BT

Bill Tai

Venture Capitalist, Athlete, Adjunct Professor

Palo Alto, California

Work Experience

  • Member of the Board of Advisors

    2023

  • Chairman of the Board ; Co - Founder / Founding Investor

    2012

    Cofounder / largest individual investor, Chief cheerleader and Chairman of the Board at Treasure Data from its creation all the way through acquisition by Softbank’s ARM corporation in the largest acquisition in ARM's history. We are a data pipeline and repository upon which AI & Machine Learning applications are built. Our team invented www.fluentd.org - a technology now used by 20,000 unique organizations including all the "FAANGs" (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and which has reached over 100 Million nodes deployed. As of our acquisition by ARM our customers were uploading over 7 Trillion rows of data monthly to our Big Data infrastructure, from which they could distill knowledge from aggregated, heterogeneous 'wide - area' data sources.

  • Angel / Seed Investor

    2012

    Honored to have CEO Eric Yuan ask me to back him at the start of Zoom. I was super lucky to be the 1st to commit to provide seed capital to what has become Zoom Video - the clear leader in the video meeting and collaboration segment.

2012

  • Board Member

    2012

    Angel Investor and Outside Board Member / Director at Voxer, a company leading the category (#13 most downloaded app in itunes 2012) in real time 'push to talk' communications on smartphones. Voxer is displacing what was a multi billion dollar revenue category of PTT (push to talk) communications services like Nextel with modern and more scaleable products and technology. It's also consistently a top consumer app in the 'social' category of the iphone and Android ecosystems. As much a company, as it is a social phenomena. (I used to say that about twitter when it was in its infancy).

  • Adjunct Professor of Innovation & Economic Development

    2011

    Visiting Professor, Innovation and Economic Development. Office of the Vice Chancellor. Creator of the Western Australia Mobile App (WAPPS) and OzApp Startup Developer competitions.

2008

  • Advisor / Board Member Emeritus

    2008

    Lead Investor and Board Member at Scribd from 2008 - 2014. Currently an Advisor having stepped off the Board April 2014. Scribd is a profitable web social publishing site that allows users to post and share written content. Scribd is among the Internet's top 50 websites in traffic and users, with over 90 million monthly viewers. www.scribd.com

  • Partner Emeritus / General Partner

    2002

    Led the establishment of CRV's Silicon Valley presence in 2002 as a General Partner. Transitioned to 'Partner Emeritus' in mid 2014 maintaining board positions and investments in prior funds. Charles River Ventures was founded in 1970 in Boston to commercialise technology from M.I.T. and is one of the country's oldest venture capital investment firms. Among the firm's early start up investments were MCI, Continental Cablevision and Amgen. More recently CRV is a backer of Twitter, Yammer, Zendesk.

  • Seed or Angel Investor

    1990

    Personal angel seed backer in a number of companies from around the world. From Australia: Canva.com, www.liven.love, powerledger.io, SafetyCulture. From Japan - TreasureData and IPInfusion. From the UK - dyad.net, reface.ai, Tweetdeck (Twitter) and Jacana.life. From the USA: blaze.tech, class.com, calyptia.com, clovers.ai, Dapper Labs, Fairmatic, Gigaverse, Lineage Logistics, Metagood, One of, TVU Networks, tango.me, Twitter (via acq of Tweetdeck), Voxer, Zoom.us.

  • Chairman of the Board

    2012 - 2016

    Elected Chairman of the Board, 2012. Maxthon now provides cloud connected / synchronized browsers across iphones, ipads, android phones and tablets, PC's & mac computers, as well as 'kid safe' browsers in tablets sold by Walmart and other retailers. Among the world's fastest HTML5 rendering using the webkit engine. Cloud back end provides services for developers to build 'virtualized storage and compute' into apps for better performance. 700M total downloads since 2005.

  • Board Member

    2006 - 2016

    Lead Investor and Board Member of MAXTHON (www.maxthon.com); provider of desktop and mobile browsers with built in cloud services. Maxthon's products have been downloaded over 600,000,000 times across 60+ countries.

  • Team Rider, Americas, USA

    2008 - 2015

    USA Team Rider