Rinse Jacobs is the co-founder/CEO of Zazu, a modern banking experience built for entrepreneurs and scaling businesses shaping the future of the continent.
Zazu is founded with the idea of making banking better for African founders and SMEs by providing them with a powerful bank account at the core, combined with invoicing, bookkeeping and cash flow management tools – making banking feel less like an obstacle and more like a catalyst for growth.
Before you read, click here to read part one of this interview with Rinse Jacobs.
What’s your favourite travel destination in South Africa and why?
My favorite travel destination in South Africa is probably Makhanda. There’s so much greenery there, so much more access to nature. It’s amazing to visit Makhanda.
What hobby do you enjoy in your free time and how does it help you relax?
What I do in my free time, besides wrestling with my kids and enjoying time with the family, I like to do a lot of martial arts. So I used to do a lot of kickboxing, I used to do a lot of jujitsu. Now I’m getting back to it. I was injured for a while but now I’m finally getting back to it finally. And I love being in nature. I love to go out on hikes and just be in nature multiple days at an end. So that’s what really gets me refueled for the next chapter.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently and how has it impacted your life?
The best book I’ve read recently is ‘Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss’, which is a book about negotiation strategies and about communication strategies. Chris Voss is an ex FBI terrorist negotiator who talks about what words, language, questions to use in negotiations to get to the bottom of issues, to read in between the lines and actually get the best out of every conversation that you have.
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If you could have dinner with any African historical figure, who will that be and why?
Let me think about what would be a proper figure. I think there is something, this is obviously going to be a very cliché answer, but when it comes to what for me at the moment is very important is how do you bring people together.
How do you bring a team together? How do you make sure that people from different backgrounds and cultures understand each other towards one focus.
So I think there’s a lot to learn from obviously Nelson Mandela about how you bring together that nation of so many different cultures and communities. I think what every business needs to look at that way by recognizing that everybody comes from different background.
But it doesn’t mean that with their own unique insights and way of looking at things, we cannot solve the problem in one big way. And how do you, on a personal level, really make sure people from different backgrounds can actually interact with each other?
What’s one thing you can’t travel without and why is it so essential to you?
I would say my power bank. That’s the number one that is always in my back pocket because my phone is always on the edge of dying. It’s always on the go and I always have to quickly whip out my laptop. So I always carry with me a power bank in the backpack just to make sure that I’m never disconnected while I’m working.
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