WHAT AMERICA GAINED AND SOUTH AFRICA LOST
Julian Krinsky
After a quarter century, this small generation of South African immigrants has risen to break through, en masse, into such key leadership roles that they're changing the U.S.
YouTube, PayPal, SolarCity, epigenetic cancer therapy and intelligent Mars robots exist only because of these expats: One of them has led the transition from PCs to cloud computing, another leads the U.S.’s top business school, and another is replacing the space shuttle.
But they've done it as individuals and—with the notable exception of commercial spaceflight pioneer Elon Musk—almost invisibly.
In December, the Silicon Valley Business Journal made a remarkable statement regarding four of their first five winners of the US’s high-tech chief executive officer awards, which feature competition from the likes of Google's Larry Page.
It said, "Here's something interesting about our executive of the year awards, something that hadn't occurred to us at the time that these four executives were selected—they are all originally from South Africa.”
In Silicon Valley alone, South African-born high-tech chief executives include Vinny Lingham, founder of Yola and Gyft; Willem van Biljon, co-founder of Nimbula; and Pieter de Villiers, founder and chief executive of Clickatell, the world's largest online text messaging service.
And these weren't even among the award winners. Those include Gauteng brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, who have built the U.S.’s largest provider of residential clean energy, and Paul Maritz, the outgoing Chief Executive of cloud computing giant VMware, who was schooled in KwaZulu-Natal.
