Founder Talk - From Idea to Impact: Building a Successful Technology Company with Wei-Ti Liu
How does a technology idea become a successful company?
This talk offers a practical introduction to technology entrepreneurship, guiding participants from an initial idea to building and growing a successful business. Topics include company formation and organization, product development, operations, sales and marketing, competition, team building and hiring, company culture, and the relationship between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
Participants will explore fundamental questions every entrepreneur must address: How do you take the first step? How do you build the right team? Do you understand your technology, customers, and market? How do you identify opportunities and overcome challenges? How do you present your vision effectively and connect with the right investors?
Using a learn-by-example approach, the talk will draw on lessons from well-known technology companies and explore how innovative ideas, strong leadership, effective execution, and market understanding helped them become industry leaders. These examples will provide practical insights into both the opportunities and challenges of building a technology company.
The talk will also look ahead. Every generation of engineers and entrepreneurs has had an opportunity to build the bridge to tomorrow. For earlier generations, it was the invention of the transistor, landing humans on the Moon, and creating the Internet. For today’s generation, the opportunity may lie in artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, quantum technologies, and other emerging fields.
This talk aims not only to explain how to start a company, but to encourage participants to consider how their ideas, technical knowledge, and entrepreneurial vision can become innovations that shape the future.
Wei-Ti Liu is a General Partner at Quantum Technology, LLC. He previously co-founded PLX Technology, where he served as GM and VP of Engineering, overseeing engineering, operations, and semiconductor foundry activities. He later served as President and CEO of NetChip Technology, a USB controller and security-device company that Broadcom later acquired.
Wei-Ti has extensive experience in ASIC and VLSI chip design and previously worked as a design engineer at IBM, AMD, and Intel. In recent years, his work has focused on quantum computing, quantum memory, and hardware design. He has delivered invited talks and tutorials at the International VLSI Technology, Systems and Applications Symposium, DesignCon, Future Memory and Storage (FMS), and the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop.
He holds 13 U.S. patents and earned an MSEE from the City College of New York and a BSEE from National Taiwan University.