Meet Chinese billionaire Weili Dai, one of the US’s richest self-made women: the Shanghai-born ‘technology geek’ made her money through semiconductors, joining Kim K and Rihanna on Forbes’ 2022 list
- Dai moved to Silicon Valley from China at age 17 and learned her English abroad, attending UC Berkeley where she met her husband and business partner Sehat Sutardja
- They started Marvell Technology in 1995 but stepped down; later, Dai invested in Alphawave, Next Input and FLC Technology, and co-founded MeetKai and Dreambig
Coming to San Francisco with her family at 17, speaking zero English at the time, Shanghai-born Weili Dai has fulfilled her American dream. The “tech geek”, reportedly in her 60s, quickly made a name for herself in Silicon Valley as the co-founder and investors of multiple companies.
So what do we know about the billionaire tech entrepreneur?
Some of her business acumen comes from basketball
Dai has been a sports buff since she was a kid. Along with badminton, running and long jump, she played semi-pro basketball from age nine to 14, and is proud of her “Michael Jordan’s lay-up”, she told SF Gate.
Her confidence, teamwork and result-driven spirit was built at that time, which helps a lot in her business life. “My hobby is sports. I love basketball. I like teamwork,” Dai, who still plays basketball in her free time, told the Los Angeles Times. “But I also like that there is a result. You shoot the ball and you make a basket. It feels like you accomplished something.”
She was one of Forbes’ most powerful women
After conquering English by bringing her pocket Chinese-English dictionary everywhere, per BBC, Dai pursued a computer science degree from the University of California, Berkeley. There she also met her husband, Sehat Sutardja, with whom she co-founded semiconductor Marvell Technology Group in 1995.
Over 20 years later, it’s become a giant with over 7,000 employees and shipping over one billion chips a year for smartphones, televisions and other devices, and making US$3.5 billion in revenue in 2014, according to Forbes. Thanks to its success, Dai was listed in Forbes’ 100 most powerful women in the world in 2015.
However, the couple stepped down from the company in 2016 after a long investigation, despite there being no accounting fraud found, according to VentureBeat. But their passion for technology and business did not wane. Besides investing in other tech companies like Alphawave, Next Input and FLC Technology, Dai also co-founded MeetKai, known as the world’s first AI concierge in 2018. She also co-founded another semiconductor, Dreambig, with her husband in 2019.