Liesel Bester
Liesel Bester has spent twenty years inside the technology industry, and almost all of it in service of the people who build. Across HR, accounting, professional development and nearly every other business function, then in senior operational roles up to COO, she kept finding her way back to the same people: developers, designers, testers, the ones actually shipping the software. She has worked inside SME teams and enterprise ones, startups and their founders, and learned, project by project, how differently each of them actually works. Building communities of these people, across South Africa, has never felt like a task to her. It has always just been how she works.
When she stepped into an interim CEO role, she used it to look forward rather than just run the business in front of her. Utilitarian AI was arriving, and she set out to understand, deliberately, what it would do to business processes, to tools, to the way software gets built, and to the roles and disciplines of the people she'd spent her career backing. DayOne is what came out of that study: a network built to keep the best AI professionals visible, vetted and ready, so the businesses moving fastest never have to go looking for who can help them get there.
Schalk Neethling
Schalk Neethling has spent seventeen years building for the open web. Twelve of them were at Mozilla, across MDN Web Docs, Firefox Growth Engineering and developer tooling, including five years leading the MDN frontend through its rewrite to the Yari platform. He now works where that platform depth meets AI-assisted engineering, moving teams from ad hoc prompting to a spec-driven, test-driven practice, where tight feedback loops lift not just the code but the product itself. He is a technical reviewer for O'Reilly and the author of the forthcoming HTML: A Comprehensive Guide. He has worked remotely from Pretoria since 2011.
They built DayOne on the belief that in AI, it's day one, every day, and the businesses and professionals who treat that as an opportunity, not a threat, are the ones who get to shape what comes next.
74% of enterprises expect to be using AI agents by 2027, but only 21% have mature governance in place — “a capability gap that favours external, ready-made talent.”
Deloitte, via DayOne market research, Sept 2026
72% of employers report difficulty filling roles, and for the first time AI skills top the list of the hardest-to-find capabilities worldwide.
ManpowerGroup 2026 Talent Shortage Survey — ~39,000 employers across 41 countries
Two-thirds of founders say a wrong hire is their single biggest fear, and 43.6% turn to referrals and trusted networks before anything else — “buyers want pre-validated people.”
elly.ai Q2 2026 Founder Hiring Report