
CEO at Piclinq
San Francisco Bay Area

CEO at Piclinq
San Francisco Bay Area
Randal is an experienced business/brand/community builder. He is currently CEO of Piclinq, a Silicon Valley-headquartered company operating in the 'connected photography' arena with offices in Los Angeles, St Petersburg and Galway.
He has most recently acted as Corporate Advisor to Fox Interactive Media (MySpace, IGN etc - a News Corporation company), Massive Interactive (Australia's most awarded web development agency, owned by STW) and as Chairman of Creative Enclave, a social games developer. He is also the founder of Metarand.com, a social media analyst and blog covering this space globally.
He was Director, Business Development for a major Australian Research Center of Excellence in Information & Communications Technology.
In this role, he spun out three venture backed companies.
Previously he was CEO of the Australian Distributed Incubator where he invested into 18 early stage high tech companies.
Randal's entrepreneurial experience includes:
- At First Tuesday he grew this business networking start up to 500,000 members in 110 cities, facilitating over $150 million in capital raisings (acquired by Yazam).
- As New Ventures Manager at global publishing house Wolters Kluwer, he created joint ventures and spin outs in the online arena. He built ComStrata, an online management, ecommerce and financial system for the strata industry (acquired by InSite), as well as LawStream, a specialist legal portal, which attracted a million page views in its first month (in 1998!)
Earlier in his career, as corporate counsel at listed conglomerate Email Limited, he worked on acquisitions and divestments and ecommerce activities.
He has been writing and commenting on the Internet, digital and social media arenas for over a decade and is an accomplished professional writer, publisher and editor.
virtual worlds, social media, pattern recognition, leadership, evangelist, entrepreneur, deal maker, branding and identity, publisher, law, mergers & acquisitions, private equity, venture capital, director, chairman, ceo, technology transfer, IP management, capital raising, portfolio management, coaching, corporate development, strategy, incubation.
(Photography industry)
August 2008 — Present (2 months)
Piclinq is an exciting 'connected photography' company headquartered in Burlingame, California.
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)
July 2007 — Present (1 year 3 months)
Metarand provides commentary and insights into the social media arena.
(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; NWS; Internet industry)
March 2008 — August 2008 (6 months)
Advised FIM with respect to various aspects of their portfolio, including acting as an evangelist for the MySpace Developer Platform and spearheaded the Platform's launch in Australia through a series of devJams.
In addition, conducted corporate development activities with respect to various acquisition and investment opportunities
(Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)
December 2007 — July 2008 (8 months)
Creative Enclave builds social media applications. Our flagship product is Imperial Galaxy, a social media science fiction MMOG. You can check out the public beta on Facebook from 17th December 2007.
(Non-Profit; 501-1000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)
April 2004 — April 2007 (3 years 1 month)
Randal was Director, Business Development for NICTA, an Australian ICT centre of excellence.
He oversaw the technology transfer activities of the company, including its investments and licensing programs. He advised on key technology trends, market analysis and business drivers.
He orchestrated a number of spin out companies from NICTA, including Open Kernel Labs, an embedded systems microkernel developer with a who's who list of multinationals as clients and a pioneer in the open source arena, Audinate, a developer of digital audio network technologies and 7-IP, a remote portable office developer in the satnav and wimax arenas.
He took up an Entrepreneur in Residence role with a view to spinning out a social media virtual world play (Yoick), and quickly achieved hottest start up in Silicon Valley status.
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Telecommunications industry)
January 2004 — August 2006 (2 years 8 months)
Tigerspike is a mobile entertainment company, based in Sydney. The team is pioneering the aggregation, publication and delivery of next generation mobile content.
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)
November 2000 — March 2004 (3 years 5 months)
ADI was an early stage venture capital company that made investments into high technology companies across Australia. The portfolio included Genetraks, 5th Finger (acquired by NineMSN), Cogstate (ASX- listed) and many others. The initial portfolio was sold in Australia's first secondary portfolio play.
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)
January 1998 — October 2002 (4 years 10 months)
Randal was the Executive Chairman of corporate advisory and venture firm, Tribalweave Capital, CEO of the global business networking phenomenon, First Tuesday, in Australia and CEO of early stage venture capital and advisory group Australian Distributed Incubator.
He has board experience with numerous high technology companies, including roles as Chairman of Genetraks, a leading Australian bioinformatics company and Chairman of nABACUS, a Hong Kong based nanotechnology company.
In the 90's Randal led a strategic initiative to bring business publishing house, CCH and its parent Wolters Kluwer, into the new media age. He focused on developing alliances and partnerships and conceptualising, financing and managing new ventures, for example, he initiated the establishment of ComStrata, an online strata management and financial system for the strata title industry, which was sold to Insite.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)
January 1996 — December 1997 (2 years)
He ran his own legal practice in South Africa in the early 90's and then worked in Sydney, Australia as corporate counsel for Email Limited, a multinational diversified manufacturing and distribution company, which had over 100 subsidiaries around the world and more than 10,000 staff. At Email he focused on intellectual property and mergers & acquisitions and was involved in numerous transactions including the acquisition of Atlas Steels for $150 million.
BA, LLB, Law, 1988 — 1992
1984 — 1984
1983 — 1984
1978 — 1982
Bachelor of Arts, English, Law (Accelerated Program)
Life Media,Social Media, Web 2.0, Immersion, Presence, Entrepreneurship, Virtual Worlds, Mobile, Life Sciences, Mountain Biking, Surfing, Art, Painting, Photography, Video.
Founder at Innovation Bay: www.innovationbay.com
South African Surf Lifesaving Champion across 4 disciplines.
Social media research materials incorporated into 2008 Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA course on strategy and management.
Recently published articles:
* http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/mobile-from-the-word-goh/2008/05/05/1209839551673.html
* http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/facebook-gets-on-with-business/2007/10/09/1191695837750.html
* http://metarand.com/2008/02/05/at-facebook-value-can-an-app-developer-ipo-north-of-2-billion/
* http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/attention-economy-needs-data-portability/2008/03/11/1205125864120.html