Alvin Foo

Alvin Foo is the co-founder of DAOventures and a senior internet and mobile media executive. Alvin is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in Asia Pacific with the last 10 years spent in China. Prior to OMG, he was the Head of Mobile for Google China.

In the 13 years prior, Alvin had held various leadership roles with other technology & media companies including Nokia and had also started his own technology startup back in 1997, his startup was listed as one of the Fast 500 companies in APAC for 3 consecutive years by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Alvin Foo’s professional career started in 1993 after he graduated in Law from Brunel University London. He took up the role of Director at Swift Advertising until 1995.

Starting off from the right foot, Alvin went on a successful career in the areas of marketing and technology, eventually turning into serial entrepreneur. Alving has worked, nonetheless, with major multinational companies in their Asian branches.

In 2007, that opportunity came with Nokia, where he became Head of China in the Advertising Business Unit. He left one year later for a Vice President position at leading provider of innovative mobile-centric marketing, customer retention and content-based solutions Velti. A position he held until 2011.

In 2011, the Google phone call arrived and offered him the role of Head of its Mobile division for the Greater China region. Among his main responsibilities, he was in charge of mobile advertising sales and business development for Greater China.

Other important roles in his career includes his 4 year tenure as Head of Mobility & Innovation at global media group Omnicom Media Group, China.

After other roles, mainly as an advisor in companies such as stock trading social platform TradeHero, crypto company NASDEX, SXSW and AI+blockchain ad exchange network NOIZ, he co-founded DAOventures in 2020.

With DAOventures, Alvin is building a decentralized finance (DeFI) pooled asset manager on blockchain. DAOventures is a smart money manager and robo-advisory on blockchain. “Imagine VC in DeFI. We aim to democratise DeFI investments through smart contract on Ethereum blockchain and generate returns for LP,” Alvin said.

Besides his professional career as entrepreneur and executive, Alvin is also a mentor working with Korean-based global accelerator SparkLabs since 2012 and mentorship-driven program Chinaccelerator since 2015.

About DAOventures and how are you trying to revolutionize venture capital via DeFi

“I’ll share with you a story so at least you know how DAOVentures came about. Sometime in the middle of last year during covid, sometime during covid, prior to starting this company I was actually the managing director of IPG China. I was talking with my partner at the time who is now a co-founder at DAOVentures. Now, I actually invested into a crypto analytics company, a start-up, for about two years. And sometime in the middle of last year, the start-up that I invested in, right? This is not very good, we’ve actually seeded the company in 2 rounds, and we were actually running out of money already. So what happened, my co-founder came up to me and said, Alvin, I just started a business and it’s actually, you know, it’s actually growing very rapidly. And he said: decentralized finance. Now, I’ve heard of blockchain, I’ve heard of a lot, I’ve even heard of decentralized finance, but for a person who was not working in the finance world, decentralized finance, decentralized is already a big word. Now, decentralized finance is an even bigger word to me. So I started to research, I actually started to, a lot of people who ask me thought I worked in decentralized finance for a long time, probably even have a finance background. I don’t have a finance background, I know sufficient about finance, but not enough to advise people”.

What do you think about Asia’s rapid tech growth?

“If I was to answer that question in very simple terms right now, if you see China as one of the most forward in terms of technology development, from smart city to infrastructure, even when we talk about money, right? e-commerce and so forth. Now, if this was the future, I would assume Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and countries around the region in time to come, you would see a lot of these technologies being exported to those countries. Obviously, it would be at a different stage, because most of these countries are also progressing at different stages, but I would assume that in Asia, especially in South-East Asia, we will see a version of China in the next 5-10 years”.