About Us

As a junior, I knew all the seniors by name. But as I became more senior, I knew fewer and fewer of the juniors. They’d greet me as we passed each other every day, but by the third time I’d forgotten someone’s name, I was too embarrassed to ask again. And so, out of pure frustration, I asked our principal if I could create a book: not a leavers’ book or a yearbook, but a visual directory of everyone in the school.

I used the first digital camera any of us had ever seen (a 350,000-pixel Casio with 2MB of memory) and walked around photographing every student and staff member I could find, typed it all up in WordPerfect. The book showed each students' name, grade, boarding house, birthday, parents’ names and contact numbers. We printed 2,000 copies and gave one to every pupil, parent and staff member. It was simple, but incredibly useful. For the first time, you could flip through and instantly see who was who.

"Ah, there's that kid who did really well in sport last week."

"And there's the kid who got expelled! I never knew what he looked like."

Word spread. Other schools called and asked for the same. And for years, no matter where I lived or what I did, schools would get in touch at the start of the year and ask me to make these directories for them.

Then, years later, I found myself in the same position again.

While building Yuppiechef.com with my two partners, our team grew from just three to over 50 people. One day I walked into the office and turned to my partners to ask, “Who’s that person we hired three weeks ago?” I remembered her background. I remembered where she was from. But I just couldn’t remember her name. And I needed it right there and then!

We had the information buried in HR systems or IT tools. But none of it helped me at that moment. What I needed was what I had created all those years ago at school: a fast, visual way to see who’s who. That moment led to the founding of Names & Faces 2015.

In 2016, I visited the UK and showed an early version of the product to a friend of mine, Richard Arscott, who was then MD of AMVBBDO, one of London’s largest ad agencies at the time. He took one look and said, “Oh wow, I need this. I employ 400 people over two open plan floors and pride myself on knowing who’s who.” He became our first UK client.

Two weeks later, he introduced me to a CEO at a sister company who’d seen him using Names & Faces. That company bought the product via email and became our second UK customer. I wrote back to Richard and said, “Come on, join me. Let’s sell this to the world.”

A few months later, he did.

In 2018, we applied to Y Combinator, the legendary US startup accelerator whose essays by Paul Graham had been inspiring me for years. To our delight, we were accepted into the Summer 2018 batch. We packed up and moved to California, raised funding from some of Silicon Valley’s leading investors, and in early 2019, relocated from Cape Town and London to the US.

We spent the next three and a half years building and growing from there.

Today, Names & Faces is the world’s simplest directory. It helps teams of 50 - 1,000 people learn, remember, and find the people they work with. It’s used by new companies, old companies, fast-growing companies, global organisations, schools, and anyone who wants to bring clarity and connection to their team.

It doesn’t try to be an HR tool, or an org chart, or a social network. It just does one small thing incredibly well; one thing that all successful leaders know makes a big difference: it helps you get to know who’s who on your team.