What I Learned Leaving Tech and Coming Back to Safari
My father advised me to explore life before returning to safari. I spent years in finance, marketing, IT, production and software engineering. When I came back, I brought a different question with me.
DRAFT — NOT FOR PUBLICATION. Personal narrative to be verified and refined by Bavu. Credential wording to be inserted when approved.
The advice my father gave me
My father first took me to the Kruger National Park when I was a child. I don't remember the exact trip, but I remember the feeling: the mornings, the scale of it, the sense that you were operating in something much larger than you. He worked in the industry for a time and he understood something about what it did to people.
His advice when I was old enough to choose a direction: go and explore life first. Come back to safari when you have something to bring to it.
I didn't fully understand that at the time. But I took it seriously.
What I did instead
Finance first. Then marketing. Then IT infrastructure — networks, systems, operations of a different kind. Production. Startups, several of them, with all the chaos and learning that involves. Software engineering, which taught me more about how complex systems actually work than almost anything else.
None of these were retreats from safari. They were, in retrospect, different angles on the same set of questions: how do you build something that works? How do you take a complex operation and make it run well? How do you design a system that does what you need it to do, reliably, under pressure?
The specific domain is different in every case. The questions underneath are surprisingly similar.
What I brought back
When I eventually came back — first helping to operate a lodge, then deepening my involvement with the industry, then training as a nature guide [TODO: credential wording to be confirmed] — I noticed something.
The problems in safari operations were familiar. Not identical to problems I'd seen in tech startups or in IT infrastructure, but structurally similar. Systems that had grown in layers without anyone redesigning the foundation. Data that lived in the wrong places or didn't move when it needed to. Teams that were solving the same problems in parallel without realising it. Manual processes that were doing the work that technology could do, freeing people for the work technology cannot.
I also noticed what was different. The stakes feel different in safari. The cost of a guest experience that falls short is not a support ticket or a churned subscription — it is a person's holiday, sometimes of a lifetime. The pressure to deliver quality is not abstract.
And the environment is genuinely unforgiving in ways that software development is not. A vehicle breaking down in the bush, a team member not arriving for a critical shift, a storm that changes everything — you cannot redeploy a server or roll back a commit.
The question I came back with
My father's advice was to bring something back. Here is what I think I brought back:
The question of what good operations actually looks like in this industry. Not the best practices documents, not the vendor presentations, not the consultants who have never worked a front desk or briefed a guide. The question of what it actually takes to run a safari business well — and what improvements are available if you look at it with fresh eyes.
I do not have every answer. I have a useful question and some relevant experience.
This platform is where I think through that question in public. It is not a portfolio. It is not a sales funnel. It is an attempt to think carefully about something that deserves careful thinking.
If you find that useful, stay around.