I’m someone who is motivated by work that drives real change and positive impact for others.

I left Google and I didn’t have a plan when I left, I just knew I had to go out and look. After a false start, I then founded Yenza, which feels more like a calling, rather than a business venture.

When I look back it makes sense. I really struggled in my younger years not knowing what I should do for my career, when all my friends had very clear, laid out plans. Not getting the right kind of guidance when I needed it, cost me crucial time, money and most significantly, good head space.

Yenza was born in 2019 as part of a mission to democratise high-quality career guidance and support. On average, only around 1 in 4,000 students has access to a professional counsellor or educational psychologist. This is a problem that sits at the root of youth unemployment.

In practice it means young people are having to make high stakes career choices and having to figure out their next steps with nobody helping them along the way. It’s hard to put a number on what that costs a society, but the impact is enormous.

So that’s the space I work in, improving career pathways for young people, at scale. We help students to build self-knowledge and confidence, because most have never been asked to think properly about who they are and what they’re good at. We guide them to find the study and career paths that are best fit for them, and we support them in getting there. We also help students build the critical skills and mindset they’ll need to succeed in the modern world of work, like learning skills, digital and AI literacy, communication and critical thinking.

We’ve guided more than 125,000 students so far, across 200+ schools, with 31 students currently enrolled in our own online vocational college.

Yenza is now the only globally recognised careers platform from South Africa, but mostly what I feel is that I’m grateful I be part of a solution people really need.

For me, entrepreneurship sits on a spectrum, and I measure it by the level of sacrifice one goes through. I left corporate comfort, I earn significantly less, I put my savings into the business to keep the company alive through COVID, and I’m tackling one of the hardest industries there is, in Education.

They say you should follow your passion, which means “to suffer”, so the more accurate phrasing is “find something you’re willing to suffer for”, which is what I have done.

If I had to name the one thing that decides how a young person’s life goes, it’s self-efficacy. The belief that you can go out into the world and make something of your life.

It’s the strongest predictor we have of career success, more so than academics and it matters most for the young people who have the least. Kids from difficult homes and under-resourced schools are the ones most often told, in a hundred small ways, that their future is something that happens to them rather than something they make.

We chose the name Yenza which means “To Do” or “Commit” with this in mind. We chose it because everything we build is meant to move a young person from waiting to doing, and to help them take responsibility for their own future rather than waiting for it to be handed to them.

So my vision for Yenza is hard to measure, but no less impactful, and that is to build the confidence, character and skills of young people to go out into the working world and reach their potential.

The other side of this is that by improving career pathways at some decent level of scale, you start better matching supply with demand, and that resolves a lot of issues with regards to student drop-out, wastage of available funds, and filling large numbers of exiting job vacancies, which is the elephant in the room with the youth unemployment crisis.

The jobs exist. The money to train people exists. The young people exist. We are just very bad at managing the talent pathways, so we have to fix our foundational piping both literally and figuratively with regards to talent.

Recreational activities

Padel, Football, Tennis, Hiking.