The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Ecosystems Across Southeast Asia: Views of a Venture Capitalist

Speakers

Peng T. Ong

Managing Director, Monk's Hill Ventures

Peng T. Ong is an entrepreneur who invests in entrepreneurs. He does so primarily through his role as Managing Director at Monk’s Hill Ventures — a technology venture fund based in Southeast Asia that he co-founded. Peng is an independent board director of YY Inc. [NASDAQ:YY], IE Singapore, IMDA, and Solve Education!. He is a trustee of the Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD) where he chairs the Investment Committee of SUTD’s Endowment Fund.

Venture Funds. Peng was the chair of Infocomm Investments from 2006 through 2013. He was also Venture Partner at GSR Ventures in Beijing from 2010 to 2013 and was Chairman of Jungle Ventures from 2011 to 2013.

Companies. Peng founded Encentuate in 2002. From 2008 through 2009, he was an executive at IBM, after Encentuate’s acquisition. Prior to founding Encentuate, Peng was the founder and chairman of Interwoven, Inc. (now part of HP), the leading provider of content infrastructure. He was the president and CEO of Interwoven through 1997, and its chairman through 2002. During his tenure at Interwoven he led the company to a successful IPO [NASDAQ: IWOV]. In 2002, for his leadership in building Interwoven into the world’s leading provider of enterprise-class content infrastructure software, Peng was awarded the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Engineering’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Service. Before Interwoven, Peng was co-founder and chief architect of Electric Classifieds, Inc.—the creators of Match.com (now part of IAC). The three businesses he started now generate annual revenues that total more than US$1 billion.

Peng has also held various engineering and management roles at Sybase, Inc. (now SAP), Illustra (now IBM Informix), and Gensym Corporation. Peng co-authored numerous patents for technologies developed at his companies.

Boards and Committees. In 2001-2002, Peng served as one of the twenty members of Singapore’s Economic Review Committee. The ERC was a high-level committee whose task was to review the economic plans for the future of Singapore. He was a founding vice-chairman of the Action Committee for Entrepreneurship, and a former board director of JTC Corporation. Peng served on the board of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore from 2003 through 2009, and on the board of COMPASS (Community and Parents in Support of Schools) in 2007 through 2010. He was also chair of the Industry Advisory Council of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore through March 2013, and on the the board of National Research Foundation of Singapore from 2009 till early 2014. Peng was on the board of SingTel from 2009 through 2013, and chaired SingTel’s Group Enterprise‘s Advisory Committee till 2015. He was on the board Ele.me from 2011 to 2013 and also sat on the Strategic Advisory Board of the Chancellor of the University of Illinois from 2013 to 2015.

Education. Peng was born and grew up in Singapore. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and received his Master of Science in Computer Science from theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Peng is also a passionate music lover and digital hifi fanatic with his house being one giant experimental studio.