Joseph Phua

Phua met his wife through the app Paktor with whom he started his family in Taiwan, and they have been residing in Taiwan since 2013.[6]

Phua attended Stern School of Business, New York University, majoring in Finance for his undergraduate degree.[7] He obtained a master's degree in Business Administration from Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.[7] After graduation, he worked at McKinsey & Company and Citibank.[8]

In 2012, while studying at the University of Chicago, Phua was inspired by the emerging dating app, Tinder, after a breakup with his girlfriend of 8 years.[9] After returning to Singapore in 2013, he founded Paktor, a mobile dating app targeting Asian markets.[9][10] 6 months after launch, the app expanded to 11 markets resulting to draining of funds.[11][12][13] Phua then raised four rounds of funding from investors such as Vertex Holdings to keep the business going.[14][15][16]

In 2017, Phua merged Paktor with 17LIVE, a live streaming platform he co-founded with Machi Jeffrey Huang, to form M17 Entertainment.[17] After the merger, Phua became the CEO of M17 Entertainment. Phua built 17LIVE into a leading live streaming company in Asia excluding China, grossing over a billion US dollars in revenue.[18] In 2020, he resigned as the CEO[19] and assumed the role of chairman and the group was renamed 17LIVE Group.[20]

In 2021, Phua's family investment office, Turn Capital, acquired the podcast platform SoundOn and merged it with the voice social service Goodnight to form the SoundOn Group.[21] The same year, he also acquired Dapp Pocket and Cappuu of a Taiwanese blockchain company.[22][23] The two companies, Dapp Pocket and Cappuu, were later merged into a retail blockchain finance platform Coinomo.[24][4]

In September 2022, Phua founded Nextapple News[25] and positioned it as an independent news platform in Taiwan.[26] Phua hired 96 percent of the more than 200 staff laid off from Taiwan AppleDaily Taiwan.[27][28] In May 2023, he led Turn capital to acquire Zuvio, a Taiwan's student platform offering discussion, forums and friend matching features.[29]

In 2019, Phua was selected by Asian fashion media Tatler as a Generation T (Gen.T) award recipient.[30]

In 2021, Phua announced the establishment of the Phua and Chang Scholarship, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business endowment, sponsoring a Booth MBA student from Taiwan or Singapore each year. The scholarship was first awarded to a student from Taiwan.[31]