Tell someone you run a startup, and the second question after “what do you do?” is “what category?” They want to put you in a box: fintech, health-tech, ed-tech, climate-tech. The vocabulary is the giveaway. Tech is the constant; the prefix tells you which industry. The pitch decks all read the same shape.
For Ebenworks, that question is structurally wrong. The category is not the constant. The user is. The mission is. Whether the next company we ship is software, hardware, hospitality or agriculture is the variable. It flexes with where the next overlooked population happens to be standing.
That sounds like a marketing tic until you try to write a brand book around it. Then it isn’t a tic; it’s an org chart.
What “a group” lets us do that “a tech company” doesn’t.
A tech company tells the world what it ships and waits for the customers who match. The pull is from the product side. We built X, who needs X? The discipline is feature velocity. Most decisions go through “does this make X better?”
A group of companies tells the world who it serves and waits for the proof of where they actually are. The pull is from the user side. Here is the population. What do they already use? What would meaningfully change for them? The discipline is honesty about where the user is. Most decisions go through “does this honor the brief?”
The mission is the constant.
The industry is the variable.
When the discipline is the user, software stops being the answer-by-default. Imali happens to live in WhatsApp because that’s where 1.6 million SA merchants already are. Chingu happens to live in voice because that’s the surface that meets a 78-year-old grandmother in Daegu. If the next overlooked population is hospitality staff in Phnom Penh, the answer might be a printed checklist on a clipboard. The brief doesn’t care, and neither do we.
Three things change the moment you stop calling yourself a tech company.
One: the hiring lens. A tech company hires for stack. A group of companies hires for proximity to the user. The Imali product manager doesn’t come from a fintech background; she comes from spending her Saturdays in Maponya Mall talking to spaza shop owners about why the loan they got was rejected. The Chingu researcher isn’t a voice-AI specialist; she’s a Korean social worker who’s spent twelve years on weekly home visits. Stack is taught faster than empathy.
Two: the legal posture. A tech company tries to fit one privacy policy across markets. A group of companies meets the law of the place. POPIA Article 72 is not the same as PIPA Article 23, and we’re proud of that. We name the article on the page where it lives. Privacy is not a brochure; it’s an article number with a paragraph of plain English under it.
Three: the time horizon. A tech company is in a quarterly hurry. A group of companies has the patience of a population. Korean grandmothers will not be solved this fiscal year. SA informal merchants will not get credit profiles in a sprint. The next company in the group can take the time it takes, because the brief never asked for a J-curve.
What this lets us refuse.
The most useful thing about the position is what it lets us turn down. Pitches that come dressed as “massive market opportunity” without a named user. Categories that pay well but don’t fit the brief. Branding work that wants us to call something “bank-grade” without a citation. We’ve already turned down a few. Each time it’s a relief, because the alternative is an Ebenworks site full of words from the avoid list.
The downside, said plainly.
The downside is that “a group of companies” is harder to pitch in eight words. Investors who read by category have to slow down. Recruiters who index on stack have to read further. Press who want a tech-company headline have to write a slower one. Every “simpler” alternative we tried (fintech for the unbanked, AI for eldercare, holding company for purpose-driven startups) flattened the brief into something that wouldn’t accept the next industry, and the next industry is the whole point.
So we live with the longer sentence. A group of companies for the people the world stops short of seeing. If you read it twice, that’s on us. The brief is worth the second read.
What we’re asking from the people who read this.
Today the companies in the group are software. Today is the operative word. The companies don’t share a category. They share a brief, and the brief is older than any stack we happen to be using to honor it. So if you’re writing about us, the ask is small: lead with who the work serves, not the stack we used to do it.
We’re a company.
That has tech companies in it. For now.
ETB · written from a kitchen table in Sandton, April 2026