About
metarand
meta musings on gadgets, tech, innovation, lifestyle and the next now - life media.
metarand is written by Randal (Rand) Leeb-du Toit.
Rand is a serial entrepreneur with experience in building and investing in high technology companies. This blog reflects the spectrum of his interest in life media and any views published here are either his personal views or the personal views of guest bloggers unless expressly stated otherwise.
He currently acts as an Advisor to a number of companies, including Fox Interactive Media and is also Chairman of Creative Enclave, a social game developer set up by New York Times bestselling novelist, Garth Nix. Creative Enclave launched the world’s first social networking MMO, Imperial Galaxy, on Facebook in December 2007 and is building a suite of interconnected apps for Internet and mobile social platforms.
Rand was the Director, Business Development at NICTA, an Australian ICT centre of excellence for three years prior to that. During his tenure he put in place a four-staged commercialisation process, which included an internal fund and an Entrepreneur in Residence Program. He was successful in spinning out three companies and building a strong pipeline of further opportunities.
Following the maxim that the dog must eat its own dog food, he stepped into an Entrepreneur in Residence role with a potential virtual world spin out and quickly placed it on the global radar screen, including being named as one of the hottest start ups in Silicon Valley.
Before that he was separately the CEO and Chairman of early stage venture capital firms, 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 has pioneered an entire 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 love to mountain bike, paint and cook.
Rand can be contacted on his Palo Alto line - (650) 276-0419, in Australia on 0419 371 596 or rand at metarand dot com.
He was recently profiled in the Next section of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age and appeared on the front cover of the Business Review Weekly magazine in September 2006. His full LinkedIn profile is here. Besides metarand, he writes commentary for a number of publications.
