A South African entrepreneur who has just made megabucks in a US deal has jetted back to South Africa to film the local version of the UK hit reality-TV show Dragon’s Den.

Two weeks ago, Vinny Lingham, 35, who grew up in East London but now lives in San Francisco, sold his mobile wallet app, Gyft, to US tech company First Data for between $50m and $100m (about R1bn).

With this track record, it is not surprising that Mr Lingham has been asked to appear on the show in which successful businessmen spend their own money buying into the business plans of would-be entrepreneurs.

And it is clear that Mr Lingham has come a long way from the small kid who was, in his own words, “beaten up all the time”.

“I think if you do things that you love, money is not actually important. I happen to be lucky because the things I do now are in vogue and I can make a lot of money out of them, whereas 20 years ago I was seen as a little geeky nerd in East London whom everyone picked on because I was a computer geek.”

It may seem easy for Mr Lingham to say all this now, but his road to riches was not an easy one.

As a schoolboy, he loved computers, but he could not get into computer science because his maths marks were so poor. (“I just didn’t take school that seriously,” he said.)

He considered ditching computers because, ironically, there was “no money in it” and pursuing law. He watched a lot of the TV series LA Law at the time, but “my dad said ‘no ways, follow your dream’. That was good advice.”

So he enrolled at the University of Cape Town, where he excelled in information systems. But the cash ran out in his third year and Mr Lingham had to drop out. He went back home to figure out what to do — and the answer was to build three tech businesses, each one more successful than the last.

First was autofinance.co.za, which allowed customers to apply for vehicle finance from the big four banks.

He sold that business to Johnnic eVentures — a division of what is now Times Media — and moved to Johannesburg to help to transition the business. But Johnnic eVentures closed down when the technology market crashed in 2000, leaving Lingham unemployed.

Click link to continue reading Lingham's journey http://enterprise54.com/the-south-african-entrepreneur-who-just-sold-his-startup-for-50m-in-silicon-valley/

here i was thinking he was actually a BLACKMAN