About
metarand
meta musings on gadgets, tech, innovation, venture capital, lifestyle trends and the next now - life media.
metarand is written by Randal (Rand) Leeb-du Toit.
Rand is a multifaceted entrepreneur and seasoned technologist with a unique blend of vision, oversight and operational experience.
He has acted as a Corporate Adviser to a number of companies, including Fox Interactive Media (who run the largest social network in the world - MySpace) and Creative Enclave, a social media games developer set up by New York Times bestselling novelist, Garth Nix, which developed the first massively multiplayer online gaming application on Facebook.
He was most recently CEO at Piclinq, a social media photography company headquartered in Burlingame, California, with operations is Los Angeles, St Petersburg and Galway. In this change agent role he built up a cohesive culture around a new product direction and put in place an ethnographically-driven design team to work on over the horizon ideation.
Rand was the Director, Business Development at NICTA, Australia’s prestigous Center of Information & Communication Technology Research for a number of years. During his tenure he created a culture of entrepreneurialism and put in place a stage gated commercialization process and IP management system, which included an internal fund and an Entrepreneur in Residence Program. He was successful in spinning out numerous venture-backed companies and building a strong pipeline of further opportunities, while also raising half a billion dollars and growing the organization from 20 staff in one lab to over 600 in five labs across Australia.
Before that he was the CEO of an early stage venture capital firm, Australian head of the first business/social networking phenomenon, and an intrapreneur within a major publishing conglomerate. His portfolio companies have IPO’d, been sold in trade sales and also via the first secondaries portfolio play in Australia, which pioneered an entirely new private equity sector.
In addition to his board level experience with numerous high tech companies around the world he has a background in publishing and the law. He is a former South African Lifesaving Champion across a number of disciplines, has surfed for over 30 years and loves to mountain bike, photowalk, paint and cook.
Rand lives in Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on his US line - (650) 276-0419 or randal dot leebdutoit at gmail dot com.
He was profiled in the Next section of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age in 2007 and appeared on the front cover of the Business Review Weekly magazine in September 2006. His full LinkedIn profile is here and his Crunchbase profile here.
