Interview with Michael van de Weg

Michael Van de Weg was born in 1974 in what is now Harare, Zimbabwe, previously known as Salisbury, Rhodesia. His mother is from Harare and his father is from Durban, South Africa. The couple met in Durban when his mother was undertaking her nursing training. They then returned to Zimbabwe before returning to South Africa.

Michael is the youngest of their two children. He says: “We grew up in Merryhill Park. There was nothing there at the time, we were the first house in the road.  We had to boil our water and had no electricity. My mum always tells the story that there was no work and my dad went to stand in the line, the South African dole, to collect his money.  He saw a long queue of men who were feeling sorry for themselves, as he puts it, and he decided he wasn’t doing that. He borrowed a big van with an open back, drove around to various sites and asked if he could clear rubbish for money. At the end of the day, he had made twice the amount of money he would have got by standing in the queue and waiting for a hand-out. From there, he built a small business that went around to collect recyclables.”

His father continued on a path of entrepreneurship creating small family businesses in order to ensure he could feed his family.

Michael believes he has inherited this entrepreneurial characteristic. He adds; “I didn’t think I had until the age of probably 39 years old, 40 years old before I decided it’s time to go to the UK and start a business with a friend of mine. That was the first time I really decided I’m going to do this, until then, during all the years of working for corporates such as IBM, Dimension Data, and PwC, my dad would say, ‘Why are you not running your own business, why are you working for other people?’ I had replied, ‘I don’t think I’m ready for that’ and the day just came, and it was time.”

Michael’s memories of South Africa centre around the outdoor lifestyle they led as children. He says: “My memories have always been one of the outdoors, feeling really free to roam and do what was needed.  My parents were avid lovers of the sea. We used to have marine tanks and go out every weekend and do snorkelling, dive, catch specimens, to understand both the English name and Latin name. This was an absolute passion right from an early age.  I think the first time I got in the water with a scuba tank I was probably about 6 years old.”

Michael attended his local primary school and then Pinetown Boys High school, both local state schools. Both schools were whites-only co-ed schools, Pinetown Boy High had over a thousand pupils. Michael played many sports as part of his education, he adds: “It’s quite different to what I’m seeing my sons’ grow up with here, where you typically do a lot more club sports and the school has focussed sports for those that want to do them.  In South Africa, essentially every term, you had to do a sport. The school had to turn out in great attendance when it was swimming season. There massive teams, we had to turn up to the galas every weekend. It was absolutely focused on sports, athletics was the same, rugby; there were mandatory rugby days where you had to support the first team.”

 Discipline was maintained through use of a cane; misdemeanours for which the cane was used included not having a homework book signed, fights, length of hair.

Michael says: “After every holiday, they would line us up and we’d have to go for hair inspection; hair inspection was basically conforming to the military style, where it couldn’t touch the collar, you couldn’t have the fringe near the eyes. This would earn you 2 lashes or 2 canings on the spot if you failed that check and you needed to go out and get it cut again.”

Michael believes the discipline was early preparation for conscription that the boys would enter upon leaving school at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Michael chose to defer his conscription until post university, however, while he was studying for his degree, conscription was abolished and he never had to serve it.

Michael’s parents wanted him to have the best education he could based on their own lack of education. He says: “My parents would have loved to go on to a university if the funds had allowed, but for them, in those times, they were really just all fighting for survival, making sure that the family had food, making sure that they had to do what they needed to do. … For them, it was all about the work and they had always instilled in me that you need to get a good education, a good university degree so that we could essentially not have the same hardship as them.  They were 100% behind and backing education to make sure that I got the best I could get.”

During the second year of his matriculation at school, Michael witnessed the shifting attitudes and policies as apartheid came to an end. He says: “They started to open up the schools to what they called Model-C schools, where they were introducing black and Indian children into the school to start that process of integration.”

In 1992, Michael started at the University of KwaZulu-Nata to study for a BSc in Computer Science. He describes the university as “one of the top sixth or seventh universities in South Africa, serving the whole of the KwaZulu-Natal regions; the old Natal province.  At the time of joining, it was a fully integrated university. It was quite significant because a) they were bringing all the cultures together and it was a university which was very strong and sporting environment and so I was able to carry on in various sports there.  And, as from an academic perspective, the quality of education was extremely high, they were not accepting any low pass marks, specifically for ourselves down in the science department where we were engaging with our lecturers, the majority of whom were Austrian or German, and they drove home some very high standards.”

It was at university that Michael learned to play Octopush or underwater hockey. He explains: “It was essentially developed as a system of staying fit by the spear fisherman, back in the 1950s or 1960s.” The game comprised of a lead puck weighing a kilo which would slide across the floor of the pool, players wore snorkels, masks, fins and carried a short stick with the objective of scoring a goal.  Michael adds: “There are a lot of techniques and styles, to a point where they’ve been having world cup underwater hockey, with many, many nations around the world competing going back to the 1990s.”

Michael’s main subjects were computer science and business information systems, plus physics until the end of his second year and then added maths in his final year.

Michael chose computer science after being captivated by it from the age of 12 when his father bought a computer. He says: “He bought an IBM XT with 2 floppy discs, and there was a programme in there called Microsoft Basic.  I got the programming book and I learned how to programme and from there I learned how to do spreadsheets and write all sorts of different things. It really captivated my idea of what one could do with computers.  So, for me, it was a natural progression to go and do computer science at university.”

Asked if he is good at writing algorithms, Michael says: “I particularly enjoyed algorithms; it was always a strength and for me. The fascinating part of staring down a major problem, of how is this going to work, how is going to be quick enough and how is it going to give the output you want in the least amount of code?  What I didn’t like, was when you saw the way out the problem, you built the algorithm that works and then you had to spend another 3 or 4 months building up all the other bits of the programme around it, just so it was useable.”

In 1997, after graduating at university, Michael joined IBM in Sandton, Johannesburg. He was recruited via IBM’s university ‘milk round’ programme and says: “They found my CV and a gentleman called Maurice Levy decided to come down to Durban to interview me. He was one of the top engineers in cryptography within IBM, not just in South Africa, there are a lot of things that he’s done all around the world. He decided that he liked my CV, he liked what I’d done, but not because my marks were particularly good but because I had a great balance of sport, technology and the science elements that he needed, and he brought me on board.”

With no previous experience, Michael says that he had nothing to compare IBM with and accepted that all business was like that. He adds: “It was extremely well-structured, our onboarding was meticulous.  As a graduate, you go to work and on day 1, you’ll be given your mobile phone, laptop, you’re walked around and introduced to everybody in the department right up to the head of banking services who is a major leader within the business.  Later that week, you’re all at someone’s house being introduced over drinks and some cocktails. It just felt like I had arrived, it was a fantastic feeling.”

Within 8 months of starting work, Michael was sent to Toronto, Canada, to work on a project called Visual Banker, replacing all the tele-systems within one of the large banks.  IBM had gone into partnership with a Canadian-based company to sell the software to the bank.  Michael was assigned to the project with by his manager as a way to allow him to attend the courses on implementing and rolling out the technology and to start building up relationships at that C-Level. He says: “I could actually have access to C-Level while understanding the underlying problems deep down if we were to ever go ahead and implement that software, so, that was the strategy around that. I was doing courses in the day and wining and dining at night.”

At the end of the Canadian project, Michael was set to work on a project to manage the logistics of fixing a memory and bias fault caused by electricity spikes with ‘stripe card and pin paired readers’. 10,000 machines had been sold and deployed in 1800 branches of Absa, the largest bank in South Africa. Michael says: “It caused a flush and it basically spiked on the bias and the bias was flattened, and it couldn’t be used.  So, what they had to do was put a little transponder into the device that would protect it.  That’s an easy solution.  However, you have 10,000 devices out there in 1,800 banks, around the country and you’ve got to get all these devices back to a central place, fix and then send them back and reinstall them.”

This logistical problem had failed and the 40 million Rand (2 million pounds in 1997) was in jeopardy. Michael adds: “My job was to go to work in the middle of Johannesburg where these devices were sent back to, manage the companies that were going out there to retrieve all the devices, work with a whole group of technicians under me inside a trusted centre and define a process of how are we going to go through the fix, the check, the test, and get those packaged up and distributed back with technicians, make sure they landed at the trusts the different banks at the right time, that the engineers were there at the right time. Make sure the software was installed, give the feedback, and make sure the loop is done so that we can actually get sign-off. It was a mammoth task but it was not something that required a lot of rocket science, it just required a lot of damn hard work.”

The first thing he did, in order to gain the respect of the older technicians whom he was now managing, was to spend half a day with each learning what was needed. He adds: “At the end of it, I knew exactly how to do all those so they couldn’t pull the wool over my eyes when things were slowing down if things weren’t working.”

The hard work paid off, Michael turned the project round and delivered it on time. He says of the experience: “It taught me an amazing lesson, you can fix everything really.”

After eighteen months, Michael discovered that IBM had a plan for his career. He explains: “One the heads of financial securities took me aside quite early on for a conversation. He first took me to the Currie Cup Final at Loftus Versfeld where we had a box with the CEO of MidBank, and he watched me interact as we had some beers and enjoyed the game. Afterwards, on the journey home in the car, he said to me that very few people would basically be able to integrate and discuss at C-Level at such a young age, but also have the technology experience to be able to do the low-level things I was doing, and that they see a path for me through that base to be able to become a leader in some form within IBM. They wanted to put a plan in place in for me that would essentially do that over the next 8 to 10 years.”

Michael jokes that the prospect “scared the death out of me”. He felt that a clear plan would remove the element of excitement and learning new things which he enjoyed so much, he adds: “That was not what I was looking for. I never saw myself as joining a company and 40 years later retiring, that just didn’t work for me. What it really did is help me galvanise and focus on what did I want to do?”

As a result, Michael made the decision that he was going to move to London which he’d visited en route to Canada. He says: “I decided I was going to London, going to contract, going to do my software development over there and going to go and see the world with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. That is exactly what we did.”  Michael resigned from IBM, flew to London and stayed for 3 years before returning to South Africa.

While in the UK, Michael did a contract at Linx technology. He says: “Linx technology was all about going out installing various technologies, break/fix, servers, etc.  They had a whole load of field engineers and they wanted to build an in-house solution that was able to manage those engineers, manage all the stock. They hired me as a contractor to build the front end and some of the middle on that.

Michael was a contractor during the run up to the year 2000 and looks on Y2K as “an absolute blessing”.  He explains: “I went to London in July ’99 and that was at the same time that every experienced programmer that they could find was sucked up into the big banks to make sure that the world didn’t fall apart. However, industry had to carry on, so, when I got involved, I only had about 2 or 3 years of actual commercial experience, but I was being offered contracting rates upwards of £35, £40, even sometimes £50 an hour. It was absolutely amazing. It was just absolutely incredible drain on the market and in 2003, they had dumped them all back on the market again, and contracting rates just went through the floor.”

Asked if the preventative work done for Y2K was essential, Michael adds: “It was absolutely essential.  … It was absolutely necessary to double-check and make sure that everything was perfectly right and ready to go.  The fact that it turned out not to be a major issue, well, that’s great that we got out of that.  It could have been pretty bad.”

Having returned to South Africa, Michael joined Dimension Data in Durban in 2003. It was the company that allowed him to “get his teeth into Microsoft technology” and was a turning point in his career.

He explains: “I had always been building and developing on Microsoft but more of a coding perspective, whereas, in Dimension Data, I was tasked as the solution pre-sales specialist to look at all the different Microsoft products, how the stack fitted together, understand them and be able to demonstrate them and be able to pull together solutions for customers.” The role also meant travel to Johannesburg where he met Dave Ives, who headed up Microsoft’s solutions specialist unit and went on to become a director, before he bought shares in a small company of about 40 people called ICE Partners that soon became Karabiner. Michael would eventually join him at Karabiner.

After three years with Dimension Data, Michael took a role with SIS Global in Johannesburg where he moved into enterprise resource planning software. He explains: “It was very much around industry experience, honing down on certain verticals. Education is one of the areas I liked to focus in.” As a result of the intense focus on business, Michael says that he developed to know a lot more about a lot less, honing his skills to a very specific area. He adds: “It was very business-focused which was great, and then putting a technical and the application experience behind that.”

After almost four years with SIS Global, in 2010, Michael joined his mentor, Dave Ives, at Karabiner who invited him to be an account executive.

 Michael explains: “My role was to go into companies, understand the business, understand some of their pains and look at ways that we could improve things with them.  There was a lot of customer relationship management and data management and that area, but one of the key areas was around analytics and that was extremely exciting, that was something that I absolutely got stuck into.”

 After four years, Michael realised that he was not happy with some of the management decisions and decided to move on to PwC. He adds: “I don’t like to be in a place and start complaining to my colleagues about the place.  If you don’t like where you are, fix it or move on, don’t taint it for everyone else that is actually quite happy with it all.”

In 2014, Michael joined PwC in Johannesburg after working closely with them while at Karabiner. He loved working with them and learned a lot but a family decision to relocate meant that Michael left after just 9 months. Initially the family intended to return to Durban for a quieter lifestyle, however, Michael, who has Scottish ancestry, decided that he would like to move to the UK to allow his children to gain their UK citizenship.

He says: “PwC was great. Anyone who graduates and has some of the PwC values, type of processes, structures installed in them from an early age, it stands them in great stead.”

Having made the decision to return to the UK, Michael called Max Smith whom he’d met at Linx Technology in London and remained friends with. The pair decided to start a business together.

Michael adds: “I got my visa and 3 weeks later, we sat down and looked at 2 businesses; one was to replicate the business he had done before, which seemed like the obvious thing, and the other one was IMMJ Systems to sell MediViewer software.”

Michael describes MediViewer as “quite simple technology, it’s simple because we made it simple. It took us a hell of a long time to make it simple.  What it does is it effectively takes all the digitalised patient records; a big Xerox that comes through and scans all those physical patient records in the records library.  We ingest all of those images and we do optical character recognition; we harvest all the information we can off the page, and we then smart index it, which is basically a way of understanding it and then we store it, so it archives it.” Clinicians access and manipulate the records on a tablet via the MediViewer software.

Michael adds: “MediViewer provides a digital patient record at the point of care when the patient presents with the clinician. We’re not the first people to have done this, it has been done before, but it’s been done with other solutions that will work in just one filing in electronic document management in engineering, financial services,  hospitality, all those places where you’ve vastly structured forms.  … Whereas with the patient records, the clinicians do what they want to do, they write what they want to write, they throw things that they want to throw in and it creates this story that builds up.  So, we approached it directly for patient records whereas others approached it as every other industry, and they’ve been struggling ever since to get it right because you just can’t treat it like any other industry.”

MediViewer is now used across 15 medical sites. Michael says that they have carefully considered the best approach in developing the right product for the NHS, including building a team that has considerable NHS experience which has given them a greater understanding of the inner workings of hospitals.

He explains: “Our team has come from the NHS, they were working at a hospital, they’ve run projects like the MediViewer project before. They have said the biggest problem is that the people don’t understand the inner workings of a hospital.  They don’t understand the relationships between the nurse, the clinician, and the hospital staff, and the admission staff.  They don’t understand how it works and how to get things done.  They come in fresh from the outside with maybe a year’s experience in healthcare and it doesn’t work. Also, they come and put it in and then they just walk away and expect it to work, which doesn’t help.  Now, they’ve successfully got a project working at Basildon and this was before we started our company, and they’ve come on board and from the very beginning, we have hired out of the NHS. Our chief projects officer, Phil Burke and our chief operations officer, Lisa Harris, ran the transformation and the programme management of that project in the NHS.  So, the moment they joined us in 2015, we knew what it was going to take to make sure this technology works in the NHS.  … We’re approaching it from that direction of working better with each other to get the information and having the patients be able to glean what we need.”

Michael says that they have been asked if the software can be adapted to help other hospital departments to manage records, from HR to Corporate. It’s a project that they’re looking at but are keen to ensure that it does not disrupt the progress of their core product. He adds: “What we’ve been hesitant to do, is make considerable changes to what we’re doing right now until we have fully embedded ourselves and we’re fully happy with the enhancements that we have with MediViewer rather than to go and break it.”

On the subject of his management style, Michael says: “You’re there to manage the output.  The only way you can manage the output is by looking after the people.  If you have to tell them what to do, you’ve got the wrong people, so, make sure you get the right people who know what to do, manage it, and the only way you can do that is by supporting the people that are doing it.”

“I would say if you see the opportunity, grab it with both hands and absolutely go for it.  What I would advise against is just going out there from a young age and trying absolutely anything just because you want to do something on your own. Build some value, build your skills, build your knowledge-base, build your network, and along that way, you will find an opportunity that comes to you.”

Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by: TP Transcription

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley