Jim Chu

Jim has been active entrepreneur and investor since 1994 and has been involved in humanitarian aid and development since 2004. After obtaining his B.A. in International Relations and Quantitative Economics from Stanford University in 1994, Jim founded a consulting firm in the very early days of the Internet, helping businesses leverage the reach of the web to expand internationally. After his M.A. in International Policy Studies at Stanford, he joined Cisco Systems where he ran marketing and business development in Latin America and Canada, growing annual revenues for services from $90M to $140M within 2 years. Jim left Cisco to join Medécins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), where he headed administrative and financial operations for their missions in Nigeria.

Since 2005, Jim has been investing in and operating numerous start-ups in Silicon Valley, both bootstrapped and venture-backed. Jim has been actively working in Haiti since early 2010 and until July, 2012 was the CEO of LifeGivingForce (LGF), a social enterprise deploying donor-funded private-public water kiosks in urban and rural Haiti. He was heavily involved in technical designs, operational deployments, field training, and market assessments for LGF’s water kiosk installations. His goal in Haiti is to promote entrepreneurship in emerging countries by giving the disadvantaged the right know-how and capital so they can meet their own needs and support their communities.