Innovation

A place of new beginnings for Lesley Williams

The Tshimologong precinct near Wits has just got a new boss. What’s her vision?

10 November 2017

The Tshimologong precinct at Wits is bustling. Students and entrepreneurs gather around workstations and talk at tables in the coffee shop in the foyer. The new person in charge, Lesley Donna Williams, the acting COO*, is pacing the quad, speaking on her phone to someone about hiring a new events manager.

The digital innovation precinct was opened late in 2016, and now appears, in the parlance of startups, to be in a period of rapid scaling. The place of ‘new beginnings’, as its name has it, was the brainchild of Professor Barry Dwolatzky, the director of the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering, who once he’d secured the tens of millions in funding and it had been built, began looking for someone to run the place.

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