Benjamin Shaw is a seasoned business leader and investment professional with extensive entrepreneurial and corporate experience. He has successfully raised multi-million-dollar rounds of funding into start-ups and has made significant contributions to ventures throughout his career.Ben worked in the M&A team of JPMorganChase and represented South Africa in the CFA Challenge after completing his studies. In 2015 he founded HouseME, a real estate technology platform industry for residential rental. He led the company as Chief Executive Officer until 2020 and under his leadership, HouseME gained recognition as a disruptive South African player, challenging incumbents in the market and serving 50,000 registered users. The First Kudu is a book written about this experience.His expertise spans a wide range of domains, sectors and stages of business and sits on investment committees as well as M&A advisory teams.Ben also serves as an advisor to several small companies and is passionate about mentorship and developing the entrepreneurial ecosystem. His private equity and venture investment areas of focus are late-stage financial technologies, marketplace platforms, regulated financial services, education- and property-technology.A selection of his writings have been published. Ben studied finance & accounting, and is an Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Fellow. He currently co-hosts the Shapers podcast with Riël Mallan.