Monte Jade West host their Annual Conference featuring the theme: Pushing the Limit. The event was keynoted by Brian Wang the Founder of www.nextbigfuture.com the world’s #1 Science News Blog. With over 1 million monthly followers Brian covered all the technologies that would be impact our future from genetics, to food production, to solving cancer and traveling to space.
The speech was followed up by a very timely panel focused on Trade Tensions. Moderated by Wen-Fang Liu – Transfer Pricing Managing Director for Deloitte Tax LLP, she led the panel that managed over $30B in global revenues discussing the intricacies of how large corporations managed their supply chains to ensure business continuity during this ever-increasing time of political volatility. Lucas S Chang – Senior Vice President and General Counsel of United Microelectronics Corporation covered history and how we can learn lessons from the past, while Daniel Koh – Vice President of Global Procurement for Flex covered how they managed their large global supply chain that has domiciles across every country in the world. Lastly, Angelica Tsakiridis spoke on the technical aspects of ensuring compliance of duties and laws.
The panel was followed by a fireside chat moderated by Cynthia Shen – First Vice President and Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley who interviewed Dr. Guo-Liang Yu, PHD co-founder of Apollomics who just recently raised $100M in their series A. Dr. Guo-Liang Yu already completed 2 other startups exiting with a total valuation of over $500M and spoke on the science behind extending life.
Wrapping up the last section was Celestine Schnugg – General Partner of Boom Capital who’s fund is focused on computational health, synthetics, machine intelligence, serverless computing, aerospace, computational genetics, synthetic biology and life extension. Prior to starting her own fund she was Innovation Partner at Innovation Partners (Eric Schmidt & Dror Berman’s VC fund). This space panel featured speakers who have launched over 400 satellites in the last few years. Mike Safyan VP of Launch Planet managed their global launch operations and they are rumored to already be “unicorn” valuation. Chris Kemp is currently at a stealth space company and was the former CTO of NASA. Dr Sara Spangelo is the Co-founder and CEO of Swarm Technologies, they have launched numerous satellites into space and have the worlds smallest low orbit satellites – they will soon be the world largest and lowest cost space communications company. Lastly, Johan Mathé, Co-Founder, Frog Labs AI is building an AI network to predict weather utilizing new satellite capabilities.
Monte Jade also hosted a dinner mixer event at Alexander’s Steakhouse for Sponsors, VIPs, Speakers, Board members and dignitaries. Dr Jen-Chang Chou was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by Monte Jade for his tireless work in building our community. As the Director of the Science Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco, he enabled the acceleration and development of key Taiwan research and investments.