Experienced founders who build, invest and mentor again after a first success are a lever for jobs and growth that South Africa is underusing, according to Alison Collier, managing director of Endeavor South Africa. She makes the case in an opinion piece published by Moneyweb on 18 October 2026. It is an argument from an organisation that backs scaling entrepreneurs, not an independent study, and it should be read that way.
For owners and managers, the practical point is about where to find capital, advice and talent: in Collier’s account, people who have already built and exited businesses invest, mentor and open doors to customers and capital, and former employees of successful scale-ups go on to start companies of their own.
What the piece argues
Collier writes that an entrepreneur’s economic contribution is often undercounted if it is measured only by the jobs, capital or exit value of one company. Many founders who have already scaled a business go on to start new ones, invest in and mentor other founders, and their former employees use what they learnt to build businesses of their own. She calls this the “multiplier effect”, where the capital, knowledge and networks created by one company are recycled into the wider ecosystem.
She says a founder building for the second or third time “does not begin at zero”. In her list, they have learnt how to find product-market fit, hire and retain people, raise capital, manage cash, enter new markets, deal with regulation and survive periods when the original plan does not work. She adds that none of this guarantees the next venture will succeed.
The evidence cited
The one statistic in the piece comes from research published by Endeavor, which Collier says examined the career paths of 200 founders behind leading unicorns, companies valued at more than US$1 billion, split evenly between the United States and emerging markets. According to Collier, 49% of them had founded a company before the one that became a unicorn. We could not open Endeavor’s report to confirm the 49% figure. Endeavor’s Unicorn Founders Pathways study, which examined 200 top unicorn founders, was publicised in November 2023, so the data is not new.
The South African examples are also Collier’s. She names Karl Westvig, Tjaart van der Walt, Melvyn Lubega, Willem Roos, Wayne Gosling, Steven Heilbron and Pieter de Villiers as repeat entrepreneurs. Van der Walt, now on the Endeavor South Africa board, sold his first business, C-Sense, to General Electric in 2011 and then teamed up with Coen Jonker to spend more than a decade building GoTyme Bank, which she describes as an international digital banking group. Lubega co-founded Go1, which she describes as South Africa’s first technology scale-up valued above US$1 billion, and has since invested in other South African and African scale-ups. We have covered GoTyme’s local outlook in GoTyme’s Q4 outlook.
The backdrop: a weak ecosystem
The argument lands against a poor assessment of the environment founders operate in. The 2026 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) National Expert Special Report on South Africa, released on 30 July 2026, scored the country 3.9 out of 10 on its National Entrepreneurship Context Index, against a global average of 4.7, and ranked it seventh weakest of 56 economies, according to the University of Johannesburg. EWN reported the same ranking and said South Africa scores below India, China, Indonesia and Brazil.
The report’s lead author, Prof Natanya Meyer of the University of Johannesburg, said the ecosystem “is not broken beyond repair”. Its recommendations include reliable, affordable broadband in peri-urban and township areas, competition reform in concentrated sectors such as finance, retail and telecoms to let smaller players enter, and making entrepreneurship a school learning area. The UJ summary adds that the report contains practical advice from its expert panel on accessing finance and markets, using government support and navigating bureaucracy.
What to do with it
- Look for repeat founders as advisers and investors. Collier’s argument is that they carry networks to investors, customers and other founders.
- Use the checklist she gives. Product-market fit, hiring and retention, raising capital, cash management, new markets and regulation are the areas she says experience helps with.
- Read the GEM report’s practical section. If you are raising finance or dealing with bureaucracy, the expert advice on those topics is where it is most useful.
- Treat the claims with care. The 49% figure and the company descriptions come from an interested party. Check them before you rely on them in a pitch or a plan.
Collier’s closing question is what these entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs they enable, will build next. For a country the GEM report says is struggling to turn ambition into lasting businesses, the answer will depend as much on the environment as on the founders.
