Vinny Lingham: Playing the Angles
By: Maria Sample
Vinny Lingham's career as a marketer started early. In kindergarten, he made money buying Thundercat stickers and selling the popular ones. In his early teens, he switched to cricket cards and then Magic The Gathering cards. In college, he partially financed his undergraduate studies by playing pool and managing and booking bands.
So it's not difficult to see why the entrepreneurial aspect of online marketing appealed to him. In 2001, he caught the bug while he ran the search marketing department for a company that marketed on behalf of online casino clients, which had a large paid search budget.
Two years later he left to start his own company. Lingham is the founder and chief strategy officer of incuBeta, an online marketing company based in Cape Town, South Africa. incuBeta owns the super-affiliate Clicks2Customers.com, a paid search marketing company, incorporated in the United States, which specializes in directing targeted traffic to its clients' sites and is one of Commission Junction's top five performers.
With more than 50 full-time employees, incuBeta is on track to generate eight-figure commissions this year, as well as over $100 million in sales for its merchant partners. The company was a recent winner of Business Day's Most Promising Emerging Enterprise in 2005.
Lingham started the company in 2003 with two friends and his then-fiancée, Charlene Troskie, who is now his wife and focuses on new development within the company's campaign team.
It's not easy working with your spouse - especially when you've been married just over one year, recently bought a house and make an international business trip every month. But Lingham feels that the toughest part of being employed at the same company is trying to keep shop talk from seeping into their home life.
Still, the line between his business and personal life is blurry. The self-described workaholic says he is online 24 hours per day and works 60 to 70 hours per week. He is often toiling at home into the night to keep up with clients on the west coast. Lingham estimates that 25 percent of incuBeta's clients are in the United States, where he travels every two or three months.
Despite all the traveling, Lingham does not feel that his company's location in South Africa is a disadvantage.
"Cape Town is considered the 'Silicon Valley of South Africa.' And we're pretty close in time to London," he says, which is where 60 to 70 percent of incuBeta's clients are based. The only real issue is having to hop on a plane to get the interaction with clients he feels is so important. "The power of face-to-face is indefinable. But we're a global company, so we'd have to travel wherever we were."
Only one thing about traveling so much really bothers him. "I hate airports - taking my shoes off, waiting in queues and taking my laptop out of its case." He's also learned not to combine leisure travel with business trips, ever since work forced him to cancel the holiday portion of a trip last year. He did, however, manage to get away for his honeymoon, where he was "forced not to work for 10 days. I only signed on twice in all that time … it drove me a little crazy."
When Lingham does have spare time, he likes to spend it watching movies, including "Tsotsi," which not only won this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was co-produced by Moviworld, a company that received investment from TEIM Ventures, the same private equity firm that provided incuBeta with crucial development capital.
Lingham is also a big reader - he's read all of Dan Brown's books and loves them. He's also a big Tom Clancy fan. And his favorite book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter, reinforced his existing viewpoint that there is a huge difference in the mindset of the haves and have-nots.
Originally from East London, a city on the east coast of South Africa where his parents still live, Lingham is happy only when he's learning. In addition to his more-than full-time job, he is also studying for his Master of Science degree, which will likely conclude with a thesis on incuBeta. He's also interested in getting an M.B.A., but only in the U.S. His ideal school would be somewhere in the Silicon Valley, where he's interested in spending a few years to grow the business.
Lingham was recently invited to join the Society of Industry Leaders, which provides knowledge and information to Vista Research, a Standard & Poor's company. He also belongs to Mensa, defined on its website as "the international society that provides a forum for intellectual exchange among members." But Lingham thinks the formula for selection is flawed. "I know my IQ but I don't put a lot of faith in it. It's your mental age divided by your chronological age," he says, claiming that means the older you get, the lower your score becomes.
He considers Virgin founder Richard Branson a role model. "We're similar in many ways, but I'm not as crazy as he is. He has a fantastic brand. Some of his companies have worked and some haven't. But he does it because he enjoys it - for kicks. It's a passion. It's not about the money." Other mentors include a former manager who inspired Lingham to study at Harvard one day, and Bono of the Irish rock group U2, "because of the work he's done in Africa and for Africa."
Lingham is a fourth-generation South African, whose ancestors hail from India. He does not consider himself religious, but says, "I was born Hindu, but I tend to focus more on the spiritual aspects of the religion (Karma, etc.), as opposed to the religion itself." As for politics, he thinks he has "far too much candor to be a politician, but maybe I'll become president of South Africa one day. Who knows?"
Proud to Be a South African
Lingham says there's a lot of erroneous information circulating about his country in terms of drought, poverty and AIDS. "The Rand Water Board has one of the top three water supplies in the world," he says, referring to the 100-year-old water utility that services South Africa. "Our economy is growing at 6 percent a year and all the urban and semi-urban areas, which house 70 percent of the population, can be considered 'firstworld' by many standards. The AIDS contraction rate is actually at a decline in South Africa, according to the latest statistics," he says. And while the CIA World Factbook lists the poverty rate as 50 percent, Lingham says that is incorrect because "it doesn't take into account PPP (purchasing power parity) or currency differentials." Lingham says, "The poverty rate has dropped to around 20 percent, which is exceptionally low for a developing country, but is still obviously not ideal."
Lingham also feels his country's low life expectancy rate of 43 years is misleading. Continued on Page 2...
Tags:
vinny lingham, incubeta, commission junction, marketing company incorporated, lingham, magic the gathering cards, marketing department, cricket cards, chief strategy officer, magic the gathering, workaholic, playing pool, cape town south africa, early teens, made money, booking bands, campaign team, thundercat, time employees,
More From Affiliate Advantage
See What Else is in This Issue |
Print
Email
Digg This
