In this week’s Savage Take, Charles takes a reflective take on leadership, loss, and long-term thinking. This piece explores how holding diverse influences, ideas, and bets over time creates compounding outcomes in life, business, and markets.

The Savage Take is where our CEO Charles Savage shares what he’s seeing and thinking each week, in markets and beyond.

From Charles 

This piece needed its own space.

I attended the farewell of Carel’s father, Carel Snr, the week before last. I didn’t write about it then because it did not feel right to rush it. Some things you do not react to. You sit with them. This was one of those.

He lived a good, long life, and rather than a memorial or a goodbye, it felt like something else entirely. A farewell. A thank you. A “see you later.” It stayed with me.

What stood out most was Carel.

He is who he is because of the people around him. His parents, his family, his friends. The diversity and richness of those influences are so obvious in him. Different views, different personalities, different ways of seeing the world, some almost polar to each other. And yet he holds them all.

Not selectively or conveniently, but fully.

It is his greatest skill and his incredible asset. It is who he is, and why he is. And it was evident in the way he shared his father’s farewell.

It takes a special person to hold that kind of diversity in one place and make it feel authentic in every moment. Carel does.

As his father’s favourite saying goes, what was… was.

And Carel has a saying I have always loved. 1 + 1 = 22.

At first it sounds simple, almost irrational. But standing there, it made perfect sense. When you hold things properly, when you do not choose between them but allow them to exist together, they do not just add. They multiply.

And so it is with Carel. What was… lives in him.

I am proud and privileged to call him a schoolmate, a colleague, a mentor and a bloody good friend.

Markets: Give It Space

Like Carel, some things deserve their own space.

Google just had its best month since 2004. It was up nearly 34 percent and added around $1.2 trillion in market value, more value created in a few weeks than most companies on earth are worth.

And then this week they reported, and it backed it up. Search is still growing, cloud is accelerating, and AI is beginning to show up in the numbers rather than just the narrative.

I saw a post this week that said, “This was obvious.”

Was it?

Clearly not. If it was, everyone would have seen it, held it and backed it. But they did not.

Most IPOs do not work that way. Most stories reset. Most leaders fade. Google did not.

It launched, held its ground and kept building, often quietly, across layers most people were not paying attention to. Chips, infrastructure, models and applications. Not one bet, but many, and importantly those bets were not competing, they were compounding.

1 + 1 = 22.

Not because of a single moment, but because of how it all connects.

All of this sits on top of a core business that still prints cash. Search, ads, data and distribution, while continuing to invest in what comes next. AI, cloud, Waymo and ventures.

Again, not one thing but many, held together over time.

That is what stands out. Not the month, but the discipline behind it.

Growth like that does not come from one big call. It comes from thousands of smaller ones, made consistently and backed repeatedly, often through periods where it does not yet show up in the numbers.

That is where it is won. Not in the breakout, but in everything that comes before it.

Hats off to Google.

EasyGroup Holding the Line

I get asked a version of the same question often. Are you not doing too much? Are you not stretched too thin?

Different words, same concern.

There is always a part of me that reacts, but you learn to hold that, to listen, to respect the question, and then to answer it calmly.

No.

Because the truth is that no one has a crystal ball. Not in markets, not in business, not in life.

What we do have is something else. Intuition and instinct, earned through data, through listening, through experience, and through staying humble enough to know we might be wrong.

So we build. We back ideas. We test new things and launch products. Not because we know exactly which one will win, but because we understand something more important.

We do not need all of them to work. We need one or two to change everything.

But to get there, we have to be willing to be wrong, often and for longer than is comfortable. That is the part people underestimate.

It is not about doing too much. It is about holding enough. Holding the ideas, the tension and the belief long enough for something to compound.

1 + 1 = 22.

Not immediately, but eventually, and only if you stay in the game.

The Savage Take

We spend a lot of time talking about building. Companies, products, countries. But not enough time thinking about what builds us.

We are shaped by the people around us, by experiences that do not always align and by influences that do not always agree. Some we embrace easily, some we wrestle with, and some only make sense much later.

The instinct is to simplify, to pick a side, to choose. But the real work is harder than that. It is learning how to hold it all.

Because the people who can hold opposing ideas, different experiences and even contradictory truths without breaking are the ones who build things that last.

That is true for people, for leadership and for South Africa.

We are not one thing. We are many things. Our strength is not in simplifying that, but in holding it and building anyway.

Because at its core, 1 + 1 = 22 is not a formula. It is an expectation. An expectation that things can be more than they appear, more than they are today, more than most believe possible.

And if you hold that, if you build with that and lead with that, then over time it becomes true.

What was… was.
What you do next… is the only thing that matters.

Charles.

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