Bill Tai

Bill Tai

Bill Tai joined Charles River Ventures in 2002 to help establish the firm’s Silicon Valley office in 2002. He has been a venture capitalist since 1991; initially as a Vice President of Walden Group, then a General Partner of IVP (Institutional Venture Partners).

Over several decades, he has funded nearly 50 early stage companies in a variety of technology segments: 16 of those evolved to become publicly listed companies, including 8×8, Inc, Award Software, Microtune, and Transmeta among others. His focus areas today include disruptive enabling technologies as well as digital media and web based services. His current portfolio includes: Glyde – a next generation commerce platform company, Maxthon – among China’s leading web browser (508 million downloads to date), Nantero – enabling super dense solid state memory utilizing carbon nanotubes, and Scribd – a social publishing company with over 50M monthly users, among others.

Bill is known as a ‘hands on’ early stage VC, having served as Chairman of IPInfusion (acquired by Access Corp – Tokyo Stock Exchange: 4813), Founding CEO of iAsiaWorks (NASDAQ IPO in 2000) and Founding President of Tradebeam (acquired by CDC Software: NASD: CDCS). Prior to his career in venture capital, he established the semiconductor practice at Alex. Brown & Sons as Vice President of Research, where he led the positioning of the public offerings for Adaptec, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Dallas Semiconductor, Exar, and Zilog. He also was an early employee of LSI Logic, serving in Product Marketing roles.

Bill holds a BSEE from the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. When he is not working with his start ups, you may find him on the water – he is a USA Team Rider for Cabrinha Kiteboarding and serves as an Olympic Ambassador for the IKA (International Kiteboard Association).