A Co-Founder and Partner at Hatch, a global VC focused on the Aquaculture and Alternative Seafood sector. Hatch launched the world's 1st Aquaculture Accelerator in 2018 and Wayne leads all accelerator and innovation program related activity in addition to now heading up Hatch’s Hawaii based projects expanding Hatch’s presence, opportunity and network in the US and the Americas. He spent an initial 20yrs in the Financial Services sector involving a variety of senior management positions covering Investment, Compliance, Training & Development and Sales. Today he brings with him a wealth of start-up experience in the management, planning and delivery of global accelerators having led and consulted on over 16 programmes in addition to a suite of international startup innovation studios since 2012. He has been involved in the selection and investment in over 100 startup companies.Prior to Hatch Wayne directed and managed a number of high profile Accelerator Programmes across multiple verticals including Selr8r, a sales focused accelerator run by SOSV and also assisted in the launch and set up of their IndieBio EU programme, the Bank of Ireland Accelerator and StartPlanetNI, an accelerator project funded by InvestNI one of the UK’s premier startup programmesHe is a qualified coach / trainer, holds a HDip in Business Management & Strategy and was a co-founder of StartPlanet, originally set up as a non-profit organisation to find, support and develop entrepreneurs and startup companies through the provision of accelerator programmes, network support and co-worker spaces. There he co-set up a novel "Founders Fund" where startups joining the accelerator each gave up a percentage of equity to share amongst their fellow co-founders in order to benefit from each other’s success To date over 2500 Startup companies have applied to join programmes he has managed from more than 60 countries with participating companies raising more than $300M in capital.