MOBILE GROWTH SUMMIT SPEAKERS

Co-Founder, Chairwoman & CEO

Company – Mobile Growth Association

Jen Laloup

Co-Founder, Chairwoman & CEO , Mobile Growth Association

Location: San Francisco, California

Jen Laloup is Co-Founder, Chairwoman & CEO at Mobile Growth Association. Jen is highly experienced in growing and scaling organizations. She brings to MGS a wealth of experience spanning, publishing, media, and news. Her skill set focuses on driving growth and performance, operations, organizational management, and content strategy and distribution. She thrives in fast-paced and mission driven organizations.

Chair, Advisory Board & Strategic Speaker Outreach

Company – Mobile Growth Association

Dave Westin

Chair, Advisory Board & Strategic Speaker Outreach

Location: San Francisco, California

Dave Westin is a highly accomplished and enterprising sales executive with a proven track record of success. He is extremely analytical and strategic with the ability to turn contacts into revenue. He is an innovative leader who inspires and delivers results. Dave has over 10 years of experience in mobile, gaming, monetization, and advertising. He co-founded Mobile Growth Association as a way to bring mobile app marketers together.

MEA Regional Director

Company – Xsolla

Andrey Kalugin

Location: Israel

Andrey Kalugin specialises in helping game developers fund, distribute, market, and monetise their games. He has two decades of software and hardware industry product marketing and business development experience within the consumer and commercial space. Prior to Xsolla, Andrey worked for Microsoft, where he managed Xbox Business, Windows oS, and Windows Device Divisions for seventeen years.

CEO

Company – Mekan Games

Evans Kiragu

CEO, Mekan Games

Location: Kenya

Evans Kiragu is a game developer and founder of Mekan Games based in Nairobi, Kenya. Kiragu has created more than 80 mobile titles but his breakthrough came when he created the game “The President” and the outcome was more than he had anticipated.

The President became number one in the U.S. download charts in July this year. The app had over 229k downloads on android and over 285k downloads on IOS since launching in February.

Chief Marketing Officer

Company – Wesgro

Jean Scheltema

Chief Marketing Officer, Wesgro

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Jean Scheltema is Chief Marketing Officer at Wesgro: the Official Tourism, Trade, Investment, Film Promotion Agency for Cape Town and Western Cape. She is also a Silicon Cape Board member and has 18 years; experience in marketing and advertising.

Jean is an Oxford Said Business School Graduate, with significant time spent in the private sector before moving into the public sector. She has won multiple awards over the past decade for investment promotion, tourism, digital and innovation. She was also profiled by Facebook as part their ”Marketing Masterminds” series.

Believing in the power of purpose-centric, design-led creative work with a focus on empathy and human connection, Jean has worked on major brands such as Coca-Cola and SAB, Kimberly-Clark and Old Mutual – she now leads a team of 12 creatives within the Wesgro studio.

Integrated ECD & Co-Founder

Company – King James Group

Danni Pinch, Integrated ECS & Co-Founder, King James

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Danni is an Integrated ECD in the King James Group focusing primarily on social media and emerging technologies in brand communications. She previously founded and led Society, a social media agency of 40+ people in Cape Town, as well as being a co-founder of King James Digital.

Significant achievements include being ranked in the top 3 ECDs of South Africa at the Loeries and The King James Group being the digital agency of the year several times at The Bookmark and Loeries awards. International awards at the Webby’s, One Show, and Cannes Lions among others.

Senior Growth Manager

Company – Carry1st

Spencer Ma

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Creative Director, Advertising

Company – Zynga

Matt Sharpe

Creative Director, Zynga

Location: Canada

Matt is a Creative Director with over 15 years experience in the curation and integration of brand partnerships in the gaming space.

Working on large-scale campaigns alongside clients such as NBC, FOX, Progressive, Hasbro, Twitter and more, the goal is always the same: beautiful executions that exceed the goals preceding them.

Co-Founder

Company – Clockwork Acorn

Francois van Niekerk

Co-Founder, Clockwork Acorn

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Francois van Niekerk founded Clockwork Acorn with his friends Leon van Niekerk and Hilgard Bell. Clockwork Acorn started life as a digital game development studio. As it grew, it expanded into business consultation and software development areas, specialising in user experience and interface development. The company makes great use of Agile development techniques in order to deliver high quality solutions to its clients.

Francois completed his degree in Game Artificial Intelligence at the University of Stellenbosch.

Investor

Company – BITKRAFT Ventures

Justin Swart

Investor BITKRAFT Ventures

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Justin Swart is from Cape Town, South Africa and has a Masters in Finance from the University of Cape Town. He spent 4 years in the investment banking teams at HSBC and Nomura before moving into venture capital. At Newtown Partners, an early stage VC firm, he led investments in mutliple startups across the globe, and led the firms web3 investment focus before joining BITKRAFT. He has also advised a number of top-tier South African startups, where he helped them raise some of the largest seed-stage funding rounds on the continent.

Narrative Design Mentor

Company – Self

Ranko Trifkovic

Location: Serbia

From game journalist to game designer, producer, pitching mentor, narrative designer, and game director, Ranko has married two of his greatest passion: storytelling and games with more than 25 years of experience in the industry to provide the best consulting service to big and small studios.