From WooCommerce to Conversio: Meet this entrepreneur who took the CA(SA) route but quit to establish two multimillion businesses

• Hi, I’m Adii Pienaar, a techno entrepreneur who was born and bred in Cape Town, South Africa.
• Growing up, I had an entrepreneurial streak and loved working on independent projects.
• Previously, I decided to be a Chartered Accountant in South Africa but soon realized that it was too rigid for me.
• Fast forward, to my last year of graduation along with my co-founders, we launched WooThemes (later WooCommerce).
• About 13 months after our launch, we reached cumulative sales revenue of $1 million!
• Here’s my story of how an almost CA was directed to entrepreneurship.

Choosing between CA(SA) and Entrepreneurship

The dream to be an entrepreneur was always part of my vision for the future. As a result, I worked on small entrepreneurial projects in high school. Having said that, none of them made real money or became a real business.

When it was time to decide on a career path, I realized that most senior executives in big corporations had the CA(SA) designation. In addition, I absolutely loved accounting in high school as it was the closest academic subject to real business and the CA(SA) pathway made a lot of sense.