Career
He is a venture partner with SOSV and listed as an influential investor on Twitter. Liao is a social networking pioneer, author, speaker, and is engaged in not for profit work. Among his non-profit endeavours he is a CoderDojo mentor and he has participated as an investor and volunteer in The Hunger Project in Uganda, New York and Mexico.
He has also been appointed as a special diplomatic envoy for Street Kitts and Nevis for sustainable development and the environment.
Liao has contributed to the Street Kitts and Nevis recovery fund for the sugar cane industry there. He is also a regular attendee at the TED conferences and also the World Economic Forum New Champions conference.
Davnet was acquired by Japanese telecommunications carrier Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) in 1996. Liao left Davnet after the acquisition and he turning his attention to other Information Technology endeavours.
He was the first external investor in XING.com, then called openBC.com, which was founded by Lars Hinrichs in Germany in 2003.
Later, Liao became a supervisory board member. In 2009, he founded WeForest.org, an organisation promoting reforestation as a way to combat global warming. WeForest.org continues, with a stated goal of planting two trillion trees by 2020 and is run from Belgium by its current Chief Executive Officer Marie-Noelle Keijzer.
Liao is still involved with WeForest and spoke at TED Long Beach 2011 about lieutenant
He was an official part of the delegation of Street Kitts and Nevis to the COP15 United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen where he also promoted the science and concepts behind WeForest.org. In 2011, Liao joined SOSV as their European Venture Partner specialising in Internet and social media.
He has invested in Mark Little"s Storyful venture, Silicon Republic. and MavenHut. Bill Liao and James Whelton founded CoderDojo, a not-for-profit organisation that teaches children how to code.
lieutenant aims to teach children creative problem-solving skills and practical creative skills and was launched in Ireland in mid-2011.
Liao and Whelton also hope to provide an outlet for children who know how to code to meet other children with similar interests and work on projects in an environment with their peers, similar to a co-working space but less formal.