David Erasmus

An entrepreneur who turned his sights to the third sector, Dave Erasmus previously founded the online charity platform Givey, before a year-long experiment living on-and-off grid culminating in the creation of Corcova, a creative community founded on the values of using nature as the basis for human connection and creativity.

Dave is a leading advocate of marrying innovation, technology and social responsibility. His keynote speeches focus on creating better educational solutions and entrepreneurial opportunities, incorporating digital marketing and philanthropy.

Born in Johannesburg and raised in Surrey, David finished his state education at 18 and left 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 company for 2 and a half years, managing £5 million of Ad spend annually and employing 20 staff locally and abroad, he sold Broadplace to pursue more socially minded endeavours.

He spent 2 years travelling the world, working on short projects and meeting global leaders to ask them, and himself, the question, “What needs to be done?” On the premise that creating better educational solutions and entrepreneurial opportunities for employment is the most important work he could help with, David began moving his work forward.

Following this revelation, he co-founded clickego.com, a Cape Town-based and majority-owned online marketing business, created to inspire entrepreneurial activity amongst young Cape Tonians as well as 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.

He has lectured at many universities on the topics of trust, start-ups, and good business that benefits others. These include Imperial College London, UCL, Kings College London students and speaking for SIFE and Imperial Entrepreneurs.

In 2009, David established a business start-up incubator, called Cubate.com, which specialises in developing mobile and social projects - including products, solutions and client work - to disrupt both the Third and commercial sectors. Its first journey into not-for-profit was in building GetGiving, an iPhone App facilitating real-time social donations to charities. After being rejected by Apple, the concept was rejuvenated by David and his team.

David believes that the future of technology and innovation lies with mobile and social. He enjoys watching this pioneering platform rapidly grow, whilst also investing in projects which really add value and positively benefit society.

In 2011, Givey was officially launched alongside David Cameron at the launch of the Government’s Giving White Paper.

Later in the year, David Erasmus accepted a role sitting on a committee at UCL university, helping to shape the design of a new degree focused around practical problem-solving and entrepreneurship in every sector of society. He also 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.

Now in 2019, Corcovado is brought to life by connecting physical spaces (CorcoHubs) with global hearts and minds (CorcoCreators) that embody the values of diversity, creativity and friendship in nature. Dave's extensive experience and knowledge allows him to speak with real authority on how social problems can be solved through tech and innovation, the mobile and social paradigm shift and how trust, start-up, and good business benefits others.