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Dave Liu is a 30-year veteran of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. He is an advisor, author, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist.
He was Managing Director and Co-Head of the Digital Media and Internet investment banking group at Jefferies where he worked on over $15 billion of transactions for hundreds of companies including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Yelp.
After retiring from Wall Street, he became an entrepreneur and started four companies in technology, merchant banking, asset management, and media. He is CEO advisor and investor to multiple companies, several of which have reached multi-billion dollar valuations including Internet Brands WebMD, MobilityWare, FIGS, and Vobile. He is involved in the entertainment industry with investments in Stampede and TEG Live, and consumer with Philz Coffee and Francesca’s. He was previously CEO advisor to ProSiebenSat.1 Media, one of the largest media companies in Europe.
Dave is also a perspiring artist and writer who loves to draw and write funny. He has multiple certifications in creative and satirical writing as well as screenwriting. He publishes a career advice column called Breaking Bamboo, and a cartoon series called The ABC Life. He wrote a humorous career book called The Way of the Wall Street Warrior: Conquer the Corporate Game Using Tips, Tricks, and Smartcuts which was published by Wiley and was cited by Bloomberg as one of the Best Books of 2021. It achieved bestseller status with Porchlight Book Company and Amazon where it was a Top 10 Best Seller in business finance. It was ranked by Amazon as the Top #1 Hot New Release in two categories: business finance and economics. He wrote the book to help underrepresented communities achieve their career goals and pledged 100% of his net proceeds to charity.
Dave completed the Management & Technology Program at the University of Pennsylvania where he received a BS in Engineering and a BS in Economics from the Wharton School. He also attended Harvard Business School where he received his MBA. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Management & Technology Program at the University of Pennsylvania and on the Trust Advisory Committee of Tau Beta Pi, the oldest national engineering honor society. He is also Chairman of the Philanthropic Advisory Council of Smile Train, the largest cleft-focused organization. Finally, he is Vice Chairman of AsAmNews, one of the top news sites for Asian America.
Dave can be reached at his website, www.Liucrative.com.
Fred is 20-year tech founder, CTO & CEO with multiple successful bootstrapped exits. An active angel investor and startup advisor, Fred has invested in numerous pre-IPO companies and startups. Father of three Asian American boys, he’s passionate about new technologies that can power social missions, the arts/movies, and the crypto industry.
Fred is Co-Founder and Chairman of Ember Entertainment, an independent game developer based in Seattle, WA and makers of AMC Walking Dead Empires (www.twdempires.game) a AAA MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) blockchain game launching in 2022. Since 2012, Ember has built a portfolio around casual and hardcore games on mobile and their titles have received millions of installs. In December 2021, Ember was acquired by Gala Games.
Prior to Ember, Fred co-founded and was CEO of San Francisco startup Manage.com, a leading Web 2.0 mobile DSP (Demand-Side Platform) and provider of mobile software and data solutions. Fred bootstrapped Manage from $0 to $100M in revenue in under 4 years. Manage was voted one of the Best Places to Work in the SF Bay Area in 2015 and was an E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year semi-finalist for Northern California. In October 2018, Manage was acquired by Criteo (NASD:CRTO).
Prior to Manage, Fred founded and was CTO of Los Angeles startup Oversee, back when there were no startups in downtown LA. At Oversee, he bootstrapped a leading Web 1.0 domain and marketing services company with major partnerships with Google and Yahoo to $230M per year in revenue and over $42M in annual EBITDA in the span of 8 years from 2000 to 2008. In November 2009, Oversee was acquired by Oak Hill Capital Partners, a $19 billion private equity firm. Fred remained its second largest shareholder after Oak Hill.
Fred was born in Ohio from Taiwan parents who immigrated to the U.S. to attend graduate school. Growing up in Southern California, Fred always had an interest in building things and tinkering with computers. “More importantly, if there was a middle child cliché, I think I’d fit it,“ said Fred. “I was always doing my own thing and not asking for much help.“
While in college, Fred worked the graveyard shift at Academy Award winning visual effects and animation company Rhythm & Hues Studios, a 20th Century Fox partner, in Marina Del Rey where he managed SGI, Netapp and Maya rendering farms. Rhythm & Hues had its own proprietary software for photo-realistic character animation/visual effects, widely acclaimed by Ang Lee for its film adaptation of the fantasy novel Life of Pi.
In his third and fourth year of college, while working at a West Hollywood startup, Fred started a company called Oversee. “We were trying to build systems that match end users with advertisers, said Fred. “By the time I graduated, there was some early momentum. We had a small office on Skid Row. We built IP that could be leveraged for ad matching, so we paired with the early Google Adsense team to build two market leaders.“ Fred graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in Computer Science.