David Erasmus was born in Kempton Park, Johannesburg, on December 5, 1985. Six months later, David moved to Cardiff, United Kingdom, where most of his family originate from. At the age of 4, he moved to Surrey, south of London, UK, where he enjoyed a state school education, growing up as the youngest alongside his 3 siblings and Mother and Father.
At the age of 18, David left school with a conviction that he could achieve more in 3 years in the business world than he could by going to University. After 6 months, he set up his first business; broadplace.com. After growing the business for 2 and a half years, managing £5million of advertising revenue and employing 20 staff locally and abroad, he sold Broadplace to pursue more socially minded endeavours.
His journey took him back to his South African roots, to reconnect with his relatives there. He also spent time alongside Jane Goodall in the USA, asking the questions: what needs to be done? And how can we leave a legacy that multiplies after we are gone? That journey led him to engage with two key issues; creating entrepreneurial opportunities for employment, and creating sustainable educational opportunities.
Following this revelation, he co-founded clickego.com, a South African (Cape Town) based and majority owned online marketing business, created to inspire entrepreneurial activity amongst young Cape Tonian’s and inspiring employment opportunities in the local area. He has also assisted in taking NoPC to India.
More locally, in the UK, after meetings with the centre for social justice, David and a team identified the same needs found in Africa, on our doorstep, amongst the gang culture in London. Working alongside Regenerate he created Mustard a Social Enterprise taking young people in Gangs and street culture and helping them start a community based service business. This ran successfully for the year of 2010
David is also a founding member of the Ambassadors for Philanthropy, a Government initiative orchestrated by the cabinet office under Dame Stephanie Shirley, the Governments Ambassador for Philanthropy.
He has lectured at many universities on the topics of trust, startup, and good business that benefits others. These include Imperial College London, UCL, Kings College London students and speaking for SIFE and Imperial Entrepreneurs.
David is a frequent Speaker at conferences, speaking at DIBI, Launch48, AIME, PPA among many others. He has contributed to the FT, Sunday Telegraph, Big Issue, Mashable, Techcrunch and many others on the topics of Social Enterprise and the Mobile & Social paradigm shift.
In September 2009, David established a business start up incubator, called Cubate.com. Cubate specialises in developing mobile & social projects both products, solutions and client work. Cubate is developing products to disrupt both the Third and commercial sectors.
Cubate’s first charitable technology offering began development in September 2009, when David’s team designed and built GetGiving an iPhone App, in partnership with MissionFish and PayPal, Apple declined the app, preventing the launch of GetGiving. David managed to get the Cabinet Minister Nick Hurd MP to write to and meet Apple in London in a bid to understand the problem, but to no avail.
David and his team then went back to the drawing board, and thought about how to solve the same problem in a different way. And Givey was born. Givey is a donation platform that allows passionate givers to give whenever we want, to whoever we want, using the social apps that we know and love like Facebook and Twitter and even good old SMS.
David believes the future of technology and innovation lies with mobile & Social and is excited to watch this pioneering platform rapidly grow, whilst also investing in projects which really add value and positively benefit society.
In May 2011 Givey was officially launched alongside David Cameron at the Launch of the Governments Giving White Paper.
In July 2011 David accepted a role sitting on a committee at UCL university helping shape the design of a new degree focused around practical problem solving and entrepreneurship in every sector of society.
In August 2011 David accepted a Special advisory role with Lord Wei of Shoreditch (Formerly David Cameron’s council on ‘The Big Society’) advising him on solving social problems through Technology.
