Hi there,

Your random doodles can now come to life! Meta (Facebook) just launched a beta of a new AI tool that lets you easily scan drawings and then animate them – check it out.

In this Open Letter:

• Forget the Naysayers: Founders reflect on 25 years of Netflix (and what it took to build it).

• Make a quick R1.6M, SA’s first XR classroom & one high building in Cape Town.

• Who pledged what: Where SA’s latest big investments will come from.

• Concerning: Thoughts on the latest developments in AI.

TRENDING NOW

25 years of Netflix

The founder’s perspective

Back in the 90s video rental stores were a big deal. And that’s when Netflix started out doing just that, rent out DVDs by mail. Yep, not email, postal mail. They would mail you a DVD and once you are done watching it, you mail it back.

A lot has changed since then and as the entertainment giant celebrates its 25th birthday (14 April), co-founder Marc Randolph has been sharing some nuggets of their early days in his Netflix Chronicles on socials.

Some highlights

• Pre-Netflix, Marc furiously pitched idea after idea only for co-founder Reed Hastings to just shoot him down – VHS cassettes were too heavy to mail back in 1997 until they got wind of “new” tech and drove to town to buy a DVD to find out if it was feasible to mail.
  

• In 1998, on a desk made from doors on four posts (seriously), Jeff Bezos offered to buy the as-then-unnamed Netflix for “somewhere in the low eight figures” ($15 million), and Marc and Reed turned Amazon down, taking it as a reason to double down instead.
  

• In 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, Netflix was cash-strapped and was willing to sell to Blockbuster for $50m. They were laughed out of the office. Today Netflix has a market cap exceeding $150 billion, and Blockbuster is all but gone.
  

• Netflix went live on 14 April 1998 at 8 am. Their servers crashed, ran out of mail labels and made only 200 sales that day. Today, they’re averaging 200 million users. After a shaky start, Marc is happiest he didn’t listen to the naysayers.

And we are glad as well. With over 300k subscribers in South Africa, they are investing in the creation of local content committing a cool R 900 million to the local industry at President Ramaphosa’s investment conference. In addition, Netflix has announced that it has poured more than R2 billion into South African productions during the past five years, leading to the creation of 1,900 jobs. As of December 2020, over 80 South African movies and TV shows were accessible on the streaming platform.

With more money hitting the local film scene and an already impressive list of productions filmed at studios such as CTFS, we are excited about this space and the opportunity that more production will bring. Happy Birthday, Netflix!

IN SHORT

🐕 Doges not mine: Know anything about Elon Musk’s family once having owned shares in a Zambian mine? He’ll pay R1.6m Dogecoin to anyone who can prove the mine existed.

📚 Future learning: Many believe that altered reality tech such as VR and AR's best use case is in education and training. And this is being tested with SA’s first XR public classroom at a high school in King William’s Town.

💨 A New High: The ole “world’s most misunderstood plant” soaring in Cape Town as the world’s tallest building made of hemp nears completion.

⚕️Better Medicine: To help give Africa a boost in medical research, Stellenbosch University has invested R1.2bn in a new biomedical facility, launched last week.

🦾 Startup X: After Elon realised that petition letters are useless (something we have all known for years, lol), he will be starting a new AI startup to take on OpenAI by registering X.ai.

INVESTING LOCALLY

The 5th South African Investment Conference (SAIC) took place last week and is the culmination of a 5-year target set by President Ramaphosa of R1.51 trillion in pledges. This amount is over 25% more than the R1.2 trillion target set in 2018 and it is encouraging that in the midst of unprecedented load-shedding levels, big business is still keen on South Africa.

Here are the top 10 pledges from this event…

Let’s hope the funds flow soon, we are watching this space…

THE TWEET

All this AI stuff is quite concerning

As tweets hit the internet of what many labelled as a left-leaning bias of ChatGPT, Elon replied “concerning”. Well looks like Sam Altman has similar feelings about Elon’s alternative.

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That’s all for today, thanks for reading!

This Open Letter is brought to you by Renier Kriel, Jason Mill and Elvorne Palmer.

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