Clifford’s is a qualified Electrical Engineer graduating from WITS university in 1996. His passion for computing led him into financial services, where he worked in a team that launched one of world’s first internet banking solutions in 1998 with Nedbank. He Joined Microsoft in 2000 and in 2009 Clifford took on a director role of running one of the 7 segments within Microsoft South Africa. In this role amongst other things he developed and launched the SA BizSpark start-up program which mentored over 3000 tech start-up’s, manged the Microsoft relationship with South African universities, managed the DevOps business in South Africa, and ran and keynoted several conferences including TechEd, DevDays and Build Tour. After almost 18 years with Microsoft Clifford decided to build a start-up of his own took on the role, of CTO and co-founder. As with many start-ups this journey had many lessons on how to build a business from the ground up.

In his current role Clifford is the CTO of Altron Netstar. In this role, he is responsible for looking after all aspects of the company technology from Hardware to Software and internal IT. Netstar is on an ambitious global expansion and transformation journey where Clifford and the executive team are transforming Netstar to not only meet the demands customers but also to take advantage of the new technology landscape like cloud computing, AI and big data processing. Clifford also keynotes and speaks at developer and technology conferences, like keynoting the devconf and holds two board positions at Wits University’s Tshimologong and JCSE centres