Lip-Bu Tan (Chinese: 陈立武; born November 12, 1959) is a Malaysia-born American executive and entrepreneur presently the Chairman of Walden International, a venture capital firm.
[3] Born in 1959 in Muar, Johor, Federation of Malaya (in modern Malaysia) to a Malaysian Chinese family,[4][5] Tan grew up in Singapore.
However, after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and the subsequent sharp reduction in opportunities in the nuclear industry, Tan left MIT and moved to the University of San Francisco in California, where he graduated with a Master of Business Administration.
"[7] Growing from $20 million upon its founding to $2 billion by 2001, Walden International has focused its investments on semiconductor, alternative energy, and digital media businesses and startups in the U.S. and Asia such as Ambarella Inc., Creative Technology, S3 Graphics, and Sina Corp.[5][7][11] For Tan's breakthrough investments in Asian tech startups, Forbes dubbed Tan "the pioneer of Asian VC" in 2001.
[17] In 2017, the analytics firm Relationship Science named him most connected executives in the technology industry garnering a perfect "power score" of 100.