Bill Liao is an Australian entrepreneur. He is a venture partner with SOSV and recognised as one of the Top 100minority ethnic leaders in technology by the Financial Times.
Liao joined SOSV as their European Venture Partner specialising in Internet and social media in 2011. He has made almost 200 partner investments in that time. Most notably he has invested in Mark Little's Storyfulventure, Silicon Republic as well as MavenHut. In 2014 he founded SOSV’s biotech practice, RebelBio, a VC-led investment programme for BioTech, HealthTech And Life Sciences. Liao is Managing Director of RebelBio, which is a world pioneer for life sciences accelerators. Liao co-founded XING.com, a European early social network founded by Lars Hinrichs in Germany in 2003. He was the first external investor in the company, then called openBC.com. Later, Liao became a supervisory board member.. Previously, Liao was the Director of Operations of telecommunications company Davnet, which achieved the fastest capital value growth in the history of the Australian Stock exchange. Davnet was acquired by Japanese telecommunications carrierNippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in 1996. Liao left Davnet after the acquisition.
Social Entrepreneurship
Bill is a passionate social entrepreneur. Alongside James Whelton he founded CoderDojo in Ireland in 2011, a not-for-profit organisation that teaches children how to code. He is Chair of Social Tech Trust, a dedicated grant maker in socially motivated tech in the UK. He is also a CoderDojo mentor and he has participated as an investor and volunteer in The Hunger Project in Uganda, New York and Mexico.
Climate Activism
In 2009, Liao founded WeForest.org,. an organisation promoting reforestation as a way to combat global warming. WeForest.org continues, with a stated goal of planting two trillion trees by 2020 and is run from Belgium by its current CEO Marie-Noelle Keijzer. He was an official part of the delegation of St Kitts and Nevis to the COP15 UN climate change summit in Copenhagen where he also promoted the science and concepts behind WeForest.org.
Awards and Recognition
Liao was appointed as a special diplomatic envoy for St Kitts and Nevis for sustainable development and the environment. He has contributed to the St Kitts and Nevis recovery fund for the sugar cane industry there. In November 2018, Liao was named to the Financial Times' list of the 'Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.'
Personal life
He is married with three children and lives in Cork, Ireland.
