Bill Liao

Bill Liao

Bill Liao at the Third Sector Digital Communications and Social Media Convention 2011 in London
Occupation European venture partner at sosventures
Children 3

Bill Liao (born William Fu Wei Liao, 1967) is an Australian entrepreneur. He is a venture partner with SOSV and listed as an influential investor on Twitter.[1] He is married with three children and lives in Cork, Ireland.

Liao is a social networking pioneer,[2] author,[3] speaker,[4] and is engaged in not for profit work.[5] Among his non-profit endeavours he is a CoderDojo mentor and he has participated as an investor and volunteer in The Hunger Project in Uganda, New York and Mexico.[6]

He has also been appointed as a special diplomatic envoy for St Kitts and Nevis for sustainable development and the environment. Liao has contributed to the St Kitts and Nevis recovery fund for the sugar cane industry there.[7]

He is also a regular attendee at the TED conferences[8] and also the World Economic Forum New Champions conference.[9]

Liao was also the Director of Operations (DOO) of telecommunications company Davnet, which achieved the fastest capital value growth in the history of the Australian Stock exchange[10] and which aggregated Internet access in the riser space[11] of office buildings. Davnet was acquired by Japanese telecommunications carrier Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) in 1996. Liao left Davnet after the acquisition and he turning his attention to other IT endeavours.

He was the first external investor in XING.com, then called openBC.com, which was founded by Lars Hinrichs in Germany in 2003. Later, Liao became a supervisory board member.[12]

In 2009, he founded WeForest.org,[13] an organisation promoting reforestation as a way to combat global warming.[14] WeForest.org continues, with a stated goal of planting two trillion trees by 2020 and is run from Belgium by its current CEO Marie-Noelle Keijzer. Liao is still involved with WeForest and spoke at TED Long Beach 2011 about it.

He was an official part of the delegation of St Kitts and Nevis to the COP15 UN climate change summit in Copenhagen where he also promoted the science and concepts behind WeForest.org.[15]

In 2011, Liao joined SOSV as their European Venture Partner specialising in Internet and social media. He has invested in Mark Little's Storyful[16] venture, Silicon Republic.[17] and MavenHut.[18]

Bill Liao and James Whelton founded CoderDojo,[19] a not-for-profit organisation that teaches children how to code. It aims to teach children creative problem-solving skills and practical creative skills and was launched in Ireland in mid-2011. Liao and Whelton also hope to provide an outlet for children who know how to code to meet other children with similar interests and work on projects in an environment with their peers, similar to a co-working space but less formal.

References

  1. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 20 September 2012. Retrieved 2012-09-16.
  2. ↑ "GlobeForum – Start". Gfbn.com. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  3. ↑ "Stone Soup – Philosophy". Stonesoupway.com. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  4. ↑ "Tribal Stories – Fitting in and Social Media". BrightTALK. 9 March 2010. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  5. ↑ "PR Newswire UK: One Young World Unveils Findings of Global Survey of 20-Somethings and Launches YouTube Contest... – LONDON, August 5 /PRNewswire/". LONDON: Prnewswire.co.uk. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  6. ↑ "Search Bill Liao's photostream". Flickr. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  7. ↑ Liao, Bill (3 July 2009). "Diplomatic appointment letter from the PM | Flickr – Photo Sharing!". Flickr. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  8. ↑ "TED Community " Bill Liao". TED. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  9. ↑ "Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2008: List of Participants" (pdf). World Economic Forum. 4 July 2008. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  10. ↑ "Dare to ask the stupid question and try for a 10,000% return". Theage.com.au. 29 August 2009. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  11. ↑ "Davnet gains further commercial access in US". Ferret: Australia's Manufacturing, Industrial and Mining Directory. Archived from the original on 6 July 2011.
  12. ↑ "Startseite - XING Corporate".
  13. ↑ "Home - WeForest".
  14. ↑ "What We Do". WeForest.org. 2012. Retrieved 4 January 2013.
  15. ↑ "Saint Kitts & Nevis on potential to reforestation & permaculture". Climate Change TV. December 2009. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  16. ↑ "www.storyful.com".
  17. ↑ "www.siliconrepublic.com".
  18. ↑ "SOS Ventures invests 500.000 euros in MavenHut Ltd".
  19. ↑ "CoderDojo Website". Retrieved 22 December 2012.

19. Forests – Reasons to be Hopeful – Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

External links

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