South Africa
Builder · Catalyst · Executive
01 · Cover
Sybrand
De Kock
Complexity simplified.
Builder. Catalyst. Executive.Fifteen years in IT, from a repair counter to Head of IT. When something breaks and nobody in the building knows how to fix it, it lands on his desk.
He prefers the complex problems, because that is where the most knowledge is gained.
South Africa
02 · The scene
The storage array was dead, and the backups that should have covered it did not exist. Fifty-seven terabytes of a company's data were offline. He was put on the problem, and over a weekend he brought every byte back.
Asked why he takes on that kind of work, he says:
Saving companies from fire made me feel alive.
03 · What you are looking at
As Head of IT he covers far more than IT: the network, security, the service desk, the company's own software, and the building itself, down to the aircon and the electricity. Specialists each solve their own slice of a problem. He works across all of them.
His own short version:
You dream it. He builds it.
04 · The engine
Solve it once,
for good.
His rule, in his words: I choose the hard path now, so it becomes simple later.
In practice that means doing the slow foundational work first. He rebuilt a server room over one weekend, new hardware and a full platform cutover, instead of patching the old one. Every job starts with backups, documentation and monitoring, and he runs security tests against his own systems. He is also stubborn, and keeps at a problem long after others have filed it as impossible.
05 · The range
At sixteen he was deploying Citrix desktops across three hospitals during his school holidays. Since then he has worked retail repair counters, MSP field work, fibre installs, server rooms, ransomware recoveries, open-source migration and IT leadership. He has run fibre into housing developments, recovered dead RAID arrays, sat in government tender meetings, written iOS forensics reports for law firms, and led the customer-service AI agent that now handles more than a million chats a year.
06 · The proof
1.3M
AI conversations / yr
Customer-service AI agent he built and runs. First to answer 99% of chats
86%
Customer satisfaction
On rated chats over the last twelve months
200+
Projects delivered
Infrastructure, security, automation, and facilities. Planned and led by him since November 2023
300+
Tools mapped
Proprietary tools mapped to open-source replacements in the Imbertech savings calculator
57 TB
Recovered, zero loss
Dead array, no working backups
98%
Recovered
Total ransomware compromise. The company stayed open
2×
National champion
Esports. Back-to-back League of Legends national titles at MSSA, 2016 and 2017
10+
Certifications
AWS, CompTIA A+, Network+ and Linux+, Sophos, Redstor
07 · The catalyst
He develops
people too.
In his words:
I go further by lifting the people around me.
He took over an IT function that ran on firefighting and built an engineering team, hiring and training engineers who now lead large projects themselves. One of the people he coached was a working chef who is now a senior IT engineer. He has mentored seven people so far, from engineers on his own teams to people breaking into the field.
08 · The man
He wants to know how things work, machines and people alike. He reads psychology and Stoic philosophy as closely as technical documentation, and money has never been the main driver.
At home he runs a lab: Home Assistant, network-wide DNS filtering, and a private mesh network linking a server, a GPU workstation, a laptop and a phone. With a software-defined radio he tracks aircraft and reads his utility meters' broadcasts. He services his own cars and wrote a diagnostics logger that reads every engine sensor while he drives. His working rule comes from Feynman: what he cannot build, he does not understand.
He started at a retail counter fixing walk-in PCs. Explaining technical problems to people who do not care about the details is still, he says, the most useful skill he has.
09 · How he thinks
How he thinks
about the work.
01
He builds teams the way he builds systems, and works through a stuck engineer with the same method he uses on a production outage.
02
He measures the work, from satisfaction scores to project counts, and makes decisions on the numbers.
03
He plans for the worst case: disaster recovery, ransomware playbooks, and single points of failure tracked before they fail.
10 · Currently
Right now,
he is
- ShippingA customer-service AI agent that answers 99% of chats first, about 1.3 million conversations a year.
- BuildingImbertech: each client's own AI operating system, set up around their email, accounting and files, plus the IT, security and compliance work behind it.
- DevelopingMentoring engineers and newcomers to the field on his own time. Sundays are coaching days.
- ResearchingA personal AI operating system: an append-only event log, a contract-audit layer and heartbeat timers, connecting an AI to about thirty custom integration servers and more than three hundred tools. Any component that stops reporting shows red in the audit.
11 · Next
Read the full record, or get in touch.