Endeavor Founder Stories | Episode 5: Michael Heyink, Founder and CEO of Yellow

The Origin: A Foundation in Teamwork and First Principles

Michael Heyink grew up in Benoni with an “epic upbringing,” where his parents, an attorney and a teacher, fostered a deep love for team sports. He credits this exposure to high-performing teams for instilling the essential qualities of collaboration and perseverance that he carried into business.

He found his path through self-directed study, ignoring advice to follow the traditional business route. He chose a degree in Economics, Philosophy, and Mathematics (PPE and Maths), driven by a desire to work from “first principles”—breaking problems down to their most basic truth. This approach was cemented by extensive travel through Latin America, where he learned resilience and problem-solving after being robbed and having to figure his way out of foreign places.

The Problem: Challenging Traditional Credit

Yellow Africa was founded to solve a massive challenge: How do you extend credit to low-income customers in rural Africa where there is no existing data?

Traditionally, financial institutions rely on centralized data and rules. Heyink and his team learned that informal lending in Africa happens with very little data, but among people who know one another well. This insight led to Yellow’s groundbreaking solution:

• The Model: Recruit agents from the rural communities being served and give them complete control over credit decisions—who gets a solar system and who doesn’t.

• The Conflict: The local business community told him this was “just absolutely the worst idea they’d ever heard of… terrible idea it won’t work.”

Heyink proved them wrong by focusing purely on incentives. He made sure the agents’ financial success was tied to the repayment success of the customers they signed up. The result? Local knowledge allowed agents to make far better credit decisions than any centralized model could.

The Turning Point: Resilience and the Right Price

Yellow’s journey began with an “incredibly rocky start.” Heyink’s first attempt at a commercial solar business failed to generate a single Rand of revenue. The second attempt, Yellow, saw him confidently order 400 systems, only to sell 40 over nine months. He gave the first system away to a taxi driver at the airport because the product simply wasn’t working.

The primary mistake was the price. After revising the business model to be completely digital and lower the cost, they dropped the price—and everything changed.

“We dropped the price… and all of a sudden we’d sold 40 in one day, and we’d sold 40 in the 9 months before that.”

This validated his conviction: if you put the product in their house at the right price, this makes absolute sense for everybody. This early pain built a critical competitive advantage: the ability to “shorten the time taken between receiving bad news and responding positively.”

Leadership: Finding Balance and Trusting the Trend

Heyink acknowledges his early leadership failures, admitting his impatience led to the first 13 employees leaving quickly. He learned to practice empathy and understand that different people require different treatment to perform.

His leadership is guided by key maxims:

• Go Far, Go Together: He embraces the African saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

• The Trend is Your Friend: He emphasizes that startups must ensure they are working with the prevailing trends, as this belief will carry them through difficult times when things are “not really actually working.”

• Balance over Sacrifice: While the work is intense, Heyink rejects the narrative prevalent in the tech scene that you must “sacrifice everything.” He advocates for balance and notes the diminishing returns of working 16-20 hour days, using nature and time with his family to recharge.