The Neoteny Team

Principals

Joichi Ito – General Partner

Jōichi Itō or Joichi Ito (伊藤穰一 Itō Jōichi, born June 19, 1966), more commonly known as Joi Ito, is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

Joi was the CEO of the first commercial ISP in Japan, PSINet Japan, which was later sold to Cable and Wireless. He went on to set up Infoseek Japan, which was acquired by Disney and then Rakuten. He also co-founded one of the first web companies in Japan, Digital Garage, which is now a public company trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (t.4819). Joi has worked closely with government, academia and standards organisations to promote the Internet and innovation. Previously a board member of the Open Source Initiative, ICANN and a variety of other non-profits, he currently holds positions at Keio University and is CEO of Creative Commons and board member of the Mozilla Foundation.

Joi also set up Neoteny, an incubator in Japan which had worked with Singapore’s Kent Ridge Digital Labs, and was the first investor in Six Apart, the largest independent blog software company. As an angel investor, he was an early investor in Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Twitter and other firms.

For more info, see Joi Ito’s wiki entry.

James Chan – Investment Manager

James Chan (陈亮宏 , born August 7, 1981) is a Singaporean-born, American-educated geek, photographer and scrappy investment manager.  In his brief 3-odd years of work experience, he has been fortunate to have gained extensive exposure to the venture capital and technology start-up ecosystem in Singapore and the US.

James was most recently a member of the investment team at Walden International Singapore managing Seed Ventures IV Pte Ltd (S4), a new fund organised under the National Research Foundation’s Early Stage Venture Capital Fund Scheme that was focused on making investments into early-stage technology companies in Singapore.

Prior to that, James was part of the team that restarted operations in July 2007 at Infocomm Investments (IIPL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore which managed assets in excess of US$200 million.  Apart from being on the investment team managing IIPL’s existing portfolio and co-investing alongside private-sector VCs into Singapore-based growth-stage infocomm companies, James was also involved in the engagement and account management of foreign VC-funded infocomm start-ups, and policy and incentive formulation and implementation, so as to promote Singapore as a location for their offshore R&D and Engineering operations.

A recipient of the Singapore Inc. Overseas Scholarship, James graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Double Major: B.Sc in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy, and graduated from Stanford University with a M. Sc in Management Science and Engineering (MS&E).  In his spare time, James pens his East-meets-West thoughts on technology, venture capital and entrepreneurship on his personal blog at www.motochan.com.

Mentors

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