Seeing the virtual future

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This was published 16 years ago

Seeing the virtual future

By Beverley Head

RANDAL LEEB-DU TOIT is a self-confessed serial entrepreneur and he's looking for funds for his latest start-up, social media company Yoick.

In February Mr Leeb-du Toit was at full throttle, spruiking the virtual world Outback Online, which Yoick was developing as the next big thing in Web 2.0 and much more advanced than Second Life. He's getting some bites from potential investors, but knows funding a virtual world isn't cheap.

Yoick is his primary interest, but Mr Leeb-du Toit has "a few other projects that are starting to boil up". One of the keys to his career, he says, is his ability to identify fledgling trends.

"I'm very good at pattern recognition and see them ahead of a lot of people - I can see where virtual worlds and social media is going," Mr Leeb-du Toit claims. "In the Valley (Silicon) it's a highly sought-after skill being able to sift through trends and make sense of it. Australia is more of a follower than innovator. In the past 30 days I've said goodbye to three people leaving because there are no opportunities here."

But Mr Leeb-du Toit will stay. He can make money as a pattern spotter even in a market that doesn't appreciate its value. "You become a serial entrepreneur. I've made money out of that and being an investor - seeing things early enough to get in and shape companies."

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He describes his career as following a "roadmap between a serial entrepreneur and investor". He's especially interested in micro investments such as those offered by US company Y Combinator: small packets of cash for very early start-ups in return for a stake in the business. The start-up's principals are also brought into Y Combinator for some intensive training in how to be a successful entrepreneur. Described by some as a sort of "Idol for geeks" where talents can be spotted, moulded and developed, Mr Leeb-du Toit believes there's merit in the approach, and is exploring whether something similar might work well in Australia.

Knowing when to ditch older ideas is just as critical a skill. According to Mr Leeb-du Toit, the time to move on is "when the gorillas come into your space or you don't have sufficient funding. I don't get emotionally involved in these things. I am passionate about them - but not emotional. It's like being an actor in a play."

Now 42, Mr Leeb-du Toit's first career was as a lawyer, initially in South Africa and later in Australia in the mid 1990s.

Two years after arriving here he set up an early-stage venture capital company, Tribalweave Capital, that focused on then still nascent social media. He was also instrumental in the establishment of First Tuesday, an entrepreneurs' social network that expanded into 40 countries.

Apart from his abiding interest in social networks, he has an interest in the convergence of infotech, biotech and nanotech and has been chairman of several companies in these areas. He acted as chief executive of Australian Distributed Incubator, part of the BITS innovation capital scheme, which he ran as an early-stage venture company.

In April 2004, Mr Leeb-du Toit joined start-up National ICT Australia (NICTA) as IP and commercialisation manager. At the time it had 20 staff and one laboratory. When he left NICTA earlier this year it had 600 staff and five labs. One of his initiatives at NICTA was to establish the entrepreneur in residence program, which seeks to attract seasoned entrepreneurs from around the world to work with NICTA researchers on ways to commercialise research.

In a move he describes as "eating your own dog food" he left NICTA in June to immerse himself in entrepreneurial activities and continue his blog at metarand.com. It suits him better, he says.

"I like to build things. With NICTA, when you get to 600 people and they are telling me this is corporate policy and what you can have as a laptop, well, sorry guys, I'm out of there. I'm a serial entrepreneur by nature."

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