Jonathan Liao
Venture Partner at Kaleo Ventures
Jonathan Liao
Venture Partner at Kaleo Ventures
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
CFO/COO
2020 - Current
CrowdSmart helps organizations reduce risk and make better decisions by combining the best of human and artificial intelligence. Designed from the ground up for distributed work environments, CrowdSmart's industry-specific SaaS solutions enable decision-makers to rapidly integrate insights from team members, partners, customers and experts. Our AI surfaces diverse perspectives from participants, reduces bias, identifies critical insights and risks, and unifies individual thoughts and preferences into clear recommendations. With CrowdSmart, organizations continually improve decision-making and build institutional knowledge for long-term competitive advantage.
Venture Partner
2023
Kaleo Ventures is an early-stage venture firm that seeks to invest equity in 50+ faith-aligned entrepreneurs across Africa each year. Kaleo currently has a portfolio of over 30 early-stage tech companies across the continent. We seek to fund entrepreneurs who will build a company with a strong culture that reflects excellence and their faith. We believe that profits are a good and necessary by-product of solving a core need and delighting your customers.
Chief Operating Officer & Managing Partner
2019 - 2020
Early-stage venture capital fund powered by CrowdSmart’s artificial intelligence software and 2,500 experts from the technology and business community. During its investment period, The Titan Fund’s advisors came together on the CrowdSmart platform to evaluate more than 150 investment opportunities. Experts weighed-in on each investment, engaging with each other’s opinions and guided by the AI software, creating a quantitative score and explanations of the ratings for each investment opportunity. Decisions on whether to invest were based solely on the score. The results were 80% accurate in predicting funding momentum and significantly reduced systemic bias in capital allocations; more than 40% of the companies recommended for funding were led by female founders or CEOs. Based on these results, in early 2020 the founders decided to build a new SaaS version of CrowdSmart’s technology to support any organizational decision process for allocations of capital and resources and created a new mission: Changing the world through better decisions.
Director, Data Analytics
2016 - 2019
• Established and led global data team. The data team coordinated the process and data flows for legal, finance, investment, corporate consulting, and accelerator functions across the firm. • Developed legal tracker and fund accounting system (6K+ transactions). Reengineered the legal dealflow/documentation process and the fund accounting process from the ground up to form a single system. • Created fundraising tracker and CRM. Formulated Fund V fundraising strategy for institutionals and corporates. • Designed opportunity fund investment strategy with the fund GPs. • Helped design go-to-market plan for corporate innovation.
Finance Associate
2011 - 2016
• Managed $55M annual operating and investment support budget including planning and forecasting • Led company-wide culture shift initiative as facilitator of Transformation Management Team
Fund Accountant
2008 - 2010
• Worked in the alternative investments global market neutral group • Specialized in emerging market portfolios and the CFD investment instrument • Produced daily NAVs and cash projections • Developed procedures to streamline valuation processing and reporting • Researched and reduced risk exposure to client • Coordinated money market investment