The man who started Webafrica and became an entrepreneur in the US

While Webafrica co-founder and former CEO Matt Tagg has moved to the US and subsequently hung up his entrepreneurial boots, his impact on South Africa’s broadband landscape continues to be felt.

Tagg launched Webafrica (then styled WebAfrica) as a hosting provider in 1997 while still in matric.

The industry was still maturing, but the income from the business supported him while studying a BSc in Computer Science at UCT.

It also taught him the basics about business and customer relationship management first-hand.

He relaunched the company in 2003 with Rupert Bryant after Webafrica hired its second full-time employee.

That was also the year Telkom ADSL started becoming more widely available, and Webafrica would soon expand beyond exclusively offering web hosting services.

Offering ADSL products proved a brilliant business decision, and Webafrica’s growth surged.

By 2007, Webafrica had 17,000 ADSL subscribers, 4,000 hosting clients, and employed 72 people.

That same year, Tagg co-founded Teraco — another business that would fundamentally change South Africa’s broadband landscape for the better.

Tagg, along with Frogfoot’s Abraham van der Merwe and serial entrepreneur Joe Botha, helped develop South Africa’s first vendor-neutral data centre provider.

According to Botha, they started an Internet peering point called hub.org.za soon after.

Tagg served on Teraco’s board for several years and moved to the United States in 2012 to join the Silicon Valley startup scene.

That was also the year Teraco officially launched the NAPAfrica Internet exchange point.

Through NAPAfrica, Teraco helped promote free network peering in South Africa and convinced major content owners like Google, Facebook, and Netflix to peer for free at its facilities.

This reduced the cost of international and local bandwidth in South Africa to near zero.

As a result, the price of a 100Mbps uncapped fibre connection has plummeted from R6,599 to under R1,000 per month since 2014.

During this time, Webafrica also expanded its hosting business.

It bought Gridhost in 2013, which lives on as 1-grid after the business bought itself out from Webafrica in 2018.

During his time in Silicon Valley, Tagg co-founded a startup called Paperjet with his friend Chris Farber.

Launched in late 2014, Paperjet solved the problem of un-fillable PDFs — a huge frustration at the time.

Paperjet allowed users to upload forms to a web interface and easily complete, sign, and send them off.

Tagg and Farber developed an algorithm that made the blank spaces in forms editable, allowing you to upload a PDF and start typing immediately like it was a web form.

Tagg remained at Paperjet until 2020.

Meanwhile, Webafrica has continued to make waves in South Africa.

On 26 September 2023, Webafrica revealed that it was buying Mweb — one of South Africa’s oldest consumer Internet service providers.

Also launched in 1997, Mweb took the country by storm with its dialup Internet starter kit, dubbed the Big Black Box.

The Competition Commission approved the deal on 5 October 2023, with conditions.

As for Tagg, although he’s living a quieter life now somewhere in Florida, he has left an indelible and positive mark on South Africa’s Internet landscape.

From web hosting to affordable broadband, he has left a legacy in South Africa to be proud of.