The story so far, and the one still being written.

We grew up in Johannesburg, and spent most of our working lives in Durban, implementing IT projects within corporate world. Then a company restructuring ended that chapter for us, and that ending became the beginning of everything since.

We decided to change our lives into something more meaningful. That decision led to Pringle Bay, in 2019.

What followed was reinvention, and a very literal, very unfinished house. COVID delayed the build, and the build turned upside down when builder abandoned the project and contract. Rising costs strained it further. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a bigger question kept surfacing, one that had nothing to do with construction: how do you find coherence in a life that keeps rearranging itself around you?

While we found our feet, a need kept finding us instead of the other way around: an elderly neighbour needing a lift to hospital, a family wanting a table at the right restaurant, a friend needing collecting from the airport, once, a tourist genuinely stranded in Pringle Bay after Uber never arrived. What started as simply helping people get from one place to another became something else, a concierge service, sparked entirely by people needing to actually live their lives here. Years of that work gave us a depth of local knowledge no amount of research could have, what tourists really think when they visit, what people want to know about a place, its homes, its restaurants, even a genuinely good debate about AI over a long drive. It's grown into something bigger than getting from A to B: helping people explore a lifestyle that actually aligns with this part of the world. That concierge work is still what keeps us afloat while the rest of this gets built.

There's a tendency running underneath all of it, one that's always been there: finding the dots other people miss, connecting them, then sharing that new map with anyone who wants to see it. Over the years, that tendency split into two threads, and never really separated. One was intellectual: worldview, psychology, and eventually artificial intelligence, the question of how attention shapes meaning, and whether that could actually be built into something useful. That became QIQ, and PersonAI.

The other was more personal: photography and images that tell a story, and the human condition, particularly how people find their way back to themselves after something difficult, through a shift in perspective rather than a fixed diagnosis. That became Keen, and its Foundation work.

QLA sits where those two threads meet.

The place-based, human expression of both: things worth finding, a home worth finishing, a life worth living on purpose.

And underneath all of it, still being written, is where the meaning of it actually gets worked out: the books, I Wonder and PersonAI.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.Søren Kierkegaard

We understand most of this only now, looking back. We still have to live the rest of it forwards.

Not because we have it figured out. Because building something that adds real value, joy and meaning to a life, our own included, is the closest thing to purpose we've found.

We built the door. Now we need people willing to help build what's on the other side of it.