[MLnick]

I think Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte (bought by Verisign) is the only real example of a startup in the sense most on HN would think about it, at least at scale.

It's also worth noting he started Canonical which gave us Ubuntu.

But in South Africa at least, there are plenty of startups - again a much smaller scale than US or Europe - in software and Internet. Few people even in SA know about them, so I wouldn't expect pg to leap in to fund a bunch. Africa needs to develop it's own pg's. I actually think the approach of "micro-angel-seed-VC" is a good fit for the funding problem.