Leaders Series: Lunch with Dante St James

Dante St James is one of Australia’s most sought-after speakers and trainers on the digital economy and social media.

Currently the Director of Innovation and Investment Readiness with the Darwin Innovation Hub and venture capital firm Paspalis - owner of three cafes in Queensland, part-owner of a chain of NSW menswear stores, two training businesses in the Northern Territory and is an angel investor in three startups in Australia and New Zealand, Dante’s love affair with building confidence and capacity in people started as a result of being heavily bullied as a teenager, leading to a resilience that has driven him as a professional and entrepreneur.

After a short career in medicine, he returned to his first love, working with the first of the cable-modem-delivered internet services in Australia, also finding himself as a regular guest on local radio news and talkback shows as a result of being one of the few Aussies working within the fledgling internet industry of the early 1990s.

A few years later he was on-air himself on the Gold Coast, followed by breakfast shows and newsrooms in Darwin and Hobart. This was during the rise of social media as MySpace, and then Facebook came to dominate how information was shared between people. This led to him being moved into a digital media spinout by Grant Broadcasters (now ARN) to commercialise this new digital opportunity.

Dante holds training contracts with two Commonwealth digital education programs, is one of five contracted Meta Lead Trainers in Australia, has been republished numerous times by LinkedIn Australia, appears on many podcasts each year and is an advisor to over 30 local and overseas tech startups.

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