## Entrepreneurship **Founder, researcher, and non-executive director working at the intersection of entrepreneurship, technology, and cultural heritage.** I have been building ventures since I was seventeen. At twenty, I co-founded Funetics, an English pronunciation software company that used machine learning to help non-native speakers improve spoken English. We raised seed funding through Telstra's muru-D accelerator and I led business development across Beijing, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Singapore. I was named Australian National Champion at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards and represented Australia at the G20 Young Entrepreneurs' Alliance in Washington, DC. At twenty-one, I founded CYALA (the Council for Young Africans Living Abroad), a non-racial, non-religious and non-political social enterprise tackling structural barriers to employment facing African youth in Australia. I took CYALA through the Impact Academy Accelerator and the Foundation for Young Australians' Young Social Pioneer Program, grew a 30-person team across four cities, delivered over 30 professional development workshops to 800+ participants from more than 20 countries, and organised Australia's first National African Youth Conference. In 2021-2023, I worked inside the blockchain space, providing governance and strategic support to NFT projects and co-developing DAOs and digital collectible projects generating over $1 million USD in sales. Alongside this work, I was a keynote speaker at the 2018 Commonwealth Games Trade and Investment Conference and gave a [TEDx talk on the phenomenal mindset of Africa's future leaders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nerg-Nx0f3c). My academic work grows from the same problems I encountered as a founder. Running CYALA across four Australian cities meant navigating the tensions of building a venture as a Zimbabwean-Australian across cultural boundaries; that experience became the basis for my doctoral research on immigrant social entrepreneurship, published in the *Journal of Business Venturing*. Working with founders from different class backgrounds across CYALA's network shaped a study on how social class experience drives transnational social venturing, published in the *Journal of Business Venturing Insights*, and the barriers faced by female founders in these communities motivated an integrative review of female immigrant entrepreneurship, under revision at *Entrepreneurship & Regional Development*. The communities I worked inside as a Web3 advisor — building DAOs, navigating legitimacy disputes in real time — became the empirical context for current work on legitimation in public blockchain markets. The research has received three Best Conference Paper Awards from the European and American Academies of Management, and the doctoral thesis won the Mollie Holman Medal at Monash University. I bring this same practice-research integration to governance. For a decade, I have chaired and served on boards that sit at the intersection of public policy, innovation, and community building: the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers in Australia (Chair, overseeing seven city hubs and 250+ members delivering entrepreneurship and social impact projects), Historic Environment Scotland (Chair of the People Committee), the Student Awards Agency Scotland, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Advisory Council, and the Queensland Government Multicultural Advisory Council. At the University of Edinburgh Business School, I bring this practitioner orientation into the classroom. I design courses incorporating AI-driven assessment tools, experiential simulations, and real-world strategic intelligence reports, and have received four Excellence in Teaching Awards across three academic years. I also co-lead a £41,499 Wellcome Trust-funded project across three Scottish universities building institutional capacity for research-informed policy engagement. My work sits where academic rigour and entrepreneurial practice reinforce each other: connecting students, researchers, and institutions to the ecosystems where ventures are built. [[About]] | [[Research]] | [[Governance]] | [[Teaching]] | [[Journey]] | [[Connect]]