William Wang

William Wang, the founder and CEO of Vizio, was born and raised in Taiwan, moved to Hawaii, United States at the age of 13 and then to California at the age of 14. He attended the University of Southern California and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1986. Wang answered a newspaper ad from a Chinese company that sold computer monitors and worked in tech support, answering customers' calls until 1990.

Thinking he could build a better computer monitor than the IBM standard, he started a company called MAG Innovision in 1990. He founded the company with $350,000 and it grew to $600 million in six years. In 1994, Wang acquired Princeton Graphic Systems, which was later sold in 2001. He started with two or three employees and grew to about 400, with manufacturing done overseas.

The market grew fast, but then the industry took a different turn. By 1998, MAG Innovision's revenue was around $470 million, but because the computer business had gone from a technology-driven industry to a commodity industry, along with spending too much money and losing money, he sold the company to his manufacturer in 1998. Wang then started another computer monitor company called Princeton Graphic Systems, beginning with an R&D facility in Asia that worked on high-definition TVs. He tried doing custom video displays for slot machines, Internet-enabled high-definition TV sets, and a few other businesses, but none of them really worked out.

As everything was collapsing, Wang was involved in an airplane crash. He survived the crash of Singapore Airlines Flight 006, suffering only carbon monoxide poisoning. The event proved inspirational: in his potentially final moments, he thought first of his family and second of all the business-related headaches that were suddenly gone. The tragedy provided an opportunity for him to reorganize his thoughts and his life, and within two years he had closed down all of his businesses before entering the television market.

In 2001, Gateway asked Wang to help put together a TV plan. Ted Waitt — Gateway's then chairman — had been one of his customers at MAG and had become his mentor. His team helped Gateway put together its 42-inch plasma TV system, priced at $2,999, while comparable systems at the time sold for upwards of $6,000.

Not long after that, he decided to get into the TV business for himself. Wang started "V Inc." in 2002 with Laynie Newsome, Ken Lowe, and $600,000. His idea was to combine low prices with high quality and exceptional customer support, and to make this approach profitable through extremely lean operations. He had originally wanted to name it W Inc. after being impressed with the Hotel W during a stay there, but settled for V when he learned that W had already been copyrighted. Later, when V Inc. was found to be hard to pronounce, he renamed the company VIZIO Inc. — the name used for their plasma TV.

The company became one of the largest sellers of LCD HDTVs in North America, with $2.5 billion in revenue in 2009 and a three-year growth rate of 295.12%. Wang also served on the Board of Directors at Segerstrom Center from 2011 and on the Board of Counselors of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering from 2009. He won numerous awards, among them the 2012 USC Alumni Merit Award, the 2012 Forum for Corporate Directors' Award for Enhancement of Economic Value, the 2012 Orange County Business Journal Board of Achievement Award, and recognition in the 2010 Forbes 25 Most Notable Chinese Americans.