Panelists

Jeff Chen

Co-Founder, Lumos

Jeff is a maker, hacker, and the other creator of Lumos. While cycling in Boston, he had numerous instances of close calls with drivers and had purchased many sets of bike lights to replace the ones he frequently lost before he built the Lumos prototype and starting riding around with that instead. 

A mechanical engineer by training and hacker by disposition, Jeff is a full stack engineer with a wide range of experience and expertise in electrical engineering, electronics, microcontroller development and mechanical design. Several of the projects and designs he developed and built have gone on to win multiple awards and prizes including 2^ndplace at the AVIC National Amphibious Aircraft Design Competition, and 5^th place at the annual AIAA Design Build Fly competition where he was part of the team from MIT. 

Jeff has a B.S. in mechanical engineering with first class honors from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and was a visiting scholar at Harvard College where he helped create Lumos and built its first prototypes.

Eu-Wen Ding 

Co-Founder, Lumos

Eu-wen is an entrepreneur, inventor, and one of the creators of Lumos. Struck by the lengths to which he and many of his fellow Boston cyclists had to go to light up and be visible with arrays of lights, reflectors, and jackets, he felt that there had to be a better way. This inspired him to develop Lumos. 

Previously he was a co-inventor of Embrace, an innovative low-cost infant warmer for babies born premature and low birth weight in the developing world. Embrace has received numerous accolades and awards including the 2011 INDEX Design to Improve Life Award and The Economist Innovation Award in 2013. The Embrace warmer has now been used by over 150,000 babies around the world, many of whom would have had few alternatives for safe warming and incubation without Embrace. His hope is to be able to touch as many lives with Lumos as he had the opportunity to do with Embrace. 

Eu-wen has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University and was getting his MBA from Harvard Business School before leaving to start Lumos. 

At Lumos, Eu-wen is in charge of product design, marketing, and business development. Originally from Singapore, Eu-wen has spent most of his adult life in America, giving him a deep understanding of western markets and how to effectively position products for the western consumer. Lumos has an engineering team that is predominantly Chinese, a design team that is predominantly British/European, and a customer base that is predominantly American. Eu-wen is the bridge that brings it all together and makes it work. 

Kevin Lau

Founder and CEO, MakerNet

Founder & CEO of MakerNet and a longtime promoter of the maker culture in China, Kevin is also a Maker Project Consultant for the British Council, and the author of MakerNet Column on ‘Modern Weekly’. Kevin is devoted to sharing the maker culture with young people to encourage and guide the use of technological innovations to develop society, eliminate interpersonal isolation, and to make up for the uneven distribution of educational resources.

Marcus Leung-Shea

Hilary Szymujko

Managing Director, Accelerate (Brinc)

As Managing Director of Accelerate at Brinc, Hilary spearheads the platform’s knowledge initiatives, investments and portfolio development. Leveraging her experience working with hundreds of founders across three continents to learn, fundraise and grow with Seedcamp, Swire Properties’ blueprint, and now Brinc, she leads efforts to source the best founders and key partners to join Brinc for them to continue to thrive.

Prior to Brinc Hilary was Head of blueprint, a Swire tech accelerator and co-working space where she focused on running the accelerator program and looking after all things startups, mentors and investors. Prior to joining blueprint, she worked in London as Investment Manager at Seedcamp, a leading pre-seed and seed stage fund, where she managed the deal processes for fund’s portfolio companies. She also ran Seedcamp’s internal learning program, helping portfolio companies attain their growth and funding goals, and looked after Seedsummit, the initiative to provide open source legal documents to the greater European startup community.

Jon Tam

Horizons Ventures

Jon is a part of the investment team at Horizons Ventures, based in Hong Kong. He is mainly involved with investments in artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, transportation and quantum computing.

Prior to joining Horizons Ventures, Jon was part of the early founding team of Nanoleaf, a green-tech IoT startup that develops innovative lighting products, where he led global business development and corporate strategy. Jon began his career as an equities trader at Goldman Sachs Hong Kong, specializing in HK/China equities. Jon graduated from Brown University majoring in Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship.

Paul Yang

Partner and CEO of Greater China, KKR Asia

Paul Yang (Hong Kong) joined KKR as a Member and Head of Greater China in 2017. Prior to joining KKR, Mr. Yang was the President and CEO of the China Development Financial Corp. (“CDFC”), one of the oldest and largest merchant banking groups in Asia with over $20 billion in assets. He led a team of over 7,000 people with operations in Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, and Jakarta. Having joined CDFC in 2005 as its Chief Investment officer and head of its private equity operation, he was promoted to the CEO role in 2011. During his tenure, Mr. Yang successfully restructured its then-proprietary private equity operation into a fast-growing asset management franchise and was credited with completing a series of strategic acquisitions in banking and securities that has transformed CDFC. Prior to CDFC, he was managing director and head of private equity and Mezzanine Finance at DBS Bank in Hong Kong. He has held positions at ICG Asia, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic and Boston Consulting Group in the U.S. and Asia. He received his M.S. and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT and his M.B.A. at Harvard.

Gordon Yen

Co-Founder & Managing Director, Radiant Venture Capital

Dr. Yen is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Radiant Venture Capital with over 25 years of public and private company management experience in global supply chain and infrastructure sectors covering areas including business development, investment management, supply chain management, corporate strategy, finance, and IT. He started participating in technology investments in the late 90s as in transactions involving startups from the USA, China and Hong Kong. Dr. Yen has also served as one of the founding Board members of the Supply Chain Council Greater China Chapter, as well as the Board of Directors and Technology Committee of HKRITA, a government funded industry-focused research institutes in Hong Kong. He is currently an independent non-executive director of Hopewell Holdings Ltd. (SEHK: 0054), non-executive director of Fountain Set (Holdings) Ltd. (SEHK: 0420), Henan Province Committee member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and an Advisory Committee member of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council for Information & Communications Technology Services. Dr. Yen graduated magna cum laude from Boston University with a BS degree in Manufacturing Engineering and holds an MBA from McGill University and a DBA from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.