Coming from Johannesburg, Lianne’s involvement in the tech and entrepreneur space kicked off in Cape Town 2010 when she started her first business, a Talent Agency in the marketing and digital space. Wanting to give back to the community and increase her network she joined Silicon Cape, a tech cluster that offers non-financial resources to the local startup, developer and investor community.
Through being vice chairperson of Silicon Cape, Lianne has successfully taken delegations to raise funding in Europe alongside being selected to represent South African entrepreneurs at Global Startup Nations, Entrepreneurship Summits and Congresses from Malaysia to Russia.
Over the past five years, Lianne has participated, arranged or collaborated on over 1000 events in the Western Cape. Being a judge on Startup Chile and various pitching competitions from the Simodisa Conference, 2014 World Design Capital, local and international hackathons, PitchVinny, Startup Bus, Get in the Ring & Road to GES to name a few.
She has recently returned from Harvard Business School honing her skills in entrepreneurial curriculum writing which makes her an accidental academic while being the Program Manager at the MTN Solutions Space Venture Lab, a pre accelerator program for startups to test and validate new business models.
In 2016 she was awarded an MTN scholarship to complete her masters in philosophy in inclusive innovation at the UCT Graduate School of Business.
Lianne was recently voted as one of Fast Company’s 2016 creative minds to change the world, she is passionate about building an entrepreneurial ecosystem and believes that Africa is the new frontier for finding, cultivating and assisting entrepreneurs along their journey to scaling which will hopefully result in more jobs and skills development.