About Keynote

Steve Westly, Founder and CEO, The Westly Group, Former California State Controller and the Chief Financial Officer. 

Steve Westly is CEO of The Westly Group; a venture advisory firm, which helps entrepreneurs, builds the clean technology companies of the future.  Before launching his firm, Mr. Westly was California State Controller and the chief financial officer of the world's sixth largest economy.  As Controller, Westly spearheaded innovative tax programs to help close the State's budget deficit and led the effort to commit more than $1 billion to clean technology investments.  

Before serving as Controller, Westly worked as senior vice president at eBay, where he guided the online auction company through its period of most rapid growth.  Mr. Westly has held a variety of executive positions in Silicon Valley and was on the faculty of Stanford's Graduate school of Business for five years.  He currently runs the California Leadership Committee, a PAC committed to supporting the next generation of Democratic leaders, and the Westly Foundation, a charitable foundation focused on education, health, and the environment.  

Mr. Westly has both a BA and an MBA from Stanford University and lives in San Mateo County with his wife and two children. 

About Visionary Host

 Tim Wilson, General Partner, Partech International 

Tim joined Partech International in 2001 and focuses on communications and components investments.

Between 1997 and 2001, Tim was the Chief Marketing Officer for Digital Island, a Partech portfolio company. The company was acquired by Cable & Wireless in 2001 for $350M. Prior to Digital Island, Tim was a General Manager at Lucent Technology where he led the international voice communications product management team (now Avaya) with P&L for product lines generating over $2B in annual sales and coauthored a VOIP related patent. Before Lucent, Tim held a variety of senior management positions within AT&T (North America and Australia) and AT&T Bell Labs from 1983-1995.

Tim's current portfolio companies include Discera, Invensense, Spudnik and Teknovus where he holds a board seat with each company.

He graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin College receiving his undergraduate degree in Physics. He received his MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business where he was named a Fuqua Scholar.

Investments: Discera, Invensense. Spudnik & Teknovus

About Distinguished Speakers

Dixon R. Doll, Cofounder and General Partner, DCM

For more than 35 years, Dixon has influenced and guided entrepreneurs, investors and executives in the computer and communications industries. In recognition of his accomplishments in venture capital, Dixon was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the top 100 venture investors on its Midas List for the past four years, as well as one of the top 100 personalities involved in creating the information highway by Upside Magazine. In April, 2005, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association in Washington, D.C.  He was recently appointed to the NVCA Executive Committee, is chairing the 2007 Annual Meeting, and will become NVCA Chairman-elect in April, 2007.

Since the early 1980s, Dixon has been a telecom and Internet venture capital pioneer. In 1996 he launched DCM, an early stage technology venture capital firm, which currently has, more than $1.5 Billion under management, headquartered in Menlo Park, California. DCM has backed such well-known entrepreneurial companies as About.com, @Motion, Clearwire, 51job, Foundry Networks, Internap, Ipivot, Neutral Tandem, PGP Corp., Recourse Technologies, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, and Sling Media. DCM has become widely recognized as one of the top Silicon Valley venture firms actively investing in China and Japan. In the mid-1980’s, Dixon cofounded the venture capital industry’s first fund focused exclusively on telecommunications opportunities. Those funds he organized launched such noteworthy companies as Alantec, Bridge Communication, Centillion Networks, Network Equipment Technologies, Optilink, Picturetel, Polycom, and UUNet.

He has authored two books, and traveled extensively to six continents to give highly sought after lectures and conference presentations. Through their family foundation, he and his wife, Carol, give generously to numerous educational and philanthropic organizations.  Among these are, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (where he serves as Chair of the museum’s dual governing boards), San Francisco Symphony, Kansas State University, the University of Michigan Business School, the Papal Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the University of San Francisco where he has served as the Investment Committee Chair. He also has served as a trustee or advisory board member for each of these organizations. He received his B.S.E.E. degree (cum laude) from Kansas State University as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, where he was a National Science Foundation scholar.

Ricky Ma, General Manager, ICT, HKSTP

As Senior Manager of the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP), Ricky Ma champions the interests of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Precision Engineering technology (Optoelectronics and nanotechnology) clusters at the Science Park and three Industrial Parks in Hong Kong.  HKSTP is committed to ensuring that Hong Kong is recognized both at home and abroad as a Centre of innovation and technology for hi-tech enterprises.

Ricky Ma previous working experience included Regional MIS Manager, Chief IT Consultant, Country Director for Inchape, Australian Government, ICL and Multisoft.  Ricky brings to bear over twenty years of private and public sector senior engineering and management experience in UK, Australia and  Hong Kong to serving as an informed advocate, marketer and facilitator of Hong Kong technology industry interests and capabilities.

He is the Vice Chairman of the Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology (AAST) and the Director of international affairs of the Hong Kong Optoelectronics Association (HKOEA). Ricky received Bsc (Hons), MBA, FHKAAST

Tony Luh, Cofounder and Managing Director, DFJ Dragon Fund China

Born in Japan, grew up in Thailand, and possesses profound knowledge in the Chinese language and culture, Tony spent his professional career in both Asia and the U.S. Tony has over 18 years of experience in capital markets, sales, strategic alliances and new business development. Tony is now a managing director of DFJ

DragonFund China – a $100M China focused early stage venture capital fund. Tony has been a managing director with DragonVenture since he cofounded it in 1999. Prior to DragonVenture, Tony was an executive for an early stage first generation Chinese Internet company – Infowave Communications. Through his involvement with Infowave, Mr. Luh influenced the early developments of Internet in Asia. As a business development executive, he struck strategic alliance and marketing deals with, among others, Yahoo!, Microsoft, TeleBank (now E*Trade), and ELoan. Tony, an avid baseball fan, was the first ever amateur/professional Major League Baseball simulcast Mandarin announcer for the Oakland A's. That was his part time fun as he helped grow ad revenues for KCNS, an ethnic TV station in San Francisco, a whopping 800% in four years between 1993 and 1997. In the mid to late 80’s in Taiwan as the corporate fund manager for Kosheng Enterprises, Mr. Luh accumulated public investment expertise in sectors ranging from information technology to high volume manufacturing in Asia. Tony attended three different high schools in three different countries. Tony also attended three different universities in three different states (Washington, Texas, California) in the U. S.

Ann Winblad, Co-founding Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. 

Ann Winblad is the co-founding Partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.  Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (www.humwin.com) is a leading venture capital firm focused on software investing and manages over $1 billion in cumulative capital.  Since Hummer Winblad Venture Partners’ inception in 1989 the firm has launched over 90 new software companies. 

Ann has over 25 years of experience in the software industry as a successful software entrepreneur, strategy advisor, technical author and venture capitalist. Her background and experience have been chronicled in many national business and trade publications. 

Ann has a BA in Mathematics and in Business Administration.  She has an MA in Education with a focus in International Economics from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.  Ann also has an honorary Doctorate of Law degree from the University of St. Thomas. 

Ann served and serves as a Director of numerous start-up and public companies. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of St. Thomas, co-chair of SDForum and serves as an advisor to many entrepreneurial organizations.

Dag Syrrist, Managing General Partner, Vision Capital 

Mr. Syrrist had a broad range of fund management, direct investing and financial structuring experience from 20 years of venture capital investing in the US and Europe.

Mr. Syrrist is a Managing General Partner of Vision Capital, a $175 million venture capital group with offices in California and Geneva, Switzerland. Vision Capital, a pioneer in Trans-Atlantic investing focuses on funding leading European technology company’s expanding into the US market and Asia Pacific markets.  Mr. Syrrist heads the investment committee at Vision Capital. 

Prior to joining Vision in 1997, Mr. Syrrist was a VP with Technology Funding, a $350 million venture capital group with over 200 portfolio companies.  At TFI Mr. Syrrist established their environmental technology investing group. He founded the then largest environmental venture capital conference in the US. He was particular active in developing state and national regulatory reform to accelerate commercialization of environmental technologies.  Mr. Syrrist joined Technology Funding in 1988.

Mr. Syrrist has chaired and worked with numerous national, private and government advisory boards in technology, regulatory affairs and policy, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, National Science Foundation, White House Office of Science and Technology, Western Governors Association, Sandia National Laboratory, NATO Scientific Advisory Board and the Harvard School of Public Health. 

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Atempo Inc., More Magic Systems Inc., Virtutech Inc., and ChipIdea SA and non-for profit organizations in education and health care in the San Francisco Bay Area.      

Mr. Syrrist holds a BA in Business Administration from Lincoln University and an MA in International Economics from San Francisco State University. 

Scott Chou, General Partner, Gabriel Venture Partners

Mr. Scott Chou is a General Partner at Gabriel Venture Partners. He is known within the venture industry for his focus on disruptive technologies and for authoring Maxims, Morals, and Metaphors – A Philosophical Guide to Venture Capital. Scott’s passion for early stage technology ventures extends back to high school when he joined his first startup as a software engineer. He has since worked for five more technology ventures including Poqet Computer and ICE in addition to world-renowned research and development organizations such as Bellcore and IBM. His broad expertise in technology spans the industry from manufacturing to software development and even chip design. Scott completed the prestigious Kauffman Fellows Program with Onset Ventures and is currently the chairman of the alumni network. He later joined Gabriel Venture Partners where he pursues research labs for fundamental innovations. Scott currently serves on the boards of Boston Power, iForem, NextG Networks, Sequoia Communications, SkyCross, and YLX. His educational background includes a bachelor’s Degree in electrical engineering with honors from Caltech as well as master’s degrees from Harvard University and Stanford University.

Lyle Fong, CEO and Cofounder, Lithium Technologies

Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies, a leading provider of on-demand community solutions, including proven forums, social networking, and chat. Lyle assumed the role of CEO in December of 2006 and since has risen $9 million in Series A financing on the heels of three straight quarters of record sales growth.

Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielson NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of

Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and

spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.

Before Lithium Technologies and GX Media, Lyle launched two other startups - a specialized computer services business which has since expanded into one of the largest ISPs in China and a software consulting business, NetStreams.

Lyle studied at UC Berkeley, majoring in Computer Science, where he received the Hewlett-Packard Scholarship Award and National Youth Leadership Award. 

Karl Jacob, CEO and Founder, Wallop

Karl has been building and advising companies for the last 14 years. During his career, he has risen over $200 million from prestigious investors and has built four companies taking them from no revenue to significant revenues or to acquisition. The remaining companies are profitable and generating in excess of $120 million in revenue per year. Jacob has received numerous awards including being named one of Business Week’s top ten up-and-comers. In addition, he has spent much of his career-advising entrepreneurs and his insight has led to numerous financings and mergers.

Jacob most recently took Cloudmark from no revenue and $50,000 in investment to $16 million in investment and over $5 million in revenue. Prior to this, he joined Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence in July 1999, charged with creating the "next big thing." He formed Keen, and was the CEO and President until May of 2002. While at Keen, he led the company to be credited as one of the fastest growing commerce companies in history taking it from no revenue to sustained revenue and membership growth. The company has been profitable for 7 quarters and in 2004 generated over $67 million in revenue. During Jacob’s tenure, the company was recognized by Fortune as a Cool Company. Prior to Keen he spent two years as a Microsoft executive, following Microsoft's acquisition of Dimension X where he was founder and CEO. Jaco’s first company, On Ramp, Inc., created some of the first Internet web sites and marketing campaigns for companies like Disney, Fox, AT&T and Reebok.

Jacob speaks on pivotal business issues at conferences including the Global Internet Project, DEMO, FIRE, COMDEX, Churchill Club, Harvard Business School Alumni and the USC School of Business. He was a board member or an advisor to many companies including Dimension X, Keen, Cloudmark, IMMI, REAL Kiteboarding and Facebook. Jacob holds a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Southern California. He currently sits on the school's board of counselors for the School of Engineering. 

John Lily, COO, Mozilla Corporation 

John is responsible for the day-to-day and international operations of Mozilla, and leads partner relations and strategic alliances worldwide. A member of the board of directors of Mozilla Corporation, he was previously the founder, CTO and VP products of Reactivity, an XML Security company. He served as a senior scientist at Apple Computer Research Labs and has held positions at Trilogy Software, Sun Microsystems and HP, among other companies. John is a regular speaker at industry events and serves on the board of directors of Open Source Application Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. He is also a member of the board of library trustees for the city of Sunnyvale. A holder of 5 US patents for software technology, he earned a B. Sc. and M. Sc. in computer science from Stanford University.

Dion Lim, President and COO, Simply Hired, Inc. 

Dion is currently President and COO of job search engine Simply Hired.  He is an experienced tech exec whose resume reads like a short history of the Internet itself: co-founder of Epinions.com (now Shopping.com), COO at Chinese portal Sina.com, Director of Biz Dev at Quote.com (now Lycos), co-founder of the "dot-com Petri dish" Round Zero, and marketing exec at Schwab. 

Prior to the Internet, he started his career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and in venture capital at Hambrecht & Quist.  Dion is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy. 

Dr. Priscilla M. Lu, Chairman & CEO, Videonline Communication, Inc.

Dr. Priscilla M. Lu has over twenty-five years of international industry experience in telecommunications, with significant relationships at the CEO, CTO level with major carriers in China, South East Asia, U.S. and Europe. She led early efforts in technology innovation in the GSM cellular networking space back in the early nineties, and earned worldwide recognition for her leadership in innovation, with 3 Special Recognition Awards in different years at the 3GSM Annual conference held in Cannes, France.  

As Chairman and CEO of ViDeOnline Communications Ltd founded in 2004, Dr. Lu current company ViDeonline is the leader in secured video networks with content aggregation for electronic content delivery. The Company is poised to launch its services in Asia in fall 2006. Major Hollywood content and local content as well as entertainment in music, music videos, games and other content genres are slated for secured downloads. ViDeOnline is also negotiating partnerships with major players in the Chinese media market.

Dr. Lu founded interWAVE Communications Ltd was Chairman and from 1994 to 2003 and took the company public in January 2000. She remained a Director on the board of interWAVE, which stayed on the national NASADAQ listing (IWAV), until it was sold December 2004 to Alvarion (NASDAQ: ALVR). interWAVE designed and manufactured end to end GSM and CDMA cellular radio and switching networks, targeting international markets, primarily Middle East, Africa, Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, China and South East Asia. Funding was from Mayfield, Morgan Stanley Ventures, Hutchison, Nortel and Alcatel. Post IPO, additional funding was raised from Eastcom, UT*COM and VIA Technologies.  

Prior to founding interWAVE, Dr. Lu spent 16 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she led efforts in the design of switching systems, sub-micron CMOS design technologies, VLSI chip designs, IP packet networks, as well as imaging and multi-media technologies. She pioneered the 32-bit CMOS microprocessors, developed the first packet switching systems and designed the first distributed networking UNIX systems at Bell Labs research.

Dr. Lu holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics (Hons) from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Northwestern University (under the Bell Labs Doctorate Scholarship Programs) and has over 50 patents in the area of telecommunications and networking.

Fireside Chat Guest From China

Songbo Li, CTO and VP of Engineering, SINA.com, China

Songbo Li is the VP of engineering and CTO of SINA.com. His responsibilities include the smooth operation of the technology backend and innovative product design. His previous roles at SINA.com include leading development of key products such as news publishing system, online community and the award winning SinaBlog. 

His interests also cover innovation management and many other things. The challenge to him is how to innovate like a startup inside a big company.

He co-founded SRS Online in 1996, the first commercial website in China and the predecessor of SINA.com. Songbo also spent 3 years in bay area as Engineering Manager in SINA US, the experience is a great asset to him. 

Songbo graduated from Beijing University of Technology in 1994, he holds an MBA from the China-Europe International Business School.

To run a business in China is not easy, if you want to know the market, resources and limitations, especially technical wise, feel free to contact him.

Miao Fu, Founding Partner, Creation Power Capital, China

Mr. Fu is the founding partner of Creation Power Capital, a VC fund focusing on early-stage opportunities in China’s TMT industries,especially in wireless, Internet, and advertisement. Before that, Mr. Fu founded Nextak Technologies (Shenzhen) Ltd. Co. in 2004, and made it a leading provider of wireless application in public sector in China. 

Starting 2001, Mr. Fu also co-founded, advised and/or served on the boards of several other companies in wireless industry in China, and one of them exited with high profile acquisition by a heavyweight NASDQA listed company.

In 1998, Mr. Fu joined i2 Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITWO), the world largest Supply Chain Management and eCommerce software provider, in Dallas, Texas where i2 has its world headquarters. During his tenure with i2, he was sent to China in 2001 to lead two strategic projects whose clients are Lenovo Group and Huawei Technologies respectively, after which he was assigned to found i2’s Global Solution Center in Beijing, and later he became i2 China’s Sales Director.  

Mr. Fu received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University with numerous honors. He also received MS degrees in Computer engineering and Industrial Engineering from University of Southern California with full scholarship.

Tami Zhu, Executive Director, AOL Ventures

Tami spearheads corporate development within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Besides collaborating with VCs and Angels on deal flow, Tami works closely with the CEOs, board members of startups and AOL senior executives to identify potential M&A candidates as well as operating opportunities. Tami holds dual B.S. degrees in Information Science and Psychology from Beijing University in China, a M.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego, and an MBA from MIT Sloan. 

Lucas S. Chang, partner in Morgan Lewis's Business and Finance Practice

Lucas S. Chang is a partner in Morgan Lewis's Business and Finance Practice. As senior partner of the Greater China Practice, Mr. Chang also serves on Morgan Lewis's Steering Committee for the Greater China Practice.

Mr. Chang focuses on corporate and securities transactions including venture capital financing, mergers and acquisitions, and public offerings for industrial and technology companies located in the United States, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He has handled many cross-border business transactions as well as foreign direct investments into China. As an experienced patent attorney, he has provided intellectual property counseling to many of his clients and served as the business and IP interface in several major IP litigations.

Prior to his legal career, Mr. Chang spent 10 years as a research scientist and technical team leader at IBM Research and Union Carbide Corporation. 

Mr. Chang is admitted to practice in California.

Lucas received J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law; Ph. D in Chemical Engineering from University of Washington and B.S.E in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University.