OP-ED - Companies in pain pay best
Part two of three on hardware-software specialist Francois Rautenbach captures his doctrine of the willing customer and follows the trail from a coffee chat at Novell's Utah HQ to the Payment Pebble.
In the first of this three-part profile series, I introduced an unassuming hardware-software specialist from Pretoria named Francois Rautenbach. And the raw machine code he taught himself as a boy laid the foundation for an eclectic career in tech spanning three continents.
Andile Masuku
We pick up his story in Provo, Utah, around 1999. Sitting alone in a half-empty Novell building with his laptop open, Rautenbach was checking in with his colleagues at Diamond Network Technologies (DNT), when a manager at what was the world's dominant force in network operating systems earlier in the decade, but now in slow decline, walked over and offered to buy him a coffee. He kindly entreated Rautenbach to stop wasting his time and money on visits to try and win a commercial partnership with Novell.
“These people are never going to buy what you're selling. They're already building it themselves, and what they're really doing is copying you.”
Rautenbach flew home and told his business partners that Novell was a dud that they should give up trying to convert. But then, in a fortunate turn of events, after Novell tried to build the thing they had been trying to copy, and couldn't, they reached back out to the team at DNT. According to him, the sticking point was a TCP/IP stack, the plumbing that lets a computer talk across the internet, and it had to fit inside 32 kilobytes on a network card.
Novell's people couldn't get it that small, but this was something Rautenbach had long solved for his own purposes years before by writing his code by hand in assembler. So the declining giant ended up back at their door with an offer to license a nut they couldn’t crack. Ka-ching.
Rautenbach’s observation is that a company in distress, bleeding money after having tried and failed to solve its own problems, and now facing a dire choice between another year of reported losses and a cheque to a person who might hold the key to a solution that could turn everything around, well, that makes for quite a willing customer.
That’s a lesson he first learned in his second year at the University of Pretoria when the study-loan arithmetic turned nasty. With the loan funds available shrinking a little each year as fees rose, under the backdrop of South Africa under sanctions in the late 1980s, paying for his own degree became impossible, notwithstanding the privileges that had got him that far.
A shrewd operator who'd won a contract to rebuild the systems running a steel factory's floor promised Rautenbach a fat bonus to finish the job. By the time he got it to around 95 per cent complete, the apartheid government’s army called him up. Help promised by the businessman to pull some strings to get him out of service never came and, apparently, neither did the bonus.
As it happened, Rautenbach wasn't the only one left in the lurch by this businessman's sketchy dealings. From the army camp, with a computer smuggled in with permission and set up for night work, Rautenbach tracked down others that the same operator had taken money from and left stranded… companies in pain. Among them were a maize mill that lost money if its scales were a hair off and a municipal power station fined whenever it mispredicted its draw from the grid.
As he honed his technical pain-whispering, he found that building what these clients needed taught him where the money to set up computing solutions actually comes from, and what motivates the spend.
Out of that came a company he incorporated as Alfega, then later DNT, which put him in league with two other South African co-founders. And by the mid-90s, they’d built a way to reach across a network, mount a broken machine's hard drive as though it were your own and fix it without leaving your desk.
Meanwhile, two Americans were circling the same idea, a certain Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich, though their version ran over a serial port and crawled painfully. For a time, the three traded knowledge without merging - collaborating closely, but playing separately, as Rautenbach puts it.
Incidentally, Cogswell and Russinovich’s company, Winternals, was bought by Microsoft in 2006, and Russinovich is currently CTO and a technical fellow for Microsoft Azure. Meanwhile, via a collaboration with Intel, Rautenbach's own work ended up inside the era's industry-wide PC standard, the part called PXE, which he helped carry from version one to version two, and which still boots servers in data centres the world over. He is quick to acknowledge his share of it as a rounding error.
It’s a contribution he was never actually paid for, though. Intel took the work and in return offered a seat in the inner circle, along with doors held open to IBM and Dell and other PC-focussed tech elites, in lieu of money. The deal was, you work with us, and if you make money off that, good for you.
Rautenbach learned that, often, the giants need the fast, small operator who delivers a critical part of the stack that makes for a compelling product proposition. Closing that gap doesn’t always translate to cash in the bank for you unless it aligns neatly with the giant's immediate revenue generation or loss-stemming dynamics.
It’s worth noting how Novell’s demise proved to be a boon for firms like Google, who famously copped the likes of Eric Schmidt who ran Novell before he ran Google, and a good deal of the Novell cream floated the same way. One of those folks walked straight back into Rautenbach's story - Stafford Masie, who spent six years at Novell's Provo headquarters, later the man who headlined Google's first presence in sub-Saharan Africa, and later still the self-described founder and inventor of a payments device called the Payment Pebble.
First came a reset. Rautenbach left DNT around 2000, burned out at thirty-five. After selling his shares a few years on, he took what was meant to be a one-year sabbatical to work out what the back half of his life should entail. As part of a concerted re-skilling focus, he built a thing he called Omnibus, an encrypted file that behaves like a private hard drive, with other companies renting space inside it to reach you. It didn’t go into what came immediately next, but it turned into his calling card and still runs inside what he’s building at AuthGate today.
Masie and his associates at Thumbzup were interested. And their hunt for someone who could build a chip-and-pin device that would actually clear under South Africa's card rules led to roping in Rautenbach’s hardware-software skills and expertise, following what he describes as the most stressful interview of his life.
After negotiations, they gave him ten weeks to prove it could be done. He was trepidatious, as he'd never worked in the payments space, never mind building a product from scratch that could actually work in the real world. But in the time given, he delivered a functioning prototype, one that paved the way for Thumbzup to raise from Entrée Capital. Visa would later take equity, and in 2023 Ecentric Payment Systems acquired the firm's IP.
Rautenbach, for his part, remembers the initial backer being reached through someone Masie happened to sit beside on a flight, and a raise in two parts - first to build and then to go to market.
He then took the Pebble to within a few months of completion before bowing out to focus on a new role at Zapper, where he would put in reps building payment rails that placed his work in front of millions of everyday transactions, and help him identify glaring gaps involving what he dubs “the attestation problem” that he’s actively addressing at his current startup, AuthGate.
Editorial Note: A version of this opinion editorial was first published by Business Report on 08 September 2026.