Presenting company
selection committee

Pierre duPont

Two Sigma Investments

A graduate of Princeton University (B.Sc.E), Pierre started his career at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) as a research scientist and software engineer in computational linguistics, parallel processing, and statistical data analysis. In 1990 Pierre was the founding Marketing Director of Division Limited, a realtime computer graphics hardware and virtual prototyping software company in England, which went public and was later acquired by HP and PTC. In 1996 Pierre was asked by the World Economic Forum to run WELCOM, a video-conferencing service for the Forum’s members, which was subsequently sold. In 1998 he cofounded the Zephyr Document Exchange, a secure online repository for managing collaborations for M&A and IPO transactions, which was bought in 2000 by Intralinks, a financial services integrator. In the early 2000s, Pierre built a consulting practice helping large companies achieve rapid growth through embracing externally-sourced technology for their own products (www.psdupont.com and www.yet2.com.) His clients included multinational chemicals, electronics, materials, and life-sciences companies based in the US and Japan, such as GE, P&G, Fuji Film, Kraft, DuPont, Canon, Ricoh, Johns Manville and SC Johnson.

Pierre now runs a “clean energy” private & public investing effort within Two Sigma Investments. The primary private investment target is solar generation, with occasional investments in other types of renewable production, distribution, storage and utilization, with a focus on cross-over investment opportunities in the public sector. He is also responsible for developing Two Sigma’s strategies for entering the asset management and public markets in China. Pierre provides guidance to two Boston-based companies he helped co-found, and has held board positions at three early-stage technology companies in the Boston area. He is also a partner in an investment-banking firm (www.occompartners.com) which provides advice to the owners/executives of privately-held middle-market companies on growth financings, recapitalizations, and exit strategies.

Alex Tham

Alcan

Alex Tham is currently Vice President, Business Development, China for RioTinto Alcan, a Fortune 500 company.

Prior to joining Rio Tinto Alcan, he was Vice President, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Norsk Hydro for China and Asia.
Alex has lived and worked in Asia, Europe and North America. He was more than 15 years of experience in M&A, Venture Capital, Private Equity and Strategy. He has been invited regularly as a speaker in conferences and appeared in Channel News Asia.

Alex holds a degree in Accountacy and an MBA. He is also a Certified Public Accountants (CPA) and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).

Brett Morris

Neo Technology Ventures

Brett Morris, Executive Director, Neo Technology Ventures, has a background in earth sciences and business consulting. He joined the predecessor to Neo Ventures in 2001 with a focus on investing in early stage Australian companies with innovative technologies, and the capability of expanding into global markets. Prior to Neo, Brett founded three strategy and business development firms through which he accrued broad-based experience spanning more than forty different industries, working with hundreds of different businesses ranging from small technology start-ups to global Fortune 50 corporations. Three decades of significant management consulting, corporate turn-around and technology development projects involved the development and execution of business and sales strategies, business models and processes, market and channel strategies, operating structures and executive team recruitment, development and support. Brett graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the University of Auckland, with a major in Geology.

Kelvin Yu

Sequoia Capital

Shelby Chen

China Environment Fund

Shelby Chen is a General Partner of Tsing Capital.  With China Environment Fund I, II, and III under management, Tsing Capital is a venture capital management firm affiliated with Tsinghua University.  Starting in 2002 as China’s first pure play cleantech overseas fund series, China Environment Funds focus on making investments into companies in environment protection, renewable energy, new materials, energy efficiency, waste treatment, and clean productions.

Formerly as a Partner of Bocom Capital Partners, Shelby had rich experiences and track records on venture fund raising and M&A transactions, with successful cases including raising the largest venture funding round for a software outsourcing company in China and acquisition of China’s largest independent security system integrator by a Fortune500 company.  Prior his investment career, Shelby was working for GE and DuPont responsible for Asia market development activities.

Gary Rieschel

Qiming Ventures

Gary Rieschel has over 25 years of operating and investing experience in the information technology industry. Most recently, Gary was the founder of SOFTBANK Venture Capital/Mobius Venture Capital in the U.S. (1996), a firm with nearly $2 billion USD under management. In this role, Gary invested in over 50 technology companies leading to successful IPO exits at UTStarcom, Concentric Networks, Verisign, USWeb, Net2Phone, Puma Technology (through acquisitions), Digimarc, Intertrust, and Critical Path, and successful M&A transactions for GeoCities (Yahoo!), Art.com (Getty Images), and Datapower (IBM).

Gary has led investments in Chinese companies TopSec, Accelergy, Bokee (Blog China), and Yeelion. Gary has also sponsored the creation of several other top venture firms, including Ignition Partners (partners in Qiming), Grandbanks Capital, and Arrowpath in the U.S., and SOFTBANK Asia Infrastructure Fund I/II (SAIF Partners) in China. Prior to his 10 years as a venture capitalist, Gary held senior executive positions at nCUBE (Sr. VP), Cisco Systems (Director, Worldwide Channels/Programs), Sequent Computer Systems (General Manager Asia Pacific), and Intel Corporation (Quality Assurance Manager).

Gary holds a B.A. from Reed College where he serves on the board of trustees, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Gary is also known for his love of wine and sports of all kinds. He and his family moved to Shanghai in January, 2005.