Etienne was born and raised in South Africa. He got his Computer Science degree at Stellenbosch University where he also met his wife, Kathryn. He started his career as a software developer in 1995. After getting married in 1996, Etienne and Kathryn moved to Aachen, Germany to join a Cybersecurity Startup. There he worked inside the FreeBSD kernel to build device drivers for proprietary PCI based encryption cards. In 2000, Etienne and Kathryn moved to San Diego, CA where he joined a Biotech startup to join their Supply Chain Management and Business Intelligence team.
In 2005 he co-founded a startup where he developed a product that helped organizations deploy and edit beautiful websites. This was a hot bed for rapidly scaling teams, being a first class citizen of the C-Suite while also learning how to be a CTO. He had a successful exit from this company when it was sold in 2015.
After serving on a few advisory boards, organizing communities and consulting as CTO, he founded 7CTOs in 2013. 7CTOs is a peer group and coaching organization for people in technical leadership roles including CTO, VP and Director levels. In 2021 he obtained his ontological coaching training and has become a coach to CTOs, C-Suites and founders alike.
