Bill Liao (born William Fu Wei Liao, 1967) is an Australian entrepreneur.
He is a venture partner with SOSV and listed as an influential investor on Twitter. He is married with three children and lives in Cork, Ireland.
Liao is a social networking pioneer,author,speaker and is engaged in not for profit work. Among his non-profit endeavours he is a CoderDojo mentor and he has participated as an investor and volunteer in The Hunger Project in Uganda, New York and Mexico.
He has also been appointed as a special diplomatic envoy for St Kitts and Nevis for sustainable development and the environment. Liao has contributed to the St Kitts and Nevis recovery fund for the sugar cane industry there.
He is also a regular attendee at the TED conferences and also the World Economic Forum New Champions conference.
Liao was also the Director of Operations (DOO) of telecommunications company Davnet, which achieved the fastest capital value growth in the history of the Australian Stock exchange and which aggregated Internet access in the riser space of office buildings. Davnet was acquired by Japanese telecommunications carrier Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) in 1996. Liao left Davnet after the acquisition and he turning his attention to other IT endeavours.
He was the first external investor in XING.com, then called openBC.com, which was founded by Lars Hinrichs in Germany in 2003. Later, Liao became a supervisory board member.
In 2009, he 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. Liao is still involved with WeForest and spoke at TED Long Beach 2011 about it.
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.
In 2011, Liao joined SOSV as their European Venture Partner specialising in Internet and social media. He has invested in Mark Little’s Storyful venture, Silicon Republic. and MavenHut.
Bill Liao and James Whelton founded CoderDojo, a not-for-profit organisation that teaches children how to code. It aims to teach children creative problem-solving skills and practical creative skills and was launched in Ireland in mid-2011. Liao and Whelton also hope to provide an outlet for children who know how to code to meet other children with similar interests and work on projects in an environment with their peers, similar to a co-working space but less formal.
