Stef Lewandowski

To a hacker - impressed indignation is a familiar reaction – how dare anyone access millions of people’s personal data? And how could someone possibly be clever enough to do so? In reality the new hackers, such as the unique and impressive Stef Lewandowski, are not shadowy figures absorbed in illegal activity and exposing sensitive data, but creative and motivated individuals, whose unique approach to making things digital are combined with a pioneering and passionate vision for the future, and enabling social change.

Sketching with code, Stef simplifies processes and technologies and tries out early stage ideas in basic building block forms. With a talent for igniting passion in anyone he comes across, Stef is on a mission to help people access their inner creativity to build things they had only dreamt of. This has led him to work in a variety of industries including; finance, supply-chain & logistics, e-commerce, urban mobility, data analytics, car sharing and education, with his latest venture helping to build Oak National Academy, an online learning programme to help students learn remotely.

Stef has led a small tech and product team to build and create a service which has now scaled to support 2.5 million students per week to learn from home. The wider team and partners have produced almost a full national curriculum of video content and resources (~10,000 video lessons) across most subjects and made it all available for free via the web.

Translating his skills to business, he highlights the importance of getting inside a complex organisation, and exploring its workings before putting it back together to create a more effective model.

Stef was the co-founder of Makeshift — an independent London start-up studio, building digital products, and the technical co-founder of Makelight, software which helps people take better photographs.

Before Makeshift, he co-founded Aframe, a cloud-based video production platform. As the technical founder, helped grow the company from two to over thirty staff, saw it through $10m of private investment and on to international expansion.

Stef sits on the industrial advisory board of Birmingham University Computer Science and has been a school governor at two schools, and was chair for three years.

Stef undertook a Clore Leadership Fellowship, sponsored by the Cultural Leadership Programme, and was simultaneously involved in a boutique web agency (3form), a record label (Type), a creative industries membership organisation (Creative Republic), and a number of experimental startup projects and festivals. Stef has also been a Venture Partner at Ignite Accelerator, a forum where he showcases hacking and acts as a mentor for future teams.

Experimental, technical and agile, Stef has one eye on the future and stays at the cutting edge of technical trends, he is the ideal speaker for all things digital.