taiwan
(25)
Rob Kuo and the business of a second helping
A video can win an audience. A cup of tea has to win it again. PressPlay co-founder Rob Kuo has built his career around the distance between the two.
Dennis Lin and the customer who could leave
Dennis Lin (林鼎鈞) helped turn creator subscriptions into PressPlay Academy. Along the way, the customer with a cancel button taught him to rethink what a learning business owes its audience.
Johnson Lee and the case for a little competition
The E Ink CEO built a business around displays that know how to sit still. His more surprising move was helping other companies compete.
Stephen Chen and the surprisingly difficult business of cutting grass
After a career in phones, Stephen Chen built a robotics company around a job that never stays finished. His second act at URSROBOT begins with a lesson from an earlier attempt: find the work before building the machine.
Augie Lien and the Art of Starting Again
He stepped away from Cardiva’s CEO desk years before its acquisition. With Aulisa, Augustine “Augie” Lien began another chapter, drawing on a career that connects Taiwan, Silicon Valley and the practical work of building companies.
Amanda Liu and the Distance Between an Idea and an Order
Before founding StarFab, Amanda Liu worked inside Taiwan’s technology industry. Her next undertaking was to help startups reach the companies that might actually buy what they built.
Lee Chen’s other networking problem
He helped build three networking companies. Along the way, Lee Chen learned that the difficult connections were often between people - and that even engineers had to answer the customer.
Sidney Lu and the education of a connector
He left Taiwan for Illinois, built a career in the parts that connect electronics, and returned to help rebuild the place that taught him. Sidney Lu’s story runs through factories, classrooms and a debt to his mother.
DennisTC Lin and the price of paying attention
A fan can applaud once. A learner needs a reason to return. PressPlay co-founder DennisTC Lin built his business around that difference, from creator subscriptions in Taiwan to a new chapter with KKCompany.
Mark Huang Bet on Hydrogen Before the Current Arrived
The YC Synergy founder spent years fitting fuel cells into boats, buses and factories. His wager is refreshingly concrete: hydrogen earns its place by solving the awkward problems the rest of the grid leaves behind.
Augie Lien’s Long Game: From Silicon Valley Exits to a Two-Country Medical-Device Build
Six ventures, decades of regulated hardware, and one recurring playbook: pair patient-monitoring engineering with the patience to build across borders.
Jerming Gu
Jerming Gu is the Taiwanese founder and CEO of CANDY HOUSE, the company behind SESAME, the smart lock that clamps onto an existing deadbolt and turns a smartphone into a key. He started the company as a Stanford mechanical engineering master's student in 2014 with co-founder Jongho Shin, then turned a 3D-printed dorm-room prototype into a Kickstarter phenomenon that raised roughly $1.4 million in 2015. After a decade building a dominant smart-lock business in Japan - including funding from ITOCHU and a strategic alliance with lock maker MIWA - he relaunched CANDY HOUSE in the US and Canada in 2025 with a lineup spanning SESAME 5, face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-compatible hubs.
Bill Lin
Bill Lin is the Deputy CEO and Board Member of One Mobility GmbH, the automotive arm of Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), headquartered in Reutlingen, Germany. With a career spanning supply chain management, management consulting, and EV business leadership at Foxconn, Lin bridges Taiwan's electronics manufacturing powerhouse with Germany's century-old automotive precision engineering heritage. He also serves as Chief Integration Officer at FIT, steering the integration of One Mobility's 11,000-person global workforce across 40+ locations in 17 countries following the 2024 acquisition of Auto-Kabel Group.
Alex Yeh
Alex Yeh is the Founder and CEO of GMI Cloud, a GPU-native AI cloud infrastructure company he built from Bitcoin mining data centers into a global AI infrastructure leader in just 30 days. GMI Cloud — one of only 6 NVIDIA Reference Platform Partners worldwide — raised $82M in Series A funding in 2024 and is behind a $12 billion sovereign AI infrastructure initiative in Japan. Yeh's mission: make building AI applications as simple as building a website on Shopify.
Cheng Wu
Cheng Wu is a General Partner at Taiwania Capital and a four-time founder whose networking and video startups have returned over $6 billion to investors. Best known for selling ArrowPoint Communications to Cisco for $5.7 billion in 2000, he now invests in early- and growth-stage technology companies bridging Silicon Valley, Taiwan, and Asia.
Jun Shi
Jun Shi is CEO and President of Accton Technology, the $7.9B Taiwanese ODM powerhouse behind much of the world's white-box networking hardware. A 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley's networking giants — Cisco, Juniper, and F5 — he shepherded startup Volterra from inception through its $500 million acquisition before joining Accton in 2023. Now he's steering the company's ambitious pivot: from hardware maker to full-stack open infrastructure provider, anchored by Nexvec, a turnkey AI-ready infrastructure solution launched in May 2025.
Leander Yu
Leander Yu is the founder and CEO of Graid Technology Inc., a Sunnyvale-based startup that invented the world's first GPU-accelerated RAID solution for NVMe SSDs - SupremeRAID. With over 25 years in the storage industry and a prior successful exit (Bigtera to Silicon Motion in 2017), Yu built Graid in 2019 to solve a fundamental bottleneck: traditional RAID controllers can't keep up with modern NVMe speeds. By offloading RAID computation to a GPU, SupremeRAID delivers up to 28 million IOPS and 260GB/s throughput from a single card. The company raised a $30M Series B in March 2025 led by Foxconn and CTBC joint venture, and signed a landmark licensing deal with Intel for VROC technology in late 2025.
Ray Chiu
Po-Jui 'Ray' Chiu is CEO and Co-Founder of Calyx (formerly BioInspira), a Berkeley-based agtech company that brings AI vision and bio-engineered phage sensors to poultry and livestock farming. A Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy honoree (2019), Chiu built his company out of a UC Berkeley capstone project and a personal brush with disaster - the 2014 Kaohsiung gas explosions that threatened his relatives' neighborhood in Taiwan. Today, Calyx's AI Eye camera system predicts chicken weights at 98.4% accuracy across 17+ million birds, while its Y-Series sensors monitor ammonia, CO2, temperature, and humidity in real time.
Alfred Lin
Alfred Lin is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of venture capital's most storied firms, where he co-steers a $7 billion AI-focused expansion fund alongside Pat Grady. A Taiwanese immigrant who resold Tony Hsieh's pizza by the slice at Harvard, Lin went on to be CFO, COO, and Chairman of Zappos - guiding it to its first profitable year and a $1.2 billion Amazon acquisition - before joining Sequoia in 2010. His portfolio reads like a decade of defining bets: Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Instacart, Reddit, and OpenAI. A three-time Forbes Midas List #1, he is the rare investor who has lived the operator's grind and brings that lens to every founder he backs.
Hans Tung
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital), one of the most decorated venture capitalists in the world with 13 consecutive appearances on the Forbes Midas List - peaking at #3 globally. A Taiwanese immigrant who moved to Los Angeles at 13, Stanford-trained, and one of the first Silicon Valley VCs to relocate full-time to China in 2005, Hans has backed over 16 unicorns including Airbnb, Coinbase, Slack, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Anthropic across three decades and three waves of technology: internet, mobile/cloud, and now AI.
Lisa Su
Lisa Su is the President and CEO of AMD, leading one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in tech history. Since taking the helm in 2014, she transformed AMD from a struggling chipmaker on the brink of irrelevance into a $378 billion semiconductor titan that rivals Intel and powers the AI revolution. The MIT-trained electrical engineer with a PhD in semiconductors isn't just building chips - she's reshaping the future of computing, from gaming consoles to data centers to artificial intelligence. Named Time's CEO of the Year in 2024 and recognized as one of the world's most powerful women, Su runs toward the hardest problems in an industry where failure means obsolescence.
Steve Chen
Steve Chen is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer best known as co-founder and former CTO of YouTube, which he and his PayPal colleagues built in 2005 and sold to Google for $1.65 billion just 18 months later. Born in Taipei and immigrating to the U.S. at age seven, Chen dropped out of the University of Illinois computer science program to join PayPal as one of its first 10 employees. After revolutionizing online video sharing with YouTube, he co-founded AVOS Systems, launched the video app MixBit, joined Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence, and eventually returned to Taiwan to nurture the island's startup ecosystem and connect Taiwanese entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley.
Kevin Lin
Kevin Lin is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of Twitch.tv — the live-streaming platform acquired by Amazon for ~$970 million in 2014. Serving as COO for 12.5 years, he helped grow Twitch to 90%+ market share, $1.5B annual revenue, and 2,000+ employees. After departing in 2020, he co-founded Metatheory (a Web3 gaming company backed by a16z), launched Lifelike Capital (an early-stage VC fund), and co-created the Ikigai Launchpad accelerator in Taipei — all while staying deeply rooted in his Taiwanese heritage and AAPI community through Gold House.
Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson is the founder of Stratechery, the subscription newsletter that essentially invented the paid independent newsletter model. Writing from Taiwan for over a decade before returning to the US in 2025, he developed Aggregation Theory - the most influential framework for understanding how internet platforms accumulate power - while building a solo business earning $5M+ annually from 40,000+ paying subscribers. Substack's founders literally used him as their pitch-deck inspiration. He also co-hosts three podcasts, including Dithering with John Gruber, where every episode is exactly 15 minutes by design.
Wayne Chang
Wayne Chang is a Taiwanese-American serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and technologist who co-founded Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter for ~$260M, then sold to Google as Fabric), co-founded Digits (AI-powered fintech for SMBs), and is currently building Reasoner, a neurosymbolic AI company claiming to outperform OpenAI's o1 models. Named one of Forbes' Top 50 Angel Investors with 80+ investments and 31+ exits generating over $150 billion in combined value, Chang also holds the coveted @wayne Twitter handle, holds 20+ patents, won an Emmy for producing Chasing Coral, and helped launch Dropbox by recruiting co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.