The South African Internet pioneer who became a filmmaker and moved to Ukraine

South African Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, filmmaker, and comedian, Ronnie Apteker, has had an extensive career, eventually settling in Ukraine before being forced to live in Poland.

While Apteker has since focused on other interests, he will remain a key figure in establishing South Africa’s commercial broadband landscape.

Born in Cape Town in 1967, Ronnie attended high school and university in Johannesburg, where he studied computer science for nine years.

He graduated Cum Laude from the University of Witwatersrand with a Master of Science in Computer Science in 1994, a year after Internet Solutions was established.

Internet Solutions, one of the first commercial Internet service providers in South Africa, was founded by Apteker and two university friends as the World Wide Web was taking off in the country.

These included Thomas McWalter and Philip Green, with Ronnie’s brother Alon and David Frankel joining the team later.

“I was a computer science graduate, Dave was an electrical engineer, and my brother was a numbers wizard of note and a brilliant businessman,” Ronnie said during an Internet Solutions interview.

“I think it came down to having the right people at the right time who were aligned, and it was a well-oiled machine for many years.”

The company offered Internet connectivity to large companies, eventually landing Price Forbes, now Alexforbes, as a client. It also served several other major corporations in the public and private sectors.

A year after the company’s founding, Apteker was invited to present a paper on Distributed Multimedia at the International Society for Optical Engineering annual meeting in San Jose, California.

In 1996, Dimension Data acquired 25% of IS, followed by the remainder of the company the following year for $55 million. The founders invested their windfalls in various new ventures.

Apteker went on to invest in several tech startups, such as Amazon.com import service WantItAll.co.za, video game company Room 8 Studio, and Thinkst Applied Research.

However, most of his attention was diverted to his love for film, and he produced his first movie, Purpose, in 2002.

The film follows a software developer who becomes a billionaire after launching a successful product. However, he then faces the distractions of fame, greed, and power while trying to save the company from a hostile takeover.

In 2003, Apteker and a bunch of stand-up comic friends devised a plan for a show called Laugh Out Loud to boost the art form in South Africa while raising money for the Reach for a Dream Foundation.

Since then, Apteker has produced 21 more movies, such as Reeker, Straight Outta Benoni, Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, Material, Cold Harbour, and Courting Anathi.

“I would be far wealthier if I had done nothing for the last 11 years, but my life has been richer for the risks I have taken,” Apteker told Forbes Africa in 2012.

“I love storytelling. I love magic and trying to inspire people,” adding that he attributes this to all the movies he watched as a kid on the projector his father won in a backgammon competition.

Moving to Ukraine

Most recently, Apteker said he was working on a film about software developers working in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he has been living part-time since buying an apartment there in 2016.

While he and his wife Marta, and their son, affectionately referred to as The Bunster, would spend at least six months a year there, the family had to leave when Russian forces invaded in 2022.

“Marta told me to pack fast. I was in a state of shock. I packed mainly food and stuff for the Bunster. I did take my laptop,” he wrote in a piece titled Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine).

Apteker said that after arriving in Poland as refugees, he and Marta did not know where to go and ended up travelling back to South Africa for some time.

This coincided with his brother’s wedding. However, he said that staying in the country was particularly difficult due to administrative issues.

He says that Kyiv was en route to becoming the technology capital of Europe before the war broke out, as the city was rapidly growing and often referred to as the “next Berlin”.

“There is an incredible tech talent base all over the country. There are about 20,000 software developers in South Africa, and I think there are about 250,000 here,” he told TechCentral in 2024.

“Ukraine is the second biggest destination for software development outsourcing in the world, after India. So many apps that we use come from Ukraine.”

This inspired his most recent work, which he started before the war broke out. Despite this, he and his team continue to work on it.

However, he anticipates that selling the film might be challenging, given the abundance of films about Ukraine, most of which are about war.