Have more than you show
Two friends. Three decades. A habit of building things that probably didn't need to be this good.
Founders
Two friends. A Johannesburg video store. The kind of partnership that outlasted the VHS.
Ivan Jenkins
Co-Founder
First PC: Spectrum ZX-81
At 16, Ivan was selling newspapers, working in a video store, and writing management software for it — simultaneously. Nobody asked him to. He just couldn't help himself.
Ivan's the big-picture half — outgoing, persuasive, and probably talking to someone right now. Data, numbers, finance, business process. Where others see complexity, Ivan sees patterns waiting to be streamlined. It's slightly annoying, honestly.
Justin Lawrence
Co-Founder
First PC: ZX Spectrum 48K
Watched Ivan revolutionise his folks' video store with code in the early '80s. A decade later, Ivan offered him his first job. He never left.
Justin's detail-obsessed, user-focused, with a love for simple designs — and far happier behind a screen than in front of a crowd. If Ivan asks why something is complicated, Justin won't sleep until the answer is elegant. Which is most nights, if we're honest.
For a decade we solved other people's problems —
Retail, logistics, customs, cross-border operations. The work was good, but the EDI requests kept piling up. Tedious. Precarious. The same problem, over and over.
So we decided to solve it once, properly. Four twelve-hour days for clients. One day a week — plus late nights — in Ivan's garage. Eighteen months later, M2North was born.
“The way to create 5 million more jobs in the country has to be to create 1 million new businesses.”
Most of what we've built — connecting suppliers to retailers, simplifying procurement, helping distributed teams work — comes back to this. Make it easier for small businesses to compete, and the rest follows.
What we believe
These aren't values we had pinned to the wall from day one. We tripped into most of them. But they've come to mean a lot to us — so we share them here in case they resonate. Your mileage may vary.
“You can't find a skilled person and teach them to be a good person.
You can find a good person and teach them to be a skilled person.”
People first
It only matters who you share it with. Use the task to develop the person, not the person to develop the task.
We argue because we care
We try not to shy away from the difficult questions, because something better is always on the other side.
Keep moving forward
We try not to get stuck in the past. Work hard to be on the same page, then face forward and give it your best.
Integrity above all
Always do the right thing — the rest will make sense later. It sounds simple, but it hasn't always been obvious in the moment. We stuck to what we knew was right anyway.
Pause and celebrate
We try to deliberately pause and celebrate the wins before moving on to the next thing. There will always be another next thing.
Have fun!
If we're not having fun, why exactly are we doing it? We chose to bootstrap over VC and turned down offers, because life is short.
Milestones
- 1990–20001990–2000
Consultancy years
Founded in Johannesburg as a technology consultancy. Built systems for Furnex (part of their 10x growth helping small furniture retailers compete with the majors), Confreight Containers (stock management connected directly to customs), and CARS/Truckafrica (cross-border logistics operations across Central and Southern Africa).
- 2000–20012000–2001
The garage years
Clients kept asking for EDI work — tedious, precarious, and repetitive. So we decided to solve it properly. We compacted five 9-hour days into four 12-hour days, freeing one day a week (and many late nights) to build an EDI switch from Ivan's garage. One connection. Every partner. After 18 months, M2North was born.
- 2001–20122001–2012
M2North takes shape
M2North grew from an EDI switch into a full procurement ecosystem — supplier discovery, inventory management, AP automation, and B2B e-commerce.
- 20132013
Tyto is born
As M2North connected more and more companies, we needed to improve how our own distributed team worked — the last mile from computer to human and back again. So we built Tyto for ourselves first, then opened it up to everyone else.
- Present dayPresent day
50 staff, 3 continents, one mission
IRJ platforms serve 55,000+ clients across the US, UK, and South Africa. The company that started in a Johannesburg garage now operates globally — still quietly getting on with it.