West Coast Holdings (WCH) is a nimble, private investment firm focused on building businesses for the long term. WCH invests in technology that corporations depend upon and businesses that provide essential goods and services to consumers or corporations.

WCH invests in companies with long-term vision, proven track records, and stable cash-flows.

Company History
In 1996, Bill Lee cofounded Remarq, a company specializing in outsourced message boards and NNTP services. After building relationships with over 1000 ISP’s and leading websites sites such as eBay and Amazon, the company was sold to Critical Path in January 2000. With the proceeds from Critical Path, West Coast Holdings was founded in 2003 to leverage the founders’ operational and technological backgrounds, access to capital, and network of contacts.

WCH ORGANIZATION
WCH is a fast-moving company. The firm combines operational experience with established M&A experience.

Bill Lee – Founding Partner
Bill Lee was CEO and co-founder of Remarq, a Benchmark Capital-backed collaboration company. At Remarq, Bill guided the company in its development of a complete end-to-end Internet messaging and collaboration platform. Before its acquisition by Critical Path in March 2000, the company developed high-volume messaging platforms for sites such as eBay, Sun, Novell, and Amazon. The company raised over $43 million in venture and debt financing.

Bill has been appointed by the Mayor of San Jose to the Redevelopment Committee of San Jose. Bill also graduated Beta Gamma Sigma from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in accounting/finance and received a JD/MBA from UCLA.

Advisory Board

Jeff Skoll
Founder and Chairman - Participant Productions (www.participantproductions.com)
Skoll has been a leader in technology and philanthropy for many years. In 1996, Skoll joined eBay as its first President and first full-time employee, and developed the company's business plan. After helping to bring CEO Meg Whitman to the company in 1998, Skoll became the VP of Strategic Planning and Analysis at eBay and led the company's acquisition, community development and new business efforts through 2001.

In the months before eBay went public in 1998, Skoll led the company's effort to give back to the community, creating the eBay Foundation through an allocation of pre-IPO shares, an innovation that inspired a wave of similar commitments nationwide. His recent honors and awards include Time Magazine's 100 People of the Year (2006), Wired Magazine's Rave Award (2006), the National Leadership Award for Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley (2004), the Outstanding Philanthropist Award from the International Association of Fundraising Professionals (2003) and the Outstanding Philanthropist Award from the Silicon Valley chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (2002). In addition, in 2003, Jeff was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Toronto.

Victor Hwang
Victor brings over a decade of significant financial experience in investment banking and venture capital. Victor Hwang was most recently CEO and Vice Chairman of ICG Asia, a Hong Kong stock exchange, publicly traded, venture-capital company. ICG Asia was jointly owned by Internet Capital Group and Hutchison Whampoa, Hong Kong’s largest publicly traded conglomerate. As founding employee, Victor built a world-class team of over 20 employees and refocused ICG Asia’s investment strategy.

Prior to his role as CEO of ICG Asia, Victor was a Managing Director, Acquisitions for Internet Capital Group, where he led ICG’s successful investments in Marketron, FreeBorders and Centrimed. ICG’s $8million investment in Centrimed returned $30.7 million in ten months, an IRR of 383%. Victor’s venture capital experience also includes work at General Atlantic Partners and Softbank Capital Partners. Victor has worked closely with numerous Management teams and has been an active member on the Boards of companies.

As an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Victor worked on a wide variety of equity, debt, M&A and other financial advisory matters and transactions, which in cumulative, raised well in excess of one billion dollars for his clients. [His most notable transactions include the IPOs of Yahoo! and eBay.]

Victor has a BA from Stanford University and obtained his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Bill Tai
Bill is a General Partner at Charles River Ventures and leads the West Coast practice. Bill joined CRV in 2002 from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). His investment focus encompasses early stage companies in enabling technologies (chips and software) and wireless technologies. He has worked with over 30 companies at their early stages as private companies.

Bill represents CRV as a director at several privately held companies: Nantero, Rosum and Staccato Communications. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Microtune (TUNE), Transmeta (TMTA) and IPinfusion (Chairman). His directorships have included Adicom Wireless, Award Software (AWRD), 8x8 (EGHT), ByAir (GWCom), Centrum Communications (COMS), Chemconnect, Ensemble Communications, iAsiaWorks (IAWK), IC Works (CY), IMGo (HKSE0067), Kinetic Tide Software, Network Peripherals (NPIX), RLX Technologies, Skytune (Broadlogic), Tradebeam and Vadem Corp.

Bill also led investments in RasterGraphics (RGFX), Terayon (TERN) and Slimdevices, and worked with Creative Technologies, ISSI, Microchip (MCHP), Premisys Communications, Radcom, Sharevision (CREAF), S3 Inc (SIII), and Vitesse on a passive basis.

Prior to his career in venture capital, Bill established the semiconductor practice at Alex Brown and Sons where he positioned public offerings for Adaptec, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Dallas Semiconductor, Exar, and Zilog among others. Previously he held technical and marketing positions with LSI Logic.

Bill holds a B.S., with Honors, in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and an M.B.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Business. He is a past Officer and Director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists.

Elon Musk
SpaceX is the third company founded by Mr. Musk. Prior to SpaceX, he co-founded PayPal, the world's leading electronic payment system, and served as the company's chairman and CEO. PayPal has over twenty million customers in 38 countries, processes several billion dollars per year and went public on the NASDAQ under PYPL in early 2002. Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal until the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002.

Before PayPal, Mr. Musk co-founded Zip2 Corporation in 1995, a leading provider of enterprise software and services to the media industry, with investments from The New York Times Company, Knight-Ridder, MDV, Softbank and the Hearst Corporation. He served as Chairman, CEO and Chief Technology Officer and in March 1999 sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in an all cash transaction.

Mr. Musk's early experience extends across a spectrum of advanced technology industries, from high energy density ultra-capacitors at Pinnacle Research to software development at Rocket Science and Microsoft. He has a physics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a business degree from Wharton and originally came out to California to pursue graduate studies in high energy density capacitor physics & materials science at Stanford.