Directors’ profiles

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LLEW CLAASEN

Managing Partner

Llew is a go-to-market strategist with almost two decades of senior management experience in cryptoassets (since 2012), digital product management and digital marketing.

He co-founded Clicks2customers (rebranded to www.nmpidigital.com) with Vinny Lingham, now a global digital marketing agency with annual billings in excess of $100 million and Synthasite (rebranded to www.yola.com).

Llew is also the former Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation, the original, the oldest and the largest Bitcoin advocacy organization globally, headquartered in San Francisco, U.S.

Llew has a Masters degree in the Management of Technology & Innovation and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

VINNY LINGHAM

General Partner

Vinny Lingham is a South African Internet entrepreneur who is currently the co-founder & CEO of Civic Technologies, a blockchain-based decentralized identity management platform.

As a serial entrepreneur, he co-founded:

  • Gyft – a mobile gift card company, backed by Google Ventures that was sold to First Data Corporation in 2014
  • Yola, Inc. (formerly known as SynthaSite), a San Francisco-based Web 2.0 start-up that provides free website building, publishing and hosting services
  • Global search marketing firm incuBeta and its subsidiary Clicks2Customers
  • He is also the co-founder of SiliconCape.com, an NGO based in South Africa that aims to turn Cape Town into a technology hub

Vinny previously served on marketing advisory boards for Nasdaq-listed companies ValueClick and Yahoo and is a member of the global, high-impact, entrepreneur organizations Endeavour and YPO. He appeared as an investor on Dragon’s Den South Africa season 1 (2015) and Shark Tank South Africa season 1 (2017). Vinny lives in San Francisco.