Hsu Yu-jen

Hsu was born in 1978 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. As a child, Hsu's parents ran food stalls in a night market. He graduated the National Chengchi University in 2000 with a B.A. in English. During this time, he also studied at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia as an exchange student. At 23, Hsu traveled across Central and South America, and is a fluent speaker of both English and Spanish. In 2013 Hsu won the THNK School of Creative Leadership scholarship. In 2015 Hsu was invited to enroll in the Singularity University Executive Program and completed the Exponential Technology course.

After returning from his exchange program to Monash, Hsu served for a year as an editor to the English-language newspaper, Taiwan News. With his savings from this time, he began traveling across South America, visiting Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Peru. Hsu arrived first in Guatemala, where he stayed for six weeks and began lessons in Spanish. During this time, Hsu worked as a tutor of Chinese and took on farm work sorting coffee beans. Hsu was also employed as a tour guide while in Costa Rica. He finally returned to Taiwan after half a year in South American to fulfill his military enlistment. After his service, Hsu was asked by his college roommate, a member of the Mac software sales division (a predecessor to the Apple App Store), to help establish a startup company in San Francisco. Apple acquired the company a year and a half later and Hsu returned to Taiwan at the age of 27. After returning to Taiwan, Hsu worked as a corporate trainer for NIKE. In 2008, Hsu and his friend organized a diverse set of speakers to form "The Big Question Conference", a forerunner to TEDxTaipei.

As partner to his college roommate's Mac software venture, Hsu developed a close working relationship with more than 6000 San Francisco based developers. Starting from 2008, Hsu began writing the TED headquarters in the United States to petition for the right to hold TED events in Taiwan. While he was not able to obtain TED authorization in 2008, Hsu founded the Big Questions Inc., a consultancy focused on social innovation and future sustainability, at this time. Hsu then collaborated with a partner to launch a series of forum discussions known as "The Big Question Conference". In 2009, the TED organization released their conference licensing rights as part of the TEDx project. Hsu applied successfully for the right to host TEDx conferences and Taipei became the first city in Asia to obtain the license.[1] At its founding, the TEDx Taipei team consisted of only three full-time and two part-time employees. With help from the Taiwan Cultural & Creative Foundation, the fledgling organization established its base of operations in the Huashan 1914 Creative Park. In 2011 Hsu became the TEDx ambassador for all of Asia, speaking at TED and TEDx conferences across the world including TEDx Summit, TEDx Kyoto, TEDx Itaewon, TEDx Wanchai and others. Hsu's stated goal at this time was to bring Taiwan's stories to the global stage. Hsu also organized the Sharable Cities Initiative in 2014, a series of hack-a-thons, forums, and workshops dedicated to increasing transparency and promoting open data through crowdsourcing.