Jerry Yang positive on prospects for Taiwan VC - AVCJ Forum

“It takes a long time to build companies, maybe 5-10 years for start-ups to become successful. You need patience and a long-term horizon to take advantage of talent,” he said.

Yang, who was born in Taiwan and emigrated to the US, established Yahoo in 1994 with David Filo. He served as CEO for 18 years, launching operations in Japan and making an early – and ultimately highly lucrative – investment in China’s Alibaba Group. Yang left Yahoo in 2012 and formed AME Cloud Ventures, which backs start-ups building infrastructure and value chains around data.

He claims to have seen thousands of business plans and met hundreds if not thousands of entrepreneurs over the past eight years. Zoom founder Eric Yuan was among those who stood out. Yuan worked for WebEx, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. When Yuan’s idea for a smart phone-friendly videoconferencing system was rejected, he departed and launched Zoom.

AME met Yuan when he was looking for early-stage funding. “We thought Zoom could become a better version of WebEx,” Yang observed. 

Yang stressed the importance of nurturing talent that can form the bulwark of the next generation of entrepreneurs, and the role of mentorship in making that happen, whether it comes from VC investors or others. He also said that Taiwan must help its start-ups scale. 

“It’s not just about having capital and VC investors, you need people and markets,” he said. “If you build companies in Taiwan, is it enough serving Taiwan, or do you need to go to other parts of the world?”

From his vantage point in Silicon Valley – he addressed the forum from his home there – Yang sees no slowdown in the amount of money flowing into venture capital. He expects it to continue as long as central banks keep interest rates at zero or close to zero, essentially incentivizing capital to find more productive assets than bonds. Moreover, the acceleration in digitalization prompted by COVID-19 is creating more interest in technology.

AME is especially interested in 5G-enabled technology, notably hardware that can take advantage of new infrastructure, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence. Yang highlighted logistics as a key area of opportunity: “There has been a lot of hype over the last five years, but it is really entering the mainstream through warehousing, supply chains, robotics, and automation.”

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