If you talk to anyone in Naked, we are not people that place any value in position or importance or anything like that. You just need to do your job, and you need to do it well. And I think we still have a lot to do. So there's never time to rest on your laurels. There's still a lot of work to do. So I'm very proud of what we've achieved. I never would have achieved it without the team that we managed to build. I mean, when we launched the public, we were about eight people. Now we about 170 people. And I think one of the things I'm the proudest about is the team of people we've managed to accumulate, yeah, that they agreed to come and work for us, and that I get to work with them every day. It's one of my big joys, and all of them are South Africans. We have amazing people in South Africa and the ability to build something that give young people the opportunity to enter the job market. Because, I don't know if you know how hard it is for graduates to get jobs these days, because everyone that works for us is a young graduate. Our average age of that team is 25 that's cool. It gives me great joy. Every person that comes in gets interviewed by myself to just make sure that they are good humans. Because we only hire good humans. You have to be smart, but you have to be good human.
Lennox Wasara:Hi, I'm Lennox Wasara, and you're listening to the lead up podcast. We speak to shape shifters, wall changers and truly inspiring alumni from the University of Pretoria who are doing some incredible are doing some incredible things in their spaces of influence. This year, marks five years of the Lee DB podcast. What a journey it's been. Can you believe it? And thank you for tagging along with us on this special journey. Today we are speaking to a real fire starter as we kick off season five, somebody who went against the grain, somebody who went against the status quo and decided to disrupt an industry that maybe you and I probably don't like, insurance. Sumarie Greybe studied BCom honors at the University of Pretoria. She completed a qualification in Actuarial Sciences. And what's very interesting about her story is that she managed to climb the corporate ladder having worked as a director at EY, even that wasn't enough for her, she felt like there was something still missing that nine to five hustle wasn't enough, so she quit. Guess what she did after that? She started naked insurance. You might be familiar with some of their billboards on the side of the roads, on radio and on television. Yeah, that's right. We're speaking to her today, and also learning about rose, the chat bot that you interact with if you ever do download their naked app. So without further ado, welcome
Unknown:to the show. It is very nice to be here Lennox, and I'm looking forward to our chat.
Lennox Wasara:Yeah. Do you actually like insurance on a real, real it's quite an interesting
Unknown:thing. I have made my whole career in the insurance area. And when I had a bit of a midlife crisis, my husband asked me, you know, do you think insurance is needed? Because I told him, I want to go do something else. I'm tired of everyone being if I tell them I'm an insurance I have some horror story, and I tell them I need to go do something else, because to be happy, I always believe it is important that you feel you're making a contribution, and I was no longer feeling that. And then he asked me that question, is insurance needed? And I told him, insurance is needed because if your neighbor's house burns down, or there's big floods like we have in KwaZulu Natal or whatever it might be, big hailstorm in Joburg, November a year ago, what's going to happen if there's no insurance? The community has to pitch in to help, because that's what humans do. We help our neighbors, and then in the end, everyone is poorer. But if you want societies to grow and to prosper, you need insurance to help, especially for those events that is game changing and affects the whole community. And then he told me, If you truly believe that, make sure your insurance, if you start an insurance company like we did with naked, yeah, does that. I'll
Lennox Wasara:tell you something strange. So yesterday, preparing for our interview today, I downloaded the app and I interacted verbal rose thought was very interesting. So I left work, and then I went on to get a haircut, because obviously you were on video today as well, so you still look nice, yeah, why don't you look nice? I was like, let me get a haircut. You know? I went into the barber store, and then there was like, a six o'clock I came out at like, 630 and then they had broken into my car, so I was confused. I look around, I'm like, oh, and I go to the back. I'm like, okay, my laptop's gone to have to go to the police station. Police station, right, you know, open a case, and so on. But then, you know, I thought it was so ironic. I was like, I'm actually recording, you know, podcasts around, you know, with somebody in the insurance space and, and this happened to me. And then I thought, well, you know, insurance does matter. Yeah, it was a horrible experience. But then I. When I went to the police, they were telling me, No, there's so many people that come here with such stories. IPhones have gone missing, or they've lost their stuff, or somebody's gone to their home. So you just said to me, Look, you must be great for your life. I thought that's the country we live in now, especially
Unknown:if you work in insurance, sometimes you start doubting the goodness of humanity in certain instances. But that is what insurance is there for. I mean, if you a car is very often one of your biggest assets, and if you lose that financially, it sets you back. Yeah,
Lennox Wasara:greatly it does. And what I think is different is that your company is all about tech, so there's no human interaction. So sometimes, if you trying to get a quote, you're on this long, one hour call, and they're asking you all these questions, and you know, you have this pressure to get this quote and also to, like, get these calls when you're at work or you may be studying, and there's all these calls coming in, so it takes away a lot of that pressure, and I think it's quite refreshing to have that experience.
Unknown:Yes, it's one of those things about being respectful about your privacy, and the fact that you don't want to be bothered the whole time with people trying to push you stuff. Our philosophy with people are that you are smart enough to make your own decisions, and you will decide when you're ready, but we can arm you with all the information that you need and make the process really even if it's not an absolute joy, at least, quite enjoyable, of getting yourself covered and to make it simple and easy and quick less of a hassle. Yeah, you mentioned
Lennox Wasara:something very interesting. You said that you because you come across so many claims, you've tried so hard not to be so negative, like, what allows you not to be a pessimist?
Unknown:I've seen more good things than I have seen bad things, and I think that helps. We've had clients that have claimed, for example, for a piece of jewelry. This is a good example that we had a couple of weeks ago. We paid out their claim, and then they came back and they told us they found it. Oh yeah. And they gave us our money back. Wow. So the way our business model works is that we don't make more or less money the more or less claims we pay. Normally in insurance, you make your money within that gap between your premiums and the claims that you pay out. We don't. We take a fixed fee, like a technology company would like a subscription fee, and any money left over at the end of the 31st of March, goes to causes and communities that our customers choose. So and I think that helps with that kind of behavior, to nudge people to do the right thing. Because with that person, when they found their ring, if they didn't give us our money back, that they weren't making any difference to us, but they were actually taking that money from causes and communities that they care about, like whether it's dogs, whether it is door of hope that helps abandon babies, you know? And I think that changes people's mindset, and that helps us to see quite a lot more good in people as well. Yeah, doing the right thing.
Lennox Wasara:Yeah, a lot of good in people, and a lot of good in your heart as well. Because in 2016 you thought, well, let me make the decision to stop and let's co found this business with two of your friends and just walk us through that. I mean, it's hard to make choices, right? Because that's a very difficult choice. You've got family, you've got responsibilities, and somebody is probably listening now, stuck in that situation, they're like, Oh, I can't stand this job no more. And they know deep down their hearts that there's something that there's something that they probably need to do and probably just don't have the strength to do it. So what allows you to make those kinds of decisions? I
Unknown:always say that right throughout my career, I've been extremely lucky. You're lucky who you born to where you born, what intellectual capacity you have, what opportunities you're given for tertiary education, what people you meet throughout your life. And I think I've always been extremely lucky in that regard. And we had a business before I joined Ernst and Young, and we sold that business to Ernst and Young. So I think one of the things that was an advantage, this wasn't my first rodeo, so we had that business for 11 years, and at Ernst and Young I was lucky in the sense that we did consulting to all the big insurance companies. And a lot of the work that we did was around how to get them ready for the digital customer, because they saw that there's a fundamental shift in how people want to interact with their providers, and they wanted us to as consultants, to come in and give them some guidance on what's happening internationally and what's changing. And as part of that process, it became obvious to us one that the incumbent players, it's very difficult for them, it's they always call it The Innovator's Dilemma. You don't want to disrupt yourself because you've got a profitable business. So why do you want to go and mess with that? That it's hard for them to do it because of that. And to that, technology has evolved to such an extent that. Think it is possible to do something as long as you start from ground up. So we saw that opportunity second. Like I said, I was going through a bit of a existential personal crisis about what am I doing with my life, and that it felt as though I'm not making a good contribution in society with what I'm doing. And in thinking about that whole thing about why isn't insurance working in the way it should? And my husband then saying, then make it work the way it should. And we believe that the fundamental problem is the fact that you make more money if you pay less in claims. And as humans, that's just you do what you're incentivized to do. That's how we operate. And then thinking through that and how we can change that and coming up with the idea of the naked difference those two things combined made us feel as though there's a real opportunity, both to meet that need of making a bigger difference in the world around us, but also to leverage the opportunity that technology is giving us to build something From scratch that can compete with the incumbent players. Yes, if you ask people about how do you make that decision? So one thing I will advise you need to read the book. The hard thing about hard things, because there's a big chance again, we've been lucky so far, the fact that things have been going while most new businesses don't make it. And you need to face into that before you make that choice, because I'm a very positive person, I always think things are just going to work out. Well, he told me, you have to read the book, otherwise we're not doing it. So I read the book, and after reading the book, I had a conversation with my family, because it is important to have your family on board to tell them, Listen, you're going from a big corporate job to something where you're not going to earn much at all, and there's big risk involved here. What could happen? Talk them through the scenario. See that everyone is happy and on board here, because if you don't do that, I think it makes it a lot harder, if there's pressure and if things aren't going so well, or if someone is now saying, we 12 months and we want to go on a big holiday, Listen, guys, remember, we all agreed we can't do that at this point of the journey. If they're all on board in the beginning, it makes that journey a lot nicer and easier, at least in a lot of aspects. But you need to think through that. What is the worst that can happen and how you gonna deal with it? Yeah,
Lennox Wasara:due diligence is very important in that, yes, the personal level as well. Yeah, family level too. So nearly 10 years later, and you're you're here now, the business survived and making waves in the industry. How does it actually feel for you? Do you feel as accomplished as you know your resume sounds and as people see you,
Unknown:I'm still not really. I still feel like, for example, if you talk to anyone in naked we are not people that place any value in position or importance or anything like that. You just need to do your job, and you need to do it well. And I think we still have a lot to do. So there's never time to rest on your laurels. There's still a lot of work to do. So I'm very proud of what we've achieved. I never would have achieved it without the team that we managed to build. I mean, when we launched the public, we were about eight people. Now we about 170 people. And I think one of the things I'm the proudest about is the team of people we've managed to accumulate that they agreed to come and work for us, and that I get to work with them every day. It's one of my big joys. And all of them are South Africans. We have amazing people in South Africa and the ability to build something that give young people the opportunity to enter the job market. Because I don't know if you know how hard it is for graduates to get jobs these days, because everyone that works for us is a young graduate. Our average age of that team is 25 that's cool. It gives me great joy. Every person that comes in gets interviewed by myself to just make sure that they are good humans. Because we only hire good humans. You have to be smart, but you have to be good.
Lennox Wasara:So it takes quite a bit of work to align. At the beginning, like back in 2016 with your co founders, you had to pick the right people. And that didn't stop, because now you've got a bigger team of 100 plus, and you still have to select the right person. So it doesn't essentially stop.
Unknown:No, I always say, hire in haste, repent at your leisure. So so I think putting a lot of effort into who you choose to go on the journey with is always a good, good, good investment.
Lennox Wasara:So the nice thing with your business is that you're not in the not the face of the business, you know, so people don't always recognize you the store and say, Oh, you're the fan of naked. No. I think one thing very glad about that, one question a lot of people probably ask. People like, what's up with the ads? Like, they're so catchy, like, walk us through how those came about?
Unknown:Yes. So we've been on a very interesting journey with a brand, and we don't use agency. We have an internal team of talented creatives that actually comes up with ideas and. It's a joint effort. To be honest, our creative director is a gentleman by the name of Shane Durant, very talented guy, and he comes up with our campaigns, and we work at it together. So we have a very collaborative way in which we deal with things at naked we use a platform called slack. All technology companies use that platform, and that means that if Shane has a new idea on marketing, he puts it on Slack, and everyone starts commenting, what do they think about it? Do they like it? Don't they like it? What do they understand? What don't they understand? And then we kind of collaboratively work on something until we get to something that that works. And everyone throws in ideas. Everyone now knows our current campaign, but just before that, we did a campaign called lose weight. And a lot of the extra things we did, like with ox and chair, that was ideas of just the general team members that said, you know, we saw the Chasing the Sun thing on Netflix. Did you guys see it? Why don't we get ox to come in and do something on lose weight, and we're like, okay, let's contact ox and see if he's willing to so it's a very much a team effort, to be honest. Sounds like a lot of co creation, yes, and that's what we have. A lot of talented young people working for us. I must say that whether they are in the creative team, or whether they are in my customer success team, or whether there are developers, yeah, they're all quite invested, which is nice.
Lennox Wasara:So one of the things that got you out of corporate is some of the bureaucracy and some of the frustrations you're experiencing in the sense that you can't really innovate much in those big existing corporates, whereas now you've gone on to create a business, and it's sort of like easier for you to have the digital innovation within a new entire enterprise, as opposed to implementing that in an existing, pre existing business. I mean, how cautious are you to ensure that you know some of the fears you experience, some of the nightmares you had in corporate don't actually creep into their employee experience in your current
Unknown:company, we invest a lot of time in that. And one of the things in our previous company that we ran ourselves. We were only 25 people, and it was a consulting business as well, actuarial consulting business called quindium, by the way. And when we were at erntion, was a really good company, really good people working there, but they have almost 200,000 employees. And what happens if you have that number of employees, you have a very large number of rules and policies to make sure no one does the wrong thing. And one of the things before we started naked was to talk about, how do we grow a substantial company without having all these rules? Because what happens someone goes and books themselves into a five star hotel, and all of a sudden you have a rule about you can only stay in these kind of hotels, yeah. And then someone does this, and then you, all of a sudden, no one is allowed to do that, just to protect, protect, protect. And it's quite interesting. We looked at a lot of things. There's something called holacracy. It's a certain approach, holacracy, holacracy, and they did it with nurses in the UK. But again, it was with small groups of people. And then just, I think about two years in, when we were still a small number of people, a Netflix book came out called no rules, rules. And I was on holiday. It was in that December, and then Alex phoned me, and he said, You have to read this book. This is the book we've been looking at and looking for, how do you scale, you know, this freedom and responsibility, that's what we call it, in a bigger company. How do you manage it? And they've done it in Netflix. Not all of it appeals to us. Some of it's very American and and we've taken that approach of freedom and responsibility, and have been implementing that at naked so that means you are given the freedom to execute on your responsibilities, but you also live and die by them. And I expect you to make some mistakes. I expect you to take chances. You have about 10 coins a year, that you can take risks with. And I expect you to fail on some of this stuff. But the big thing is that you have to have a very talented team, and that you have to have a team that actually consults so very big on consulting. So if you have an idea or you want to do something, you'll actually do something where you go and talk to a large number of people and hear what they think about your idea. Take on board if they think there's they have concerns with it, really listen to what they're saying. And if, in the end, you decide this is still what we should be doing, even though everyone disagrees with you, if that's your responsibility, you can go and do it. If it doesn't work, then it's your responsibility that it doesn't work. And we also have something that people then talk about their failures and why it failed, and what they learned from it. It's a hard culture for some people, but I think if you implement it, well, it's actually very rewarding for people that work there, because they feel as though they're actually really making a country. Vision, and they have the power to do so,
Lennox Wasara:yeah, I mean, if you're saying your average age in the organization is 25 I mean, I wonder how they're taking up some of the approach that you have no, like, no rules, and like, you know, you have responsibility, and you got to use it wisely. But let's say, for example, with things like, working hours, you know, do people pitch up at any time? Or, like, how do you navigate that? Because that's an interesting one.
Unknown:It depends. Like, obviously, if you are working in customer success, they like a technical help desk, so they help with things. So obviously they have hours that they have to be there. So for them, there's not that much flexibility around that. So how we do it is, we've got squads of people. So you have a squad lead, yes, and then you, and then you have a group of six people about underneath them, but they decide how they want to tackle things on their portion of the help desk. I don't tell them exactly how they'd have to do things or how they have to organize things. That group decides, and then they share, because some and then we kind of track which of the groups are doing better than the other groups. So the groups that are then doing better then share how they are tackling some of the problems or how they are organizing themselves. So even though they don't have flexibility necessarily around they work as those particular individuals, they have a lot of flexibility on how they execute on their responsibilities. Yeah, listening
Lennox Wasara:to you, I pick up, you pay attention to the detail. And yeah, and I'm thinking, so as an entrepreneur, that's one of the difficult things of like, as a business grows letting go, yes. How have you handled that? Because you still sound like you very much the detail badly.
Unknown:No, it's really hard. Yeah. I think if you ask a lot of the people. I think all three of us are still extremely involved in the detail. We are making a concerted effort to train up more people to to be able to execute on some of the stuff. What is hard is I have very fixed views, for example, on how rose should be speaking to you, yeah, for example, got a
Lennox Wasara:lot of personality, by the way, I'm glad to hear
Unknown:no. And all of us have different areas that that we feel that way about. Alex is a lot more on the on the technology side and but, yeah, I think it is one of the things that you have to let go, but that is why you have to make sure that you have a good, talented team. And it's been interesting for us to go on that journey, because you always have the choice of hiring experienced people or taking juniors. And we've taken the hard road of taking juniors and growing them, and that does make that stepping away even a bit more tricky, because you also, the whole time, need to be aware where are they in their development journey, how much responsibility can they take, and how far can you step away? Because you also don't want someone to drown. You don't want to throw them in the deep end and they drown, because then they don't grow and they don't learn. So you want to loosen the reins, let them step up a little bit loose and let them step up and and I think that's the main thing that and we talk about that a lot. And we also have a counselor, counselee structure, so every person with us has has a counselor. And that's a discussion that's had all the time as well, about what level of responsibility can you take at the moment? How do you feel? Is the support you're getting? Do you need more support? Less support? Someone needs to back off a little bit or whatnot? Yeah, but it's all about talking about it regularly, especially if you have a
Lennox Wasara:young team, okay? And also make a difference, something that you mentioned earlier. Do you think that corporates can always, you know, will be inspired to take this route, because a lot of the folks, especially customers, feels that when they make a claim, it's a little bit hard to get that because it kind of compromises the the profit structure of the corporate space. Yeah,
Unknown:it's an interesting one. Corporates give money to charity, and that's great, but it's, it's like we opened this thing, we cut the ribbon. We've done our duty. Now it's not integrally part of the business. So for us, the naked difference is to make sure we do the right thing, so that we pay all the claims we're supposed to pay, because we're not worried about the fact that it's going to reduce our profits, obviously, and I have this conversation with our claims team all the time. We are the custodians of our customers money, so we can't pay fraudulent claims, but we have no reason to be iffy on valid claims. But given that any excess money after we've taken our fee goes to causes that our customers care about, it means it's integral to our business. It totally changes the way that we think about things. And insurance is a community activity. It is, like I said in the beginning, it's there for communities to grow and thrive. So for me and for my co founders, it feels as though the naked difference is integral to that. It just makes sure that we keep on. Remembering that insurance is a community activity. It's there to uplift communities, and that's what we're trying to do with with the naked difference. Guess I could talk for hours about the make a difference. I'm super passionate about it. And when you look back now,
Lennox Wasara:is it, was it actually what the risk is? Because I'm sure you're speaking to some colleagues at the time saying, Hey, this is what we want to do. And some people probably gave you some very hostile feedback as to I don't think that's going to work, but, you know, almost 10 years later, here we are
Unknown:no it's always easy to say, if things went well, that it was the right thing to do, but I, I'm not sorry to be honest, I I have learned a lot through the process, and I've actually really enjoyed it. That sounds super selfish, but, but I've actually really enjoyed it as well. A lot of people
Lennox Wasara:refer to you as a disruptor, as an innovator. How do you determine if something's really innovative, as opposed to just being really a cool idea? It's
Unknown:quite an interesting one. I do think you need to go through a process of actually rigorously determining if there's a market for your idea. So if you've got a one sided platform, so you want people to sign up. Actually, what we did a lot there is something called, and it's a book. You can go and look at it, and you can also get it on online now with TJ and smart. It's the Google Design Sprint process. Yes, within five days, you get a good idea of whether there's like legs to an idea that you've got. So you go through you decide to build a little prototype thing, and you actually live test it with users, see how they respond to it. See, there's a whole big philosophy around it, but we use that a lot in the beginning, because you need to talk to customers, and you can't ask customers, what do you want? Will you buy? This doesn't help. They don't know what they want and that they will just be polite. That's the other thing. People are polite. Also, don't ask your mother, because she'll always love your idea. So you have to go through a process of engaging with real potential customers and seeing how they're responding with it. So I would recommend, if anyone is thinking about it, to actually go and read the Google Design Sprint. And like I said, if you're lazy at reading, there's Google Design Sprint, 2.0 AJ and smart on YouTube, go and look at the videos.
Lennox Wasara:I wonder what's your drive and what really got you going all these years? Because it's really not an easy journey. I
Unknown:always say large portions of it is just luck. It's always luck. It's, yeah, it's who you born to helps, but the biggest thing is always who you meet along the way, and maintaining those relationships, I think, is one of the things I mean, for me, family is really important. I have a family, and I'm very close to them, and one of the things that always sticks out for me from the time that I was a little girl, my grandmother was born in 19 108 she was a very smart woman, and she lived in Belfast on a farm, and she was in res in town, and when she came to standard eight or grade 10, now, her dad told her dad told her she has to come back to the farm. Now she studied enough, so she kept on every day running back to the school, and then I agreed that she was going to do matric. But then she wasn't allowed to go study. She had stay home, learn how to hold a house and get married. Eventually, she got married, and then when she was 44 she had had all her children. She went and she studied, and in those days, she could only study as a girl, normally either nursing or teaching. So she became a teacher, and I stayed with her. And when I was a little girl, when my mom, my mom was also a teacher, and I stayed with my grandma, and my grandma from the time that I was a little girl. She told me that you must make sure that you can look after yourself and that you must use the privilege that you will have, that you can go to university and that you can live whatever your potential is, because she always felt that, you know, in the old days they were so restricted. And I think that had quite a big impact on me, the fact that my gran always told me, You can do whatever you want to do, as long as you work hard and you try your best, don't let anyone tell you you can't do something. And I think that had a big impact on me. And I was also very lucky that both my parents, my dad, always treated me like a boy. He didn't have any boys, and I was the eldest. So again, I think all those things was just very lucky for me. The last thing I will always advice I give people is if you say you're going to do something, do it, because the only person you disappoint is yourself, and the more you do things that you told yourself you're going to do, the more confident you become in your ability to do things, and the more you can do. I don't know, but I think the my family and the grounding that they gave me, and I could still hear my grandmother, yeah, never be dependent on any. One, make sure you make your own way. Yeah,
Lennox Wasara:that's incredible. I'm glad that she had that impact on you, because look where you are now and all the things you've been able to achieve. So I wonder how you know, when you think of the business, the relationship between the co founders sort of evolves when it starts. The relationship is, you know, to where it is now. It's probably a little different. How would you just would you describe the evolution of that relationship? Because sometimes people don't see eye to eye after some time, because, I mean, it's business, so I'm glad that you all that all together and, you know, still working happily. But when you when you think of how the journey has been, how have you all evolved?
Unknown:What people don't realize is, and I didn't fully, I think appreciate this. I appreciated it after our first business, because I didn't appreciate it. Then is, if you start a business with someone, it's almost like getting married to them, to be honest with you, that's why there's counseling for co founders like you would have marriage counseling, because if you don't know the person very well, you'd most certainly get to know them very well through this process. And if anything small irritates you about them through this process, you know what it's like when you get married. I always tell people, if there's something small bugging you about that person before marriage, just know it's going to get 100 times worse over time it is, I promise you. So make sure you can live with that thing. And I think again, we were lucky, because the three of us knew each other very well. We've got different strengths and weaknesses, and we kind of knew each other's quirks. But even with that, it is sometimes, especially in the beginning, to determine what exact role every person is playing. Because in the beginning, everyone is doing everything together. And I think the hardest part was when we were starting to separate responsibilities a bit. And the main thing there is to actually talk, be able to talk about it and talk through issues like you would in a normal marriage. That's how I think about it. So be careful about who you pick. Make sure you know them, and make sure you have different strengths, so that when you when it gets to that time, when you have to split responsibilities, it's easier. Thank you for
Lennox Wasara:sharing that. I think that's pretty important, likening it to a marriage journey. So I think the a lot of people excited about where the business is going, and I'm personally excited about, you know what the
Unknown:business? No, I must just get you to buy,
Lennox Wasara:man. So I wonder from that perspective. I mean, let's think 10 years from now, where were we going to be?
Unknown:We are very ambitious. We have big ambition in South Africa. We also believe that there is opportunities outside of South Africa. South Africa has quite a good track record of moving insurance businesses to other territories. It's not as easy as it sounds, because legislation and insurance is very complex, but we've got a good track record. If you look at for example, Hollard is in Australia as well. Archer and UE is very big in Australia, Oakhurst, you guys know them as Dachau Moore. They also in Australia. Utterance has now moved to Ireland. We've got vitality that's in the UK. So we're definitely looking out for opportunities like that as well. And 10 years from now, I have no intention of retiring yet, but I I'm sure that at that point in time, I would have found something to make myself useful, because it's important to be useful. Otherwise you're not going to be happy. You have to be useful. My
Lennox Wasara:final question is just around taking you back to the journey at the University of Pretoria. Completed your cura sciences qualification, difficult course, by the way, one of the most difficult ones there at the university. But you survived that, and just some memories that you've had from the past. When you think of the University of
Unknown:Pretoria, my dad was actually a professor in mathematics at the University of Pretoria. He spent his whole career there. So I have very fond memories of the keys as a little girl, I used to spend tons of time in his office, sitting in some of his classes that he used to give. So when I go to the old maths building, I get very emotional about it. My dad advised me not to go and study mathematics, by the way, he told me, I am not an academic. I need to I don't have the patience for it. I need to find something else to do. And then he kind of guided me towards actuarial science, not that I really knew what I was going to go study. And I think one of my favorite memories is probably in my second year when I failed my first test ever. It was my first actuarial exam, and the whole class failed. But I was just like, This is not for me. And our professor at that stage was an actuary by the name of George marks, and I told him, I'm switching back to my original plan. And he told me, I didn't take you as one of these girls that's just here to catch a husband. Made me so upset, and I heard my grandmother again, and I pushed through. And I'm always grateful for him that he actually that he actually did that. I really enjoyed my time at text. And like I said, I still go there every year to recruit people for naked Wow, yes. We go to the career fair, and we also do some guest lectures for the computer science classes. We also hire out of the actuarial class and more broadly, but we actually contribute through lectures and stuff in those specific areas. And I think my daughter is going to go there next year. She's in matric this year, and we filled in her techies application last night, actually, honestly, online.
Lennox Wasara:That's good. Thank you so much. Simile for opening up about family life, business life, and just the journey you've worked
Unknown:over the years. Yeah, it was really lovely to spend some time with you. Lennox, amazing.
Lennox Wasara:That brings us to the end of our chat, really excited to learn so much about what's meant that what the journey has meant to her, talking about luck, but also talking about being persistent and making those hard choices, but most importantly, enjoying the ride. If you're curious more about season five of the lead up podcast, simply go to up.ac.za forward slash lead up or find out more information there. But this production is probably brought to you by the University of pretorias Alumni Relations Office. Our Head of Content is Dr Samantha castle, and our content producer is Elna Schutz. And this production is brought to you by meropa. From my side, is nothing but love and light to meet again. Goodbye. You.