Over the past 19 years in China, Richard has been directly involved with eight startups as a senior executive or co-founder, and with dozens of others as an advisor, mentor (500 Startups, HAXLR8R & Chinaccelerator) or angel investor.
Previously he was a senior executive at three companies from private entities through to their public listings. Went on to found five companies in the mobile internet space. Three companies exited to publicly listed companies, a fourth landed squarely in the ‘L’ column and the fifth is still fighting the good fight.
Active in the geek-o-system and speak frequently at tech conferences globally (MC’ed these events: TechCrunch Beijing, GMIC Silicon Valley, Web Summit Dublin and Startup Asia Singapore & Indonesia).
Richard studied at USC in Los Angeles and Cambridge University in the UK. He worked his way around the world for a few years after college and then traveled overland from Switzerland to Hong Kong via the Trans-Siberian railway in 1993 and fell in love with China.
He got an MBA at the Rotterdam School of Management in The Netherlands and then fell in love with the internet. Richard did a solo 4,000km bike trip through Africa from Nairobi to Capetown after graduation and then moved here to the Middle Kingdom where he has been based since 1996 to combine his passions of China and the interwebs.
Two of his labors of love to exercise/exorcise his creative muse:
– Writing children’s books with all proceeds going to charity; and
– Producing/MC’ing live comedy shows across Asia with top standup comedians.
Richard is married to a lovely entrepreneur wife and also have two lil’ guys ‘Made in China’. Perpetual student of Mandarin.