Bill Liao (born William Fu Wei Liao, 1967) is an Australian entrepreneur. He is a venture partner with SOSV and recognised as one of the Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology by the Financial Times.

Career

Liao is a social networking pioneer, author and speaker. He is a regular attendee at the TED conferences and also the World Economic Forum New Champions conference. Since May 9, 2022 Bill Liao has been appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of the SRF (

SENS Research Foundation The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization that does research programs and public relations work for the application of regenerative medicine to aging. It was founded in 2009, located in Mountain View, California, USA. The organiza ...

)

Venture capital

Liao joined

SOSV SOSV is a venture capital firm that provides pre-seed, seed, venture and growth stage funding to startups in the technology sector. The company conducts seed accelerator programs in Asia and the United States of America. SOSV was founded in 1995 ...

as their European Venture Partner specialising in Internet and social media in 2011. Most notably he has invested in Mark Little's

Storyful Storyful is a social media intelligence agency headquartered in Dublin, Ireland that is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp offering services such as social news monitoring, video licensing, and reputation risk management tools for corpo ...

venture,

Silicon Republic Silicon Republic (domain:SiliconRepublic.com) is an Irish technology news website, founded by Ann O'Dea and Darren McAuliffe in 2001. It has been honoured at the Irish Web Awards. InspireFest Silicon Republic ran ''InspireFest'', an annual conve ...

as well as MavenHut. In 2014 he founded SOSV’s biotech practice, RebelBio, a VC-led investment programme for BioTech, HealthTech And Life Sciences. Liao is Managing Director of RebelBio, which is a world pioneer for life sciences accelerators. Liao co-founded XING.com, a European early social network founded by

Lars Hinrichs Lars Hinrichs (born 18 December 1976, Hamburg, Germany) is a German entrepreneur and investor. Hinrichs is best known as the founder of XING, a Germany focused, but worldwide available, social networking website dedicated mostly to cultivating b ...

in Germany in 2003. He was the first external investor in the company, then called openBC.com. Later, Liao became a supervisory board member. Previously, Liao was the Director of Operations (DOO) of telecommunications company Davnet, which achieved the fastest capital value growth in the history of the Australian Stock exchange. Davnet was acquired by Japanese telecommunications carrier

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation , commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked 55th in ''Fortune'' Global 500, NTT is the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world in terms of revenue, as well as the third la ...

(NTT) in 1996. Liao left Davnet after the acquisition.

Social entrepreneurship

Alongside

James Whelton James Whelton is an Irish computer coder, venture capital advisor, and co-founder of CoderDojo, a network of free computer clubs for children. At the age of 16, Whelton became famous for hacking the iPod Nano and creating watch faces for the devi ...

, Liao founded

CoderDojo CoderDojo is a global volunteer-led community of free programming workshops for young people. The movement is a grassroots organisation with individual clubs (called "Dojos") acting independently. A charity called the ''CoderDojo Foundation'' ...

in Ireland in 2011, a not-for-profit organisation that teaches children how to

code In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

. He is Chair of

Nominet UK Nominet UK is currently delegated by IANA to be the manager of the .uk domain name. Nominet directly manages registrations directly under .uk, and some of the second level domains .co.uk, .org.uk, .sch.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk, .ltd.uk and .plc.uk. ...

's Social Tech Trust, a dedicated grant maker in socially motivated tech in the UK. He is also a

mentor and he has participated as an investor and volunteer in

The Hunger Project The Hunger Project (THP), founded in 1977 with the stated goal of ending world hunger in 25 years, is an organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. It has ongoing programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where it implemen ...

in Uganda, New York and

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

Climate activism

In 2009, Liao founded WeForest.org,. an organisation promoting reforestation as a way to combat global warming. 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. 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.

Awards and recognition

Liao was appointed as a special diplomatic envoy for St Kitts and Nevis for sustainable development and the environment. He has contributed to the St Kitts and Nevis recovery fund for the sugar cane industry there. In November 2018, Liao was named to the

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Nik ...

' list of the 'Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.'

Personal life

He is married with three children and lives in

Cork Cork or CORK may refer to: Materials * Cork (material), an impermeable buoyant plant product ** Cork (plug), a cylindrical or conical object used to seal a container ***Wine cork Places Ireland * Cork (city) ** Metropolitan Cork, also known as G ...

, Ireland.

References

23
Forests – Reasons to be Hopeful
– Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

External links

TV Interview

Network Dialogues
{{DEFAULTSORT:Liao, Bill 1967 births Australian businesspeople Living people Australian environmentalists