William Tai Ph.D

William Tai Ph.D General Information

Biography

Dr. William Tai is a Co-Founder and serves as a Board Member at Extreme Tech Challenge. He also is a Co-Founding Investor of OneOf. He also is a Co-Founder and serves as Chairman of the Board at Treasure Data. He is a Co-Founder and serves as a Special Limited Partner at ACTAI Ventures. He is a Co-Founder of Sangha Capital. He is also a board member of Ensemble Communication. He is a Co-Founder & serves as Chairman at Metagood. He serves as a Board Member at Jacana and Kickfurther. He also serves as an Advisor at Stack Capital Group and CrowdClip. He serves as an Advisor and global Ambassador at Powerledger. He served as a Board Member at Glyde. He also serves as an Advisor at Tango. He also served as a Partner at MaiTai Global. He serves as Head of the Strategy Committee, Board Member, and Advisor at BitFury. He also serves as an Advisor at Emercoin. He is a prolific individual investor and entrepreneur, and a Board Director of Voxer. He served as a Board Member at Scribd. He has been funding companies as a Venture Capitalist since 1991 and has had 23 companies he backed at the early stage grow to become listed companies. He has served on 8 public company boards from his portfolio. He has been involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem since 2010. He is an early backer of Bitfury Group having personally funded their Bitcoin mining ASIC ~8 years ago. He is the Board Chair of one of North America's largest publicly listed Bitcoin and Ethereum mining operations, $2 Billion (market cap) HUT8 Mining (NASDAQ: HUT), an Angel backer of Dapper Labs (creator of Cryptokitties and NBA Topshot), and a co-founder of NFT companies MetaGood and OneOf. As a personal VC, he is Zoom Video's first backer and among the first backers of 'unicorns' Canva, Color Genomics, Class.com, Dapper Labs, and SafetyCulture. He has had more than 20 of his early-stage companies grow to be publicly listed companies. He has an operating background as founding Chairman of network operating system pioneer IPInfusion (Tokyo Stock Exchange:4813), and Founding CEO and Chair of iAsiaWorks (IPO Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley), which operated Internet Data Centers in 10 countries across Asia in the 1990s. Originally trained as a computer chip designer, and joined the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor at the startup of LSI Logic during the 'silicification' of Silicon Valley and was issued Badge #A001 during the formative years of Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE TSM) which is now among the ten most valuable companies in the world. He started the semiconductor practice at Alex Brown & Sons in the 1980s, handling the IPOs of companies such as Atmel, Cirrus Logic, and Zilog. He holds a BSEE with honors from the University of Illinois, an MBA from Harvard, and an Honours Ph.D. from Curtin University where he is an Adjunct Professor of "Innovation and Economic Development" and Chairs ACTAI Global, a 501c3 uniting Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators to fuel technology-based environmental conservation and economic development via entrepreneurship.