Cape Town

Cape Town’s product and venture firms are more visible, relative to the city’s corporate economy, than Johannesburg’s. The University of Cape Town and, an hour away, Stellenbosch supply research and graduates. The provincial government of the Western Cape is a different political administration from Gauteng. Company law and exchange control are still national.

The photograph is the city against the mountain. The operating issues are more ordinary: power, the price of housing in the parts of town where staff will live, and distance from the corporate customers on the Highveld.

A company can build a product here and still have to sell it in Johannesburg, in London, or in another African capital. The city’s quality of life is not a distribution channel. Founders who stay because the city is pleasant still have to solve a small local market.

Foreign capital that uses Cape Town as a pleasant place to park a holding company has not solved South African exchange control if the operating company and the intellectual property are onshore. Pleasant and cleared are different words.