The Counder Podcast

Building an Airline in the Middle of COVID and Why It Was the Perfect Time

with Gidon Novick

Nobody starts an airline in the middle of a pandemic. That, he says, is exactly why it worked: aircraft were cheap, good people were suddenly available, and the competition was struggling. Gidon Novick joins Tobi to explain how LIFT got off the ground, and why an industry that has collectively lost money since the Wright brothers first flew still pulls him back. He traces it to a childhood spent sitting in cockpits at the airport where his father worked, through kulula.com, to the four years at LIFT where the hardest days are the ones he now remembers most fondly, including the week the bank had not cleared the payment gateway while flights were already on sale. He and Tobi get into what actually makes airlines so hard: brutal fixed costs, volatile fuel, and the pricing discipline the industry keeps giving away. Most of his energy now goes to SA Harvest, a food rescue operation moving 30 million meals a year in a country where roughly a third of the food produced is thrown out while around 10 million people do not have enough to eat. Asked for the target, Gidon does not offer a number he is confident of hitting. He names the problem instead: billions of meals, in South Africa alone. A candid conversation about restlessness, why business is really just problem solving, and what a genuinely optimistic leader does to the people around them.