Bio

William is Managing Director of Orbit Startups the first and longest running startup program in Asia and General Partner of SOSV the #2 most active venture capital investor in the world and #5 Asia/ROW with US$1.5bn in assets under management. Orbit helps scale breakthrough startups from around the globe across emerging and frontier markets in Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas to drive economic independence and efficiency in ecommerce, fintech, media, health, education, and logistics. Orbit provides hands-on support for growth, partnerships, fundraising and user acquisition combined with an initial investment package and millions available in follow-on funding from SOSV. Orbit's consumer ecosystem has helped our startups scale to 160m monthly active smartphone users. William joined Orbit and SOSV from SingTel Innov8 Ventures where he was a founding Managing Director. Prior to that William was a Partner at Softbank China & India Holdings, a VC backed by Softbank and Cisco, leading investments in China and South East Asia. William started his career in equity research most recently with Deutsche Bank where he was a top ranked analyst for Asia Internet and China Tech, Media and Telecom and worked on the IPOs for Alibaba, Kingsoft, eLong (Expedia China), OnMobile, Rediff and Infoedge Naukri. In 2005, he was ranked #3 stock picker in China/Hong Kong and #1 for Technology, Media and Telecom by Thomson Reuters Starmine. In 2006 he was ranked #3 equity research analyst in Asia for Software and IT Services by Institutional Investor Magazine for his work on China Internet. William has done over 300 early stage investments including Bitmex in blockchain, UShopal in ecommerce, Snapask in edtech, italki in edtech, Carota in mobility, Phable in health, Flickstree in media, ELSA Speak in edtech, Tappytoon in media, Coutloot in ecommerce, and Dastgyr in fintech. He currently sits on the board of directors of Phable, Supplynote, Scantrust, Boost Capital, Pandabus, Fleksy, Goama, italki, and SRT as well as non-profit Blair Academy. He holds a BA from Bowdoin College.