William Bao Bean

Investment Partner, SOS Ventures

BeanWilliam is a Partner at SOSV, a US$235m accelerator focused venture capital fund, and the Managing Director of Chinaccelerator, China’s first startup accelerator. William joined SOSV from SingTel Innov8 Ventures where he was Managing Director supporting China investments. While at Innov8 he led investments in Yodo1 (mobile games), Gmobi (Android platform), Lekan (children’s video platform), and Massive Impact (mobile advertising). Previously, William was a Partner at Softbank China & India Holdings, a venture capital firm backed by Softbank and Cisco. While at SoftBank he led investments in Silk Road Telecom (SRT) – in mobile enterprise cloud SaaS, Playspan – a payment platform acquired by Visa (NYSE: V), Punch Entertainment – a mobile game developer acquired by DeNA (Tokyo: 2432), and Peacesoft – a Vietnam eCommerce and payment platform backed by eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and MOL Group (NASDAQ: MOLG). William spent 11 years as an equity research analyst most recently with Deutsche Bank where he was responsible for Internet and Telecom Equipment in Asia and China technology, media and telecom. Previously he covered Digital Media at Bank of America Securities in San Francisco and PC/Enterprise Hardware at Bear Stearns in New York. William is an active angel investor with 39 investments between 2004 and 2014.

In 2006 he was ranked #3 All-Asia analyst for Technology/Software and IT Services by Institutional Investor Magazine Asia. In 2005, he was ranked #1 stock picker in Technology, Media and Telecom, and #3 overall for Hong Kong/China by Forbes/SCMP/Starmine. He currently sits on the boards of advisors/directors for a number of companies including GMobi, Silk Road Telecom, Massive Impact, Socbay, iTalki, kineticOne as well as organizations including Angelvest (天使谷), the largest and most active angel investing group in China, AAMA Shanghai and the Techyizu, Beijing Hive, Digital Matters and AdTech: China events. He holds a BA from Bowdoin College.