africa's best schools and raising $1.4M to take it continent-wide. Only 60% of school fees get paid on time. Kwezi's job is to sort out the other 40% so teachers can go back to teaching. Stories like this land in SYCM every Saturday. Subscribe, link in the first comment.

We're going on tour. Seven cities, seven months. If you missed us at Cannes, the first dates just dropped. Grab your spot while there's one to grab.

Mustafa Khanwala started MishiPay to help shoppers skip the queue. He ended up rebuilding the tech behind the whole checkout. MishiPay is now the platform retailers use to roll out Scan & Go, self-checkout, mobile POS, RFID and cash registers without the usual multi-year headache. With $11M ARR in the pipeline for 2026, their bridge round is closing soon! Stories like this land in SYCM every Saturday. Subscribe, link in the first comment.

Our founders use Operator to find the right rooms, dodge the wrong moves, and get in front of the people who can actually change things for them. Here's one of them in action. Operator is exclusively for our OPUS community. Want in? Join using the link below.

Every month, we get some of the sharpest operators and investors in the game on a call with our founders, and open the floor. They ask whatever they like and get straight answers. This week was no exception. Chris Tottman, the man who sold MessageLabs to Symantec for $700m, co-founded Notion Capital and has backed over 500 founders, gave us an hour. You had to be there to get the answers, but the takeaways we can share are in the slides. Want to know when the next one is happening? SYCM subscribers find out first. Link in the first comment.

Aurélie C. spent a holiday in Bali interrogating chefs. Then she built AlignEat so nobody has to. Point your camera at any menu, in any language, and see what you can eat. Two billion people with dietary restrictions just got a translator. Now raising $200K to take it global. Stories like this land in SYCM every Saturday. Subscribe, link in the first comment

Accounting software has a type. It likes accountants. Tayla (Thompson) Dandridge spent years in financial services watching entrepreneurs make do, so she co-founded stub. An AI-native platform that sends the invoices, chases the expenses, watches the cash flow and writes the reports. The founder does the fun part. Two years later stub is doing the books for close to 10,000 businesses. iKhokha built iK Accounting on it. Capitec wired it straight into South Africa's biggest customer base. Yoco signed up in June. All of it mostly bootstrapped, with $1.2M from strategic angel investors arriving once the hard part was done. Xero and Sage have size on their side. Tayla has the entrepreneurs. Stories like this every Saturday in SYCM. Link in the comments.

Cape Town is home to some of the most exciting founders in the world We took over a house and filled it with them, plus founders who flew in from Dubai, London and everywhere in between. This is global access, curated. Where we go next lands in SYCM every Saturday.