South Africa’s FM Campus is a magazine published by Financial Mail and is promoted as a publication aimed at students and lecturers. The publication serves to place news, current events and industry trends into an academic context. It’s a really good read and you don’t need to be a student or really even remember those hazy student days to subscribe so head on over and do it now (online version).

Last week the cover article, “Young guns making it online” was written by Michael Salzwedel (a former QuirkStar) and focused on some of South Africa’s youngest and most successful web entrepreneurs, many of whom are still students themselves. Some names that were featured included Evan and Ryan Shein, Adriaan Pienaar and Tyler Reed but the one that really caught my eye was Quirk’s brand spanking new Star, Rafiq Phillips.

Salzwedel describes Rafiq as “a well-known figure in the local online world, first started making money on the Internet by designing websites in his first year of studies (software development at CPUT) in 2001. Now, his key services are 'helping companies understand and apply search engine marketing and other emergent trends and technologies that help them become more visible online and increase their return on investment.”
Rafiq joined Quirk this month and we sure are proud to have him on board!

The online space is the ideal platform for young entrepreneurs to begin building their careers and reputations and these “Young Guns” are certainly utilising it to the best of their abilities. For the full scoop be sure to read the article.

This article also got me thinking of another Young Gun – well not as young as the guys featured here but if this article was written 8 years ago he would definitely have been included. That’s right… our very own CEO, Rob Stokes, who founded Quirk while he was in his 3rd year of studies at UCT. Today, 8 years down the line there are three QuirkStations (London, Cape Town and Johannesburg), 42 QuirkStars, a host of local and international clients and a whole lot of success. And all of that came from one man’s idea.

If these young online entrepreneurs are headed on the same track they’re in for some great times.