Joseph Phua (born 1984) is a Singaporean entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of the dating app Paktor, co-founder and Chairman of the live streaming platform 17LIVE Group, Chairman of SoundOn Group, and founder of Nextapple News. He is known for his role as Chairman of Turn Capital, a single family office that focuses on value investing in the consumer internet sector.
Family
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.
Education
Phua attended Stern School of Business, New York University, majoring in Finance for his undergraduate degree. He obtained a master's degree in Business Administration from Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. After graduation, he worked at McKinsey & Company and Citibank.
Career
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. After returning to Singapore in 2013, he founded Paktor, a mobile dating app targeting Asian markets. 6 months after launch, the app expanded to 11 markets resulting to draining of funds. Phua then raised four rounds of funding from investors such as Vertex Holdings to keep the business going.
In 2017, Phua merged Paktor with 17LIVE, a live streaming platform he co-founded with Machi Jeffrey Huang, to form M17 Entertainment. 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. In 2020, he resigned as the CEO and assumed the role of chairman and the group was renamed 17LIVE Group. In 2023, 17LIVE announced the plan to list on the Singapore Stock Exchange, in combination with Vertex Holdings’backed SPAC, at a valuation of close to S$1.2 billion (close to US$900m). Phua, 17LIVE’s co-founder and Chairman, is said to be the company's largest individual shareholder.
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. The same year, he also acquired Dapp Pocket and Cappuu of a Taiwanese blockchain company. The two companies, Dapp Pocket and Cappuu, were later merged into a retail blockchain finance platform Coinomo.
In September 2022, Phua founded Nextapple News and positioned it as an independent news platform in Taiwan. Phua hired 96 percent of the more than 200 staff laid off from Taiwan AppleDaily Taiwan. In May 2023, he led Turn capital to acquire Zuvio, a Taiwan's student platform offering discussion, forums and friend matching features.
Awards and honors
In 2019, Phua was selected by Asian fashion media Tatler as a Generation T (Gen.T) award recipient.
Philanthropy
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.