Magda Wierzycka is known as the founder of Sygnia, a woman once reported to be South Africa’s richest, and one of the country’s loudest voices against corruption. This is not that interview.

In an unguarded conversation with Richard Sutton, she goes back to the places the headlines skip: a Lego city she knew she would never see again, a handful of Polish soil slipped into a red coat pocket, a father digging ditches through an Austrian winter to buy his daughter a toy, and a grandmother who told her she could be whatever she wanted.

She talks about learning to separate her emotions from her work, imagining a Perspex box around herself in boardrooms, and living with chronic insomnia. She tells the story of leaving Coronation (“fired or resigned, it’s a 50-50”), an overnight R300 million negotiation in which she says the other side never noticed she had left the room, and the days she spent in a London hotel room going through half a million emails after being advised to leave South Africa. She explains why she would press a “giant delete button” on AI even as Sygnia reinvents itself around it, and the promise she has made to her staff.

And she describes the version of herself she wishes people could see: on a couch, laptop on her knees, answering 200 emails by evening, privately knowing that no one is coming to share the load. It ends with a princess dress, and a childhood dream that took forty years to come true.

Courage comes before readiness. Every meaningful choice carries a cost. This is what that looks like up close.

In this episode: the Polish border crossing and the Traiskirchen refugee camp, a hidden Jewish heritage, scarcity and independence, the bursary that decided her career, why people who chase money in their 20s plateau in their 30s, founding Sygnia on “innovate, don’t imitate”, AI and job security, the 2008 crisis, principle over comfort, why she came home, and what the girl in the refugee camp would need to hear today.

Guest: Magda Wierzycka, founder and CEO of Sygnia and author of Magda: My Journey. Host: Richard Sutton.