New Trends Among Asia-focused Accelerators — Incubating at a Distance

Speakers

Elisa Chiu

CEO, Anchor Taiwan

Elisa Chiu operates at the intersection of tech innovation, cultural immersion and cross-border collaboration. She is the founder and curator behind Anchor Taiwan‘s signature soft-landing program, partnering with governments, corporates and tech communities to provide industry access and business intelligence. She works closely with top entrepreneurs and professionals from Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Warner Bros., UBS, Deutsche Telekom and such for growth, market entry and investment in Asia. Elisa was awarded 40 Under 40 Girls in Tech in Taiwan for her cross-border initiatives in empowering talent and communities. Anchor Taiwan has a 9.4/10 average rating from its alumni and was featured on Business Weekly for its unprecedented ways of bringing tech influencers to Taiwan.

Elisa sailed from Wall Street with a decade of experience at top-tier investment banks and hedge funds, trading and overseeing over US$1 billion assets in Pan Pacific Asia. She graduated with distinction from the University of Toronto with Master of Financial Economics, and University of British Columbia with a B.A. in Honours Economics. Elisa is a world citizen (60+ countries and counting), a mentor at Founder Institute, and an ecosystem builder through startups, culture and impact investing

Varun Kanotra

Managing Partner, TechGrind Venture Capital

Varun Kanotra is co-founder of TechGrind Venture Capital, an early-stage VC fund focused on building tech unicorns in South East Asia. He started his first business developing inventory management solutions for small-medium sized businesses. He has since launched several ventures in technology, consumer products, finance, and real estate. Varun has also served as a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies working on M&A and expanding business lines to new markets.

Varun takes a very value-driven approach to each initiative he gets involved with. He looks for challenges where there is a huge arbitrage of opportunity that could lead to tremendous value creation using engineering, technology, and finance.

He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jung Moon

Co-CEO/Founding Partner, SV 101 Innovation Lab

Jung Moon has extensive professional experience in technology cross-border between Korea and Silicon Valley in various areas including IT, BT, and Clean Tech in his professional career. He was Sr. Director at AMB Property in Korea and managed $125 million REITs fund, and evaluated industrial complex real estate development projects and acquired several global distribution properties.

During his term of office at Korean Consulate General in SF, his role is not only initiating and connecting Korean technology in the US for the technology development and collaboration along with venture capital firm’s investment but also enhancing a strong governmental business and economic relations between Korea and the State of California. He has successfully induced several major SV global companies including Intel, Google, AMB Property, and many other SV companies’ Korea expansion and provided strategic guidelines for Korean conglomerates such as SK Telecom, LG Display, Hynix, and many small and medium companies.