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Henk Kleynhans
Making it Profitable to Protect Nature
Henk Kleynhans is the founder of SquareBySquare, an innovative platform that allows individuals and businesses to buy and sell small parcels of conservation land, promoting eco-conscious practices. His mission centers on making it profitable to protect nature, thereby empowering users to engage in conservation efforts actively.34
Professional Background
- Previous Ventures: Henk founded Skyrove, which became South Africa's largest independent WiFi hotspot network. He has also held roles at notable companies such as Atlassian and Qantas, showcasing a diverse background in technology and leadership.15
- Current Role: As the leader of SquareBySquare, he focuses on product development and design, emphasizing the importance of empowering others to create impactful solutions.2
Henk is based in Sydney, Australia, and continues to drive initiatives that align with sustainability and innovation in the tech space.6
Highlights
I think our jobs are safe from AI.
Is anyone successfully using AI tools in their startup? Either to save costs or do be more productive/efficient?
I've had very little success...
👩🏻🏫 Slidedecks: Beautiful.ai, Gamma.app, Google Slides with Gemini. I wanted to ask AI to improve some slides on an existing slidedeck, but they all made a mess of it and I continue to manually move pixels about.
📊 Financials: ProAI - great first draft, and very useful for making you think about your business inputs/outputs, but I found it hard to rework numbers. I ditched it and created a simpler model from scratch.
📸 Profesional headshots: can't remember the name of the service, but was less than impressed with the results.
📝 Notetaking during video calls: Supernormal - great for quick summaries and transcripts, but it still needs work & integrations (e.g. with Notion). Vinny Lingham's Rumi.ai is brilliant, but it's a standalone meeting app, so great for internal meetings but less useful for all the Zoom/Meet/Teams calls.
👨⚖️ Legal & Compliance: GPTs have helped me to think of legal questions to ask my lawyers, but some wild hallucinations has sent me down some rabbit holes, costing several hours.
📧 Email writing: I've found it helpful when needing to improve (especially to 'soften') my tone in some emails, but not for writing full emails in an authentic way. Or learning how to write in "my" tone of voice... I would never start an email with "I hope this email finds you well" 😅
I'm sure there must be some good, useful AI tools out there, but my experience so far makes me extremely skeptical of trying any of them, and I find most of them ask for card details to use their free trials, which I often forget to cancel. (Aside: is there an AI service that will automatically cancel unused subscriptions before the renewal date? 🤔)
I have found AI useful as a 'sounding board' to help me structure my thoughts and sometimes make me think of new ideas, or to understand some concepts better (provided I fact check myself).
But I feel the promise of most AI tools has been a productivity boost, which I'm struggling to see.
#startuplife #AI
