| Blog | metarand.com |
| Birthplace | South Africa |
| Birthdate | 5/11/65 |
| University of Cape Town, Bachelor of Law | 1992 |
Business Review Weekly
Rand is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
He was most recently the CEO with Burlingame-headquartered Piclinq, a social media photography company.
Prior to that he was a Corporate Adviser to Fox Interactive Media and Chairman of NY Times Bestselling Author Garth Nix’s Creative Enclave - which has built a very sophisticated MMO, Imperial Galaxy.
He was a director with Australia’s foremost Information & Communication Research Centre where he was instrumental in setting up an internal fund and spinning out a number of successful venture backed companies such as Open Kernel Labs, Audinate and Monitoring Division.
Before that he ran an early stage venture capital and incubation company that included within its portfolio companies like mobile marketer 5th Finger and personalized genetics venture Genetraks. He sold this portfolio in a secondaries transaction to a consortium of venture firms and funds of funds.
He has been Chairman of other companies such as Tigerspike, Nabacus and an adviser to the Global Security Challenge.
As a key executive at First Tuesday, he was instrumental in growing this social and business networking phenomenon to over 500,000 members in 110 cities in the late 90’s.
In the latter half of the 90’s, he orchestrated a number of interesting ventures for Wolters Kluwer, one of the world’s largest business publishing houses including a legal vertical portal that had over a million page views in its first month of operation.
He is a qualified lawyer and has both run a private practice and been corporate counsel for a major multinational, where he was involved in multi million dollar M&A transactions.
He is a professional writer, having written for Wolters Kluwer publications, Australian national newspapers and as a blogger since 1998.
In his youth he was a South African Lifesaving Champion and still maintains his fitness by surfing, paddling and mountain biking. He enjoys photowalking, cooking and painting and resides in both Woodside, California and Sydney, Australia.
