Mark was born in the dusty gold-mining town of Welkom in South Africa, and grew up in Cape Town. His fascination with technology started at a tender age when he discovered computer games, a vice that continues today.
In 1995, his final year at UCT, Mark founded *Thawte Consulting*, as an Internet consulting business. The focus of the company quickly shifted to Internet security for electronic commerce. Thawte became the first company to produce a full-security e-commerce web server that was commercially available outside the United States. This brought Thawte to the world of public key infrastructure, which is the basis for all encrypted and authenticated Internet transactions. Thawte was one of the first companies to be recognized by Netscape and Microsoft as a trusted third party for web site certification, and it quickly established a leadership position helping businesses around the world accept secure transactions over the web. By the time it was acquired in 1999 by *VeriSign*, Thawte had become the fastest-growing Internet Certificate Authority, and was the leading Certificate Authority outside of the USA. Mark is no longer involved at Thawte, but is very proud of the way it has continued to go from strength to strength under new management.
Since the heady days of 1999, Mark has formed a new project team called *HBD* <http://www.hbdvc.com/>. The name is a reference to the phrase “Here Be Dragons”, which legend has it was a phrase used to describe uncharted territory on early maps. HBD is a venture-capital company seeking to invest in innovative technology companies that are based in South Africa but that have the potential to serve a global marketplace. HBD has invested in several South African companies in a variety of sectors, such as software, pharmaceutical services, electronics and mobile phone services. As well as funding HBD, he also serves as a non-executive director on the board of the company.
He has created a non-profit organisation that supports social innovation in education in Africa. *The Shuttleworth Foundation* <http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/> seeks to fund projects that demonstrate a significantly better approach to some aspect of the education system and hopes to improve both the quality and the reach of education in Africa. The Foundation has worked in all 9 provinces of South Africa, funding initiatives from teachers, small businesses and private individuals. The Foundation is also an advocate of the role of open-source software in education and in developing countries.
Mark believes that developing countries need to find their own voice in the digital era. To this end, he also funds and serves on the board of *bridges.org*<http://www.bridges.org/> - an international non-profit organisation that seeks to address digital divide issues both through grass-roots work and high-level policy dialogue. Bridges.org has offices in Cape Town, South Africa and Washington, D.C., and is the leading international organization working to bridge the digital divide between Africa and the developed world.
Mark Shuttleworth is frontrunner and an advocate of Open and Free Software particularly in developing countries and this is to ensure these countries are exposed and gain valuable knowledge on Free and Open software for developing their SMME markets. He is the founder of Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com, a debian based Linux desktop Operating System that is managed by Canonical Limited and the Go Open Source campaign, which is a 24 month partnership between private and public sector to drive awareness of OSS in the South African marketplace. |
