Bill Tai has been a ‘hands on’ early stage Venture Capitalist since 1991 and has had 22 of his startups become listed companies. He is among the first investors in ‘unicorn’ companies Canva, Color Genomics, Safety Culture, Tweetdeck/Twitter, Wish.com and Zoom Video, where he was the first backer to commit at the company’s formation. He was also founding Chairman of Treasure Data (acquired by ARM/Softbank), IPInfusion (acquired by Access Corp), iAsiaWorks (IPO via Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley), and Tradebeam (acquired by Avolin).
Bill Tai talked with KDT about everything from his background in Silicon Valley in CA and the beginnings of his career, to how he works with start-ups. Tai told us about the early days of Twitter (back when it was TWTR), how his venture firm decided to seed it, and what he saw in Zoom even when it had only 20,000 users. Now 300 million users strong, Bill’s confidence in the platform is benefitting all of us.
Watch our full interview with Bill Tai, and check out the Ctrl/Alt/Disrupt breakouts below.
