Bill Tai
General Partner at Charles River Ventures
Palo Alto, California
Overview
Work Experience
Member of the Board of Advisors
2023 - Current
Chairman of the Board
2017
Board Chairman of HUT8 Corp, publicly listed in 2017 (NASDAQ: HUT). HUT is an energy infrastructure company with subsidiaries HighriseAI (Nvidia GPU based data centers) and American Bitcoin (crypto mining). HUT was once a division of Bitfury Corp, a pioneering Bitcoin Miner with custom designed ASICs starting 2011. HUT8 Corp as of 2024 manages over 1 Gigawatt of energy with pipeline of 12 Gigawatts fueling its subsidiaries as well as providing managed services to other data center operations. As of 2024, HUT8 8 Corp is also among the top 5 largest listed company holders of Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
Chairman of the Board ; Co - Founder / Founding Investor
2012
Cofounder / largest individual investor, Chief cheerleader and Chairman of the Board at Treasure Data from its creation all the way through acquisition by Softbank’s ARM corporation in the largest acquisition in ARM's history. We are a data pipeline and repository upon which AI & Machine Learning applications are built. Our team invented www.fluentd.org - a technology now used by 20,000 unique organizations including all the "FAANGs" (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and which has reached over 100 Million nodes deployed. As of our acquisition by ARM our customers were uploading over 7 Trillion rows of data monthly to our Big Data infrastructure, from which they could distill knowledge from aggregated, heterogeneous 'wide - area' data sources.
Treasure Data is a software development company that develops a cloud-based data analytics platform for data management.
Raised $288,050,000.00 from SoftBank and Carbide Ventures.
Angel / Seed Investor
2012
Honored to have CEO Eric Yuan ask me to back him at the start of Zoom. I was super lucky to be the 1st to commit to provide seed capital to what has become Zoom Video - the clear leader in the video meeting and collaboration segment.
Board Member
2012
Angel Investor and Outside Board Member / Director at Voxer, a company leading the category (#13 most downloaded app in itunes 2012) in real time 'push to talk' communications on smartphones. Voxer is displacing what was a multi billion dollar revenue category of PTT (push to talk) communications services like Nextel with modern and more scaleable products and technology. It's also consistently a top consumer app in the 'social' category of the iphone and Android ecosystems. As much a company, as it is a social phenomena. (I used to say that about twitter when it was in its infancy).
Voxer is a powerful push-to-talk service that works worldwide on any iOS or Android device.
Raised $30,000,000.00 from IT-Farm, Windcrest Partners, AFSquare, Matthew Luckett, IVP, Webb Investment Network, Chris Dixon, Roger McNamee, Tuesday Capital and Intel Capital.
Formative Seed Investor
2012
Honored to be the Catalytic seed backer at the start of Canva!
Adjunct Professor of Innovation & Economic Development
2011
Visiting Professor, Innovation and Economic Development. Office of the Vice Chancellor. Creator of the Western Australia Mobile App (WAPPS) and OzApp Startup Developer competitions.
Advisor / Board Member Emeritus
2008
Lead Investor and Board Member at Scribd from 2008 - 2014. Currently an Advisor having stepped off the Board April 2014. Scribd is a profitable web social publishing site that allows users to post and share written content. Scribd is among the Internet's top 50 websites in traffic and users, with over 90 million monthly viewers. www.scribd.com
Scribd is an unlimited reading subscription that offers access to books, audiobooks, magazine articles, documents and more.
Raised $106,750,000.00 from Spectrum Equity.
Partner Emeritus / General Partner
2002
Led the establishment of CRV's Silicon Valley presence in 2002 as a General Partner. Transitioned to 'Partner Emeritus' in mid 2014 maintaining board positions and investments in prior funds. Charles River Ventures was founded in 1970 in Boston to commercialise technology from M.I.T. and is one of the country's oldest venture capital investment firms. Among the firm's early start up investments were MCI, Continental Cablevision and Amgen. More recently CRV is a backer of Twitter, Yammer, Zendesk.
CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in investments in technology companies.
Seed or Angel Investor
1990
Personal angel seed backer in a number of companies from around the world. From Australia: Canva.com, www.liven.love, powerledger.io, SafetyCulture. From Japan - TreasureData and IPInfusion. From the UK - dyad.net, reface.ai, Tweetdeck (Twitter) and Jacana.life. From the USA: blaze.tech, class.com, calyptia.com, clovers.ai, Dapper Labs, Fairmatic, Gigaverse, Lineage Logistics, Metagood, One of, TVU Networks, tango.me, Twitter (via acq of Tweetdeck), Voxer, Zoom.us.