Jill Shih
General Manager, Taiwan
The General Manager for AI Fund’s Taiwan division, Jill leads AI Fund’s presence in Asia and works with founders to build successful startups.
A key focus for her as she helps launch new companies from AI Fund’s studio in Asia is ensuring their products leverage human-centered design. “What we’re doing is to first understand who the users are, and then what are their pain points,” she says. “When you start from tech-enabled feature sets and capabilities, you end up designing really complex technologies or interfaces.”
“I truly believe that for the most advanced and powerful technology to actually do good in the world, you have to understand what users need.”
Jill’s come to know this people-first path firsthand. After kicking off her career in the United States as a software engineer at Sprint, she turned to designing and prototyping enterprise and consumer security software for Trend Micro in Taiwan. That was something of a product-manager boot camp for targeting and building. “Doing a whole lot of interviews, one user will say this, and the next might say otherwise. You have to be systematic,” she recalls. “Then when designing an MVP, you work to keep the focus. What’s the wow moment we are looking for, the one thing that’s really important for this product’s launch?”
Later Jill jumped to Beijing to be the point person for Microsoft’s Bing in Asian markets. More recently, she has led product and UX for Cheetah Mobile when it IPO’d on the NYSE and developed new products from 0 to 1, and done stints leading a startup crypto exchange and a virtual bank.
She was back in Taipei as Chief Experience Officer and Head of Tech Products at securities brokerage Good Finance before signing on with AI Fund. “I’m a romantic,” Jill admits. “I know how powerful technology can be, and I love to take that experience and knowledge to a huge industry that’s going to impact everybody’s life.”
Calling herself ever curious, Jill coaxed herself to pick up running and to do half-marathons while also taking drum lessons. She also enjoys traveling, singing and trying new foods. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the National Taiwan University as well as a master’s in information sciences from the University of Pittsburgh.
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