Bill Liao (centre) was last year inducted into the Entrepreneur Hall of Fame
SOSventures investing partner and co-founder of CoderDojo Bill Liao has been appointed director of SunZu The Art of Business, a new Dublin-based social platform started up by entrepreneur Lyndon Wood.
SunZu The Art of Business is a new social business networking platform that will launch at the end of January. The Dublin-based platform is a completely new global business network that aims to give business owners the assistance and shared learnings they need in order to grow.
Wood is a successful British businessman who owns multi-million-pound businesses, including insurance company Moorhouse Group and Construcaquote.com. He set up his first business at the age of 19.
Wood also wrote Diary of a Fortune Hunter in 2011, drawn from 21 years in business covering 52 real issues he faced and providing 52 solutions to the problems.
“SunZu will be completely different in terms of the look, feel and business model,” Wood explained. “No advertising will appear on the site, although businesses will be encouraged to promote their expertise through articles, as well as promote their business in the companies pages as well as inspiring and assisting other businesses.
“The only similarity is that it will start with a membership of over half a million from Ecademy.com and we are targeting 1m members by the end of the year. Crucially, SunZu is all about meeting new business friends face to face as well as online, because many networks have forgotten that business is about people,” Wood added.
Liao’s next social platform for business
Liao co-founded CoderDojo in 2011 with celebrated programmer and entrepreneur James Whelton to address the lack of technology education in Irish schools. Today it is a global organisation with 130 dojos across 24 countries training 10,000 children how to write software on any given Saturday.
An Australian of Chinese descent, Liao co-founded, along with Founder Lars Hinrichs, Open Business Club in Hamburg in 2003 as a platform for business professionals and renamed it XING in 2006. XING was one of the first Web 2.0 companies to go public and has grown to become one of the world’s leading business-to-business social-networking portals.
As well as being an investment partner in SOSventures, Liao is also the author of Stone Soup: The Secret Recipe for Making Something From Nothing.
“I am well quoted as saying, ‘Your network is your net worth’ and what excites me about SunZu is that it will go a long way to support the smaller businesses and enterprises which are not currently well served by any one network,” Liao explained.
“SunZu will allow businesses to promote themselves in a friendly environment with like minded-individuals worldwide. Lyndon’s genius is acquiring the IP and database of an established network (Ecademy.com) that was starved of investment but will now be invigorated with a substantial investment,” Liao added.
In related news, it emerged in recent weeks that SOSventures invested €750,000 in SkyLabs, a cloud software company focused on opportunities in the oil and gas exploration sector.
Disclosure: SOSventures is also an investor in Siliconrepublic.com
