Matthew de la Hey
South Africa
Master of Business Administration (MBA), 2015
New College
Funding: Louis Dreyfus
Matthew is the CEO and Co-founder of inploi. inploi’s mission is to connect the world’s workforce and its employers, helping people to obtain information, advertise and access job opportunities, network and make connections and, ultimately, help companies and people to be better informed and more successful.
Matthew grew up on a dairy farm in the Kwazulu-Natal Midlands of South Africa and received an Honours degree in Accounting and Finance from Stellenbosch University, where he was a Mandela Rhodes scholar. Matthew worked at the World Bank in Washington D.C. as a member of the SAWIP leadership programme, was a co-organiser of the TEDx Stellenbosch talks, and was a co-founder of InkuluFreeHeid, a non-partisan movement of young South Africans focussed on social, political and economic issues to enhance freedom, promote dignity and realise the vision of a truly free non-racial South Africa.
Matthew completed an MSc in African Studies at Oxford as a Weidenfeld Scholar, with research focussed on changing agricultural behaviour in 'ex-homeland' South Africa, considering small-scale community agricultural production in the village of Mbotyi. His research was published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, co-authored with Professor William Beinart. After the MSc, Matthew continued to the Saïd business school to read an MBA as part of the 1+1 programme.
From Oxford, Matthew worked briefly at a private equity fund investing in agricultural assets across Africa before co-founding technology startup inploi, an online platform on web and mobile app connecting job seekers with employment opportunities. Matthew is a member of Harambeans, a network of African entrepreneurs working to realise the continent’s potential through enterprise and was previously finance director. He is also an advisor to various start-ups and is the editor of open-sourced creative writing journal Ozymandeus.
Matthew is currently based in London, UK.
