Dawid Naude
Dawid Naude
A notepad sketch in a coffee shop, three customers from one lunch break, and a $15 million exit in under two years.
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Dawid Naude
Dawid Naude is Chief AI Officer at Affinda Group and continues to run Pathfindr, the AI venture he founded in 2023 and sold in an all-scrip deal valued at $15 million less than two years later. Before that he spent eight years at Accenture, rising to Managing Director, after an earlier career in foreign exchange banking.
Dawid Naude grew up between South Africa and Australia, where his mother handed him an expensive computer as a kid with permission to break it - and he did, constantly, which made him a lifelong tinkerer with tech. He followed his father's path into banking instead of his own instinct, becoming one of the highest-rated foreign exchange dealers in the country, before walking away from a six-figure bonus to take a tech consulting role at Accenture for less than half his old salary.
Years later at Accenture, he fed a client's 40-year-old Pascal codebase into ChatGPT just to see what would happen - and that was the moment the fire got lit. He sketched the idea for Pathfindr on a notepad in a coffee shop, clients on one side of the page and AI on the other, and picked up his first three paying customers during the lunch break of his very first keynote talk. Eighteen months later, Affinda Group acquired Pathfindr in an all-scrip deal worth $15 million, and Dawid rolled his equity straight back into the combined group as its Chief AI Officer.
He finishes with three life lessons: why it's never too late to reinvent yourself, why the years spent in the "wrong" career are never wasted, and why you can't afford to drop your healthy habits exactly when you need them most.