Toby Shapshak

Toby Shapshak writes and speaks about how technology has fundamentally changed how we work and play, especially since the Covid-19 lockdown dramatically changed the world.

Toby is the editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff Studios, but also a small business owner who has weathered the worse economic storm of this century.

He is a senior contributor to Forbes on innovation, and writes a weekly column for South Africa’s Financial Mail and Daily Maverick.

His passion for the last decade has been how innovation is better in Africa. His TED Global talk in 2013 on how Africa is solving real problems has had over 1,5-million views; and he has been featured in the New York Times.

He believes Africa is a mobile-driven continent, about which he has written for CNN, The Guardian in London, Quartz and for Forbes. He is writing a book on innovation in Africa, looking at how the problems Africa is solving for itself will benefit the rest of the world.

He has spoken at numerous conferences about innovation in Africa, including TED Global in Edinburgh. Toby has spoken four times at the South by South West (SxSW) conference in Austin, Texas; at Intel’s IDF conference in San Francisco; The Guardian newspaper’s Activate: Johannesburg; Germany’s Zukunftskongress (Future Congress), Sweden’s The Conference, AfricaCom in Cape Town, TEDxGateway in Mumbai, the GSMA’s Mobile 360 in Kigali, Pivot East in Nairobi, and Tech4Africa in Joburg.

Toby was named in GQ’s top 30 men in media and the Mail & Guardian newspaper’s 300 influential young South Africans list; and has won the ICT Journalist of the Year.

GQ said he “has become the most high-profile technology journalist in the country” while the M&G wrote: “Toby Shapshak is all things tech… he reigns supreme as the major talking head for everything and anything tech.”

As a news and political journalist, he ran Mail & Guardian newspaper’s website when it was the first news site in Africa, shadowed Nelson Mandela when he was president, and covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

He has interviewed a range of tech industry luminaries, including Bill Gates and Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Formerly a senior newspaper reporter covering everything from crime to politics, he has been writing about innovation, telecoms and the internet and the impact it has on our lives for more than 20 years, including the Sunday Times, Business Day, Mail & Guardian, Financial Mail, Daily Maverick, The Times, City Press, ThisDay, and The Weekender.