Team
Charles K. Cheng
Charles is Vice Chairman and Past President of the Asia America MultiTechnology Association Greater Bay Area Chapter after spending 20 years in various marketing and business development roles in Silicon Valley and Asia. Charles has led and launched products and businesses with record-breaking revenues of >US$500 million, driven M&A deals and founded entrepreneurial ventures. Charles is an active angel investor with current investments in China and Silicon Valley. His target investment areas include AI, robotics, analytics & security, internet infrastructure, software and storage.
Shail Rajan
Shail Rajan has over 15 years of experience with Andersen and Ernst & Young, where she developed deep expertise in process design and operational efficiency. As XTC’s Head of Process & Operations for the past 5 years, she specializes in streamlining cross-functional workflows and ensuring rigorous, high-quality program execution across multi-stakeholder initiatives.
Board Members
Young Sohn
Chairman of Semiconductor Advisory Board, Samsung Electronics
Chairman of HARMAN Board of Directors
Board Member of ARM
Former Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer, Samsung Electronics
Founding Managing Partner, Walden Catalyst Ventures
Co-Founder, Extreme Tech Challenge
Young Sohn is a Silicon Valley business executive and investor. Young is currently a Founding Managing Partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures, an over $550M early-stage venture capital fund dedicated to deep-tech investments focused on data & AI across North America, Europe, and Israel.
Previously Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer for Samsung Electronics, as well as CEO of two successful Silicon Valley public companies (Inphi, Oak) and board member of Arm, Cadence, Cymer (ASML), and others, he now serves as Chairman of the Board of HARMAN International. Young was also an important seed investor for various innovative companies, such as Berkeley Lights, AI21 Labs, Zoom Video, Graphcore, and TTTech Auto.
Young is a co-founder of the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), a global start-up competition inspired by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Bill Tai
VC and Founding Chairman HUT8 Corp; Co-Founder, Extreme Tech Challenge
Bill Tai has been funding startups as a VC since 1991 and has had 23 of his seed or early stage projects grow to become publicly listed companies. He is Zoom Video’s 1st seed backer and seed catalyst to forming the founding team at Canva. He is among the first backers of unicorns Bitfury, Canva, Color Genomics, HUT8, SafetyCulture, Treasure Data and Zoom Video.
He has an operating background as Founding Chairman of energy infrastructure provider HUT8 Corp (NASDAQ: HUT), Co-founder and Chairman of machine learning pioneer Treasure Data (acquired by SOFTBANK), founding Chairman of network operating system pioneer IPInfusion and Founding CEO and Chair of iAsiaWorks (IPO Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley), which operated Internet Data Centers in 10 countries across Asia in the 1990’s.
Originally trained as a computer chip designer, he joined the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor at LSI Logic and was issued Badge #A001 during the formation of Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE TSM), now the 6th most most valuable company in the world. He started the semiconductor practice at Alex Brown & Sons in the 1980’s, handling the IPO’s of companies such as Adaptec, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Dallas Semiconductor and Zilog.
He holds a BSEE with honors from University of Illinois, an MBA from Harvard where he serves on the Board of Advisors to the Dean at Harvard Business School. He is Chairman of ACTAI Global, a 501c3 uniting Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators to fuel technology based environmental conservation and economic development via entrepreneurship.
