York Zucchi

Centre for Unconventional Entrepreneurship

York Zucchi with a list of achievements longer than most LinkedIn pages, Swiss-born York nevertheless humbly refers to his current position, as ‘Chief Coffee Drinker’. Yet, this GIBS MBA graduate and former Goldman Sachs banker is passionate (ok, obsessed) with SME Growth. He is a TEDx Talk speaker, business founder many times over, and an expert in what it takes to succeed in a broken ‘SME’ system and access to markets as part of SDG 8. He has worked in many countries and built ecosystems that supported SMEs in over 83 countries and in the process learned quite a lot about what works and what doesn't. He is currently writing the world's first book about access to markets.

York Zucchi is a Swiss born investor and entrepreneur in Africa since 2007. He was previously at Goldman Sachs where he contributed towards the global financial meltdown. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, Africa and coffee and believes that the right mixture of these 3 will make Africa the continent to be for the next 20 years. He gets featured a lot in the press (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine) but doubts anyone actually understands what he really does for a living.

In 2016 he co-founded the SME Movement, an initiative to fix the SME support ecosystem which is now active in over 83 countries (www.SMEmovement.org) and whose aim is to support 100 million SMEs by 2022.