About
metarand
meta musings and digital curation on topics such as brands, design, marketing, social business design, fashion, tech, innovation, venture capital, lifestyle trends and the future.
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. A consummate business artist, he has changed thinking at some of the world’s largest publishing houses, jumpstarted over 20 businesses and raised more than half a billion dollars. He has software deployed across over 500 million devices, filed more than 40 patents and his pan-continental canvas extends across a wide range of high tech and media arenas.
He is a veteran of the social business arena. It is over a decade since he helped grow one of the first social business phenomena across 110 cities connecting over 500,000 entrepreneurs and investors.
He has acted as a Strategic Adviser to a number of companies, including Fox Interactive Media (who run one of the largest social networks in the world – MySpace) and Creative Enclave, a social games developer set up by New York Times bestselling novelist, Garth Nix, which developed the first massively multiplayer gaming application on Facebook as a marketing tool for an upcoming novel.
He was Chairman of Tigerspike, a New York headquartered BRW Fast 50 mobile advertising company for three years running and was the lead investor in 5th Finger, a San Francisco-based pioneer of the mobile advertising arena.
He is currently based in Sydney where he is immersed in building Seggr, a high speed, low drag innovation agency entirely focused on driving company, product and brand development through heightened transformation.
He regularly undertakes keynote engagements and was a co-founder of Innovation Bay, a Sydney-based invite-only business and angel network. In the last year, Innovation Bay Angels have assessed over 50 companies and placed $5 million in funding.
He is on the Advisory Board of E-Diary, a company which builds events-based software that enables communication with sports and entertainment fans via the intimacy of their personal calendar.
He was CEO of a social media software 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 in the field of photo management and metadata and put in place an ethnographically-driven design team to work on over the horizon ideation.
Rand was the Director of Business Development & Commercialisation at NICTA, a prestigious Australian Center of Excellence for a number of years. NICTA is focused on applied research in Biomedical & Life Sciences, Environmental Management, Intelligent Transport Systems, Mobile Systems & Services, Safety & Security and Software Infrastructure.
During his tenure at NICTA, Randal created a culture of entrepreneurism 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 a number of venture-backed companies and building a strong pipeline of further opportunities, while also raising half a billion dollars, growing the organization from 20 staff in one lab to over 600 in five labs across Australia and taking its brand global.
Spin outs included:
* Open Kernel Labs, a Chicago-based venture-backed embedded operating systems and virtualization technology developer. The company’s micokernel performance is a core component of advanced operating systems and is deployed in over 500 million devices;
* Audinate, a Sydney-based venture-backed developer of Internet protocol networking technologies for professional-grade installed audio networks and equipment;
* 7ip, a Syndney-based company which develops optimized and instant wireless telecommunication systems; and
* Monitoring Division, a Sunnyvale-based venture-backed company providing greater visibility to optical fibre degradation for network operators.
Before that he was the CEO of an early stage venture capital firm. 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.
His portfolio companies included:
* Genetraks, a venture-backed personalized medicine and bioinformatics company; and
* 5th Finger, a venture-backed creative mobile marketing company that has spearheaded more than 5,000 integrated mobile campaigns and 300+ million consumer interactions globally.
He set up a global think tank which focused on using pattern recognition to uncover disruptive technologies. As an intrapreneur within a major publishing conglomerate in the mid 90′s he:
* built a specialist legal vertical portal, which attracted over a million page views in its first month of operation; and
* created ComStrata, a software as a service solution for the strata property management industry.
He was previously on the Advisory Board of the Global Security Challenge, a London Business School initiative to foster innovation in the homeland security arena.
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 an admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa. 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 +61 419 371 596 or randal dot leebdutoit at gmail dot com.
He appeared on the front cover of the Business Review Weekly magazine in September 2006. His full LinkedIn profile is here and he can be found on twitter as @metarand.
