The engineer who helped build top South African technology companies, including Superbalist, MasterStart, and Yoco
Matthew Goslett’s path into South Africa’s e-commerce and fintech sectors began with IRC, dial-up Internet, and a fascination with how messages travelled between computers.
That curiosity eventually took him from building chat tools and gaming infrastructure to helping launch Superbalist, one of South Africa’s best-known online fashion retailers.
After leaving Superbalist in 2017, Goslett entered the financial technology sector and now serves as Principal Engineer at Yoco, a company that offers payment hardware and online payment services.
Between Superbalist and Yoco, he held senior engineering roles at MasterStart and Balfour Group. His career has spanned e-commerce, online education, financial services, and digital currencies.
A self-taught software engineer, Goslett said he has a passion for all things digital. “I love all languages, not equally, and enjoy designing and building full-stack solutions,” he said.
His preferred tools include Python, Docker, Kubernetes, FastAPI, Django, React, and TypeScript, although he said he approaches each project with an open mind.
“I lean towards the open source stack, and whilst Python is often my go-to language, I believe in using the right tool for the job,” Goslett said.
Goslett was born at Mowbray Maternity Hospital in Cape Town in July 1987 and was introduced to computers at Herzlia Constantia Primary School around 1996.
His family bought its first shared computer, a Pentium II, around 1998, complete with a dial-up modem, when Goslett was 10 years old.
Back then, residential Internet access was billed per minute at standard landline telephone rates, which was expensive under normal circumstances.
However, Goslett convinced his parents to sign up for Telkom’s “R7 Call More” deal, which made dial-up cheaper at night and on weekends.
“The single phone line we had was permanently engaged,” he said. Call More capped the price of calls at R7 each between 19:00 and 07:00 on weeknights, and from Friday evening to Monday morning.
IRC, gaming, and early code
Goslett said he was shy and introverted growing up, and spent much of his time in the digital world. He discovered forums, mailing lists, and later Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
He hung out on ZAnet, then South Africa’s largest IRC network and named himself fmaxwell41, after his dad’s band.
His first exposure to programming came through mIRC, the most popular IRC client for Windows. mIRC scripting allowed users to write bots, custom commands, and simple applications.
What interested him most was not only the scripting language but the underlying idea of computers passing structured information across networks.
He started reading RFC1459, the original IRC protocol specification, which led him into sockets, networking, TCP, UDP, and ports.
His first real-world application was an IRC daemon written in mIRC scripting language, implementing the chat protocol on top of the mIRC client.
Visual Basic 6 became his first “real” programming language after the brother of a close friend gave him a copy of Programming Visual Basic 6.0.
At 14, he created and open-sourced Multi-Chat Server and Client, a rudimentary IRC-style application with server and client components.
He later moved into web development, learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, classic ASP, PHP, MySQL, and Linux through hobby websites and open-source codebases.
“This was in the days of spaghetti code, which included globals, spattered mysql_connects, god classes, and PHP files embedded within HTML,” he recalled.
His first contract job came at 16 through a friend in the gaming community, Arman, whose mother worked at the National Institute for Occupational Health.
The institute needed a conference website for delegate registrations, payments, and abstract submissions. Goslett delivered that project and two further conference sites.
More work followed in South Africa’s gaming scene, including projects for the Professional Cyber Gaming League and Arena77, an online gaming platform linked to NAG magazine.
“I developed a close bond with Arman. Even though we’d only ever known each other over the Internet, we partnered up to start our own computer and gaming e-commerce store — LiquidHive,” said Goslett.
“We, two kids, even somehow managed to get the distribution rights for SteelSeries gaming peripherals.” Goslett said they imported the products, took payment online, and shipped them after school hours.
“The ‘business’ did alright, but we were both young, and eventually we moved on from the gaming scene and decided to shut it down.”
The tweet that changed Goslett’s career
Goslett tried to move away from computers after school, applying to study law at the University of Cape Town.
After several course changes, he completed a B.Com but missed the threshold for a postgraduate accounting diploma by three percentage points.
He enrolled in a postgraduate diploma in computer forensics in 2011, while working on contract development projects and waiting tables at Greens Restaurant in Constantia.
On 12 April 2011, he responded to a tweet from a friend looking for a part-time PHP developer for a new company.
The following day, Goslett met one of the founders for coffee and accepted a role at 6 Pepper Street in Cape Town.
The company was CityMob, a group-buying website competing with Groupon after the global company had acquired South Africa’s Twangoo earlier that year.
Goslett joined two weeks before launch as a web developer, alongside Luke Jedeikin, Lior Chen, Claude Hanan, and Skye Aspden.
He described the company as a typical start-up, with a cramped office, late-night coding sprints, two dogs running around, and burger and pizza boxes all over.
For the first six months, Goslett handled website development while also answering customer calls, live chats, and support tickets.
“A very early memory is that our first phone system ran on FreePBX inside the office on a desktop computer,” he told MyBroadband.
“It sat on one of the kitchen counters in the Pepper Street office. Our phone lines went down for an hour when one of our first employees unknowingly unplugged it to plug the kettle in for a cup of coffee.”
CityMob grew and became profitable, but operated in a crowded group-buying market with roughly 35 competitors.
“We needed to look at ways to differentiate our offering. A decision was made to pivot away from group buying towards time-limited ‘flash sales’,” Goslett said.
“The company rebranded itself as an exclusive, members-only design destination focused on selling designer products — art, decor, apparel, homeware, and geekery (gadgets).”
It relaunched as Superbalist.com in 2013 after the team concluded that CityMob remained too closely associated with group buying and bargain hunting.
Superbalist grew quickly, and Takealot acquired 100% of the company in August 2014 to broaden its appeal among millennial customers.
It remained part of the Takealot Group for a decade before being sold to a South African consortium led by Blank Canvas Capital in September 2024.
In 2016, Superbalist’s platform team migrated the business to Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform as the company faced larger-scale technology challenges.
“In preparation for Black Friday that year, we deep-profiled our core services and refactored and optimised significant portions of our code right up until the night before,” Goslett said.
The work paid off, and he said they “survived Black Friday relatively unscathed.” It would be his last Black Friday at the company.
“Still today, that’s one of the things I miss most about working in the industry. The thrill of firefighting, war rooms, graphs and dashboards, company-wide synergy, record-breaking traffic and volumes.”
From e-commerce to education and fintech
Goslett left Superbalist in 2017 after concluding that the company had outgrown the start-up culture that had initially drawn him in.
He joined MasterStart, a Cape Town-based education technology company, as CTO in August 2017, taking on another early-stage platform-building role.
In less than two years, Goslett was promoted to CTO of Balfour Group, the investment holding company behind MasterStart.
He moved to Yoco in May 2020, joining a fintech that had become one of South Africa’s most prominent financial technology start-ups, and was promoted to Principal Engineer in July 2024.
Goslett’s move returned him to infrastructure-heavy product engineering, this time in payments rather than fashion retail or education technology.
His career has had several unusual turns: distributing gaming peripherals with a friend he met online, a detour through law school, and one life-altering tweet.
“I started my tech career as a hobby, co-founding what became South Africa’s largest apparel, homeware and lifestyle e-commerce brand,” Goslett said.
“I’m a hacker. I love creating things, breaking things, learning from others, and learning from my own mistakes.”
Goslett said he loves companies that embrace a culture of challenging things in healthy ways and create space for individuals to explore. “If I’m not making mistakes, I’m not growing,” he said.
When he’s not working, Goslett said he is usually running, cycling, boxing, training or hacking something on his Raspberry Pi.
More photos from Matthew Goslett
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