On the 22nd of April 2025 (exactly a month after my wedding), I incorporated my first company – Beagle & Baobab. You can visit its website here. While I won’t go too much into my long-term plans in this post, suffice it to say that my goal is to build South Africa’s leading travel company by totally reimagining what it means to travel in Africa’s most beloved destination. For anyone paying attention, it’s obvious that the travel industry is wide open for a shake-up – all it needs is a great big push and some beneficial ignorance1.
But why start a company at all? It’s certainly a big decision, one that locks you in for 3 – 5 years of late nights and early mornings with no guarantee of success. Then there’s not only the financial cost of failure (though this is rather minimal in the case of Beagle & Baobab), but the social cost too – the fear of failing publicly is a terrifying prospect for most people, myself included (though there are those that argue that this is why it’s also such a great motivator2). The reasons not to start a new venture are probably endless – so what made me want to take the plunge?
Autonomy
Growing up, I was the kind of kid who had problems with authority. I still do, in a way. The desire for autonomy is a core part of my character – I come from a long line of nerds who fell in love with Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic anarchist novel, The Dispossessed. If I’m going to work hard at something, I want to do it for myself, in the way I like, on projects I find interesting. Hard work is rarely pleasant, but it’s far more unpleasant when it’s at the whims of someone else for a purpose unaligned with your own internal goals. With this in mind, starting a company becomes a quite obvious choice.
Financial Independence
I have no real desire to be rich. One of the few things I’ve learned for sure in life is that money as an end in itself is fairly pointless. But the fact remains that we live in a socio-economic system where money is necessary, particularly so if you want to buy yourself out of that system and regain control over your life. I don’t want to have to work, and certainly not for other people, for the rest of my life. And short of inheriting a fortune, starting a successful company is one of the few ways to not only avoid the drudgery of regular work (i.e. minimal autonomy), but perhaps forever escape the obligation to work on things you simply don’t care about.
Creating Stuff
I loved Lego as a kid, and then later the Sims and (still) Minecraft. When playing strategy video games, I rarely won – strategy was never as much fun as building out my base or settling new shores. I was big on arts and crafts, too. It feels silly to say, but getting older sometimes feels less like growing up and more like learning to be comfortable with who you were (are) as a kid. Most days, all I want to do is create cool stuff. Setting out to build a company from scratch, relying on nothing but your wits and ambition, seems a good way to nurture that creative instinct. In any event, certainly a better idea than my brief misadventure with a civil engineering degree.
The Challenge
I enjoy a good challenge. Like moving from South Africa to Germany, motorbiking independently through Central and Southern Vietnam, or signing up for my first half marathon, I want to set myself big challenges and work hard to meet them. As long as you don’t get lost in the challenge and forget to live life, I think a good way to give meaning to our daily struggles is if we incorporate them into some larger, more worthwhile challenge. Solo-founding a bootstrapped business venture is certainly going to be a challenge but probably not as difficult as the regret of never even trying.
My Wife
While it may seem at odds with the ultra-individualist notions that have overtaken some corners of Western Europe, marriage has been the most freeing moment of my life. Because freedom isn’t just about endless options – it’s about having the power to commit, to choose and stay the path.3 From our island of commitment, my wife gives me the confidence and support to set out on a long and uncertain road, without which I’m not sure I would have ever had the courage. But she’s also given me reason. More than anything, I want to make her proud.
There you have it – a few of the reasons why I decided to start Beagle & Baobab. Now back to work.
- Entrepreneurs and other sorts of high-achieving folk sometimes benefit from a kind of blissful ignorance – you either don’t know how hard a thing will be and so do it anyway, only realising once it’s too late to pull out, or you don’t know enough about a field you’re entering to have any preconceived ideas or biases and therefore are more prone to innovative thinking. See here. ↩︎
- Simply put, your fear of failing catastrophically in full view of your friends and family drives you to work as hard as possible to avoid failure, thereby raising the odds for success. Blissful ignorance + a fear of failure can be a might combination. ↩︎
- In The Dispossessed, Le Guin wrote “A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.” I like that. ↩︎