The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order by company): Kevin Leung, HTC

Kevin Leung gets bored easily. It is a trait that has defined his career so far, having worked for 10 companies in 20 years including founding and subsequently leaving several profitable startups. None of them could maintain his interest. So what job can an easily-bored entrepreneur find that will keep him engaged? It turns out that running a $100m virtual reality (VR) accelerator program for technology provider HTC does quite a good job of it.

“I am a technology geek and I get bored easily. I founded several profitable startups but I left mostly because I got bored. But at Vive X, not only do I have the chance to work with some of the smartest people in the industry, I also work with new teams every six months so I will never get bored,” Leung said.

HTC launched Vive X in April 2016 with Leung coming on board as director in July that year to run its operations in Beijing and Shenzhen in China and now its newly opened location in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was set up as a series of accelerator programs in different cities to foster innovation in the VR sector and create an ecosystem around HTC’s Vive VR product.

Vive X has invested in more than 80 companies since it started, with Leung having managed more than 30 deals, according to Alvin Wang Graylin, Vive’s regional president in China.

Graylin said: “It is an exciting time of rapid innovation for the VR industry now and Kevin has made a big contribution to the VR startup ecosystem with his efforts.”

Vive X recently announced its third batch of startups that would go through the program. Of the 26 companies that will participate across five locations, 14 will be located in Beijing (Future Tech, Genhaosan, JuDaoEdu, Lenqiy, PanguVR, Pillow’s Willow VR Studios, Yue Cheng Tech), Shenzhen (Antilatency, Configreality, Super Node, VRWaibao, Wewod) and Tel Aviv (Astral Vision, Remmersive), under Leung.

This continued growth is one of the biggest challenges that Leung faces. He said to keep up with the growing size and diversity of the accelerator’s community, his team also needed to keep growing in pace.

Perhaps the biggest success of Vive X so far was a company in its first batch, TPCast, which has developed a wireless adapter for VR headsets, removing the need for cables to connect to the PC that is doing the graphics processing.

“It is a team that I incubated last year [2016], helping them to transform a proof of concept to a mass consumer product in just months,” Leung said.

The TPCast adapter is the first wireless solution for VR, which competitors in the market had previously said is a problem that they did not expect to be solved for another two years. The RMB1,400 ($220) device was offered for pre-order in November 2016 through Vive’s Chinese site and reportedly sold out within minutes.

Leung said the company had brought in a massive return on investment, however as it is in the process of raising a new round he asked that we not disclose figures. He added: “In general, over one and a half years of running the accelerator we are seeing three to five times returns on most investments despite it being the so-called VR investment winter.”

While Vive X has done a good job of keeping Leung occupied he still maintains other interests to stop himself from getting bored. He is the CEO of Muku Labs, a phone accessory company he started on Kickstarter in 2012. He gives the company around four hours of his time a week, having outsourced all of the business functions, from product design to manufacturing to marketing and sales, and it is still profitable.

Leung also uses his free time to guest lecture on MBA and executive MBA courses at Columbia University in the US and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in China, passing on his entrepreneurial experience as well as that earned in the corporate world form the likes of HTC and financial services firm HSBC.

Despite maintaining outside interests, Leung has no plans to leave Vive X in the near future. For now, his goal is to make VR “as ubiquitous as the smartphone through our efforts in ecosystem investment”.