About Me, Leon van der Walt

You want to know more about me? Well, my name is Leon van der Walt. I trained as data miner/information analyst and have worked for a bank in South Africa and in a direct marketing agency in London. I have been involved with this site since 2004 and have been working on it on-and-off.

I've always worked hard to expand my entrepreneurial skills and my first 'business venture' was selling pancakes. We had to do this Stretch-A-Rand project in grade 4 and I quite enjoyed it (though I did not win the competition).

Another financial achievement of which I'm quite proud was our school's fun run for charity - we had to collect donations beforehand and the person with the most donations can win prizes.

I was in grade 11 when I first thought I want to give it a go. I went round to all the houses in the neighborhood and asked for donations. I ended with a princely sum of approximately R1300, which actually only landed me a second place. If any of you had ever ended in second place, you might imagine what I felt like... The next year I put in more effort (and more of my own money) and got first place with R2100.

I have also dabbled a bit in stocks (if you can call losing six grand dabbling - 60% of my total investment). Since then I've learned more about risk and reward of stock and decided to stay away from it until I can make a commitment (or I'm willing to lose more money). I'm currently involved with two web business ventures: one being this website; and the other in the area of public speaking. If you want to find out how I built this website, go here for the review of the product I used.

In my spare time I like to read and expand my business and entrepreneurial awareness. During the summer months, I also like to get out to play a bit of golf (18 handicap) and taking walks in nature.

General interests that I like to keep abreast of include:

• Golf
• Space technology and exploration
• Adventure sports like skydiving and bungee jumping (planning on doing my first jump soon).
• Digital photography
• Technology- and spy gadgets
• Social psychology
• Data mining and statistics and its applications - pattern recognition, segmentation, predicting consumer behavior, etc.

Want to contact me or Advertise on the Site?

If you like what I've done with this website, or would like to advertise on the site, drop me a comment through the contact form.

All the best in your endeavors!

Warm Regards,
Leon van der Walt

London, UK