He built his first computer at 15. Twenty-five years later, Metacom is the backbone of connectivity across Africa.

Réan van Niekerk has always built things. As a child he was pulling apart batteries, switches and wires, working out what changed when you reconfigured them. At 15 he built what was arguably one of South Africa's first single-board computers, soldering components onto a printed circuit board he made himself, mounted onto a piece of wood. An innate passion for technology that became the foundation of everything Metacom is today.

That passion led him through several software and electronics companies before 2001. Each one sharpened something: his understanding of engineering, of business, of what technology could do if you connected it the right way.

The idea was a series of little black boxes, hidden away, interconnected, doing intelligent things in the background without anyone needing to manage them. Réan couldn't fully describe what those boxes would be. But the concept stayed with him. What we now call the Internet of Things: physical devices connected, communicating and responding to each other without human intervention.

In 2001 he walked away from a successful business to build it. Without a roadmap and with no guarantee it would work.

The first major opportunity came through Eskom. They had an engineering communication problem that others hadn't been able to crack. Réan understood it quickly and knew how to solve it. The solution others couldn't find, he delivered. Today, well over half of the communication infrastructure Eskom uses to monitor and control South Africa's electricity grid runs on Metacom.

By 2002, another major opportunity was already emerging. The networks carrying transactions across Africa were running on ageing X.25 infrastructure, slow, fragile, and overdue for replacement. Within three months, Metacom had designed and built a GPRS-based device that could carry financial transactions over the newly released cellular networks, landing them their first major retail client. That client base has since grown to include some of Africa's largest enterprises.

Today there is not a single town in South Africa without a Metacom device running quietly in the background, monitored and managed from Cape Town. That early device was the foundational blueprint for what became more than 25,000 routers deployed across over 20 countries.

As any entrepreneur will tell you, the journey was not straightforward. There were regulatory hurdles, financial pressure, and the challenges that come with growth. Réan admits there was a moment, about 15 years ago, when the weight of it all became heavy enough that he just wanted to sit down in the street and ask a friend to come fetch him. He didn't. He pushed through. Within a year, that particular storm had passed. The path was clearing and the energy came back.

That resilience is part of the Metacom story. So is the willingness to keep evolving. The original idea is still in the company's DNA, but the business has grown in directions Réan didn't anticipate. The little black boxes he imagined all those years ago are still at the heart of it. But between that first idea and where Metacom stands today is a story that doesn't often get told.

In the first episode of A Founder's Lens, Réan tells it in his own words: the moments that shaped the business, what nearly stopped it, and what it actually takes to turn a childhood passion into something that spans a continent.