Our Team
Liza Wang
Founding and Managing Partner
Liza has been a tech investor and entrepreneur for over 15 years. She founded Silicon Ventures to invest in the next generation entrepreneurs in the technology space of AI, consumer and enterprise. Prior to that, she was general partner at Long Venture Partners, an early stage VC firm headquartered in Silicon Valley that invests in Amplitude and Bolt. She has managed her family’s investment fund for 7 years with a 15x return.
She was the Co-Founder of Guru Online, a public company in the digital and mobile marketing space in Greater China and SouthEast Asia. Liza went to school at University of California, Berkeley and Chinese University of Hong Kong. Liza was awarded Piaget Outstanding Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 and Outstanding Businesswomen Award 2019.
Michael I. Jordan
Advisor
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive and biological sciences, and have focused in recent years on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in distributed computing systems, natural language processing, signal processing and statistical genetics. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, ASA, CSS, IEEE, IMS, ISBA and SIAM.
He is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Ant Financial and Amazon Scholar.
Aayush Patel
Analyst
Aayush is the fund’s analyst, focusing on early to mid-stage startups in the consumer social, D2C, fintech, SaaS, and deep tech sectors.
He comes from a heavy product and engineering background, with experience as a SaaS PM at Microsoft, TPM at Facebook, and engineering at Boeing and Novawurks, a DARPA-backed space tech startup. Aayush is a UC Berkeley educated engineer with strong ties to it’s entrepreneurship community.