Paper short abstract:

When struggling for success, South African entrepreneurs operate within intersecting temporalities. Based on material collected in a tech incubator in Johannesburg, this paper investigates how events of the past and visions of the future impact the day to day lives of entrepreneurs.

Paper long abstract:

International and South African policy makers, NGOs and corporations see entrepreneurship as crucial to counter the lingering poverty and skewed economic structures inherited from the apartheid era. Therefore, much effort has been put into growing the South African entrepreneurial eco system.

As startup incubators attempt to cultivate entrepreneurship, they play an important role for South African startups. Entrepreneurship training programs try to compensate for the social capital, material goods and generational knowledge beneficial for entrepreneurs that black South Africans were unable to accumulate during the apartheid era.

My paper investigates the motivations of young black entrepreneurs running their own businesses. Knowledge of historical suppression, personal experiences of racism and governmental integration efforts shape their entrepreneurial journeys and how they make business decisions. Concepts like white privilege are used by entrepreneurs to show how they interpret events taking place in the startup ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is marked with uncertainty, and entrepreneurs experiment with several potential futures (Mattingly 2014). Visions of becoming the next Elon Musk, securing family members financially, or moving from a township to a gated community are some of the prospective destinies. A failing business could mean ruined relationships and indebtedness, a vision fraught with anxiety. The potential futures lay directions for decisions made in the here and now. Through the Deleuzian concept of becoming (1991) I explore how entrepreneurs draw on historical events and personal experiences when envisioning the future, and how they understand their present-day experiences through these intersecting temporalities.