David Yu (born 6 November 1967) is the former chief executive officer of Internet betting exchange

Betfair Betfair is a British gambling company which operates the world's largest online betting exchange. Its product offering also includes sports betting, online casino, online poker, and online bingo. Founded in 2000, the business is split into two ...

and a tech investor.

Education and early career

Yu studied computer science at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

and

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. He moved to London from California in 2000 at the behest of his employer

Alta Vista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

Betfair

He became chief technology officer of Betfair in 2001. He was promoted to the position of CEO in January 2006 during a turbulent time for the company that saw the shakeup of the positions of CEO and Chairman with Sir Robert Horton being forced out as Chairman. As an IT guy, Yu's promotion to the helm was unusual. He took the company public on the

London Stock Exchange London Stock Exchange (LSE) is a stock exchange in the City of London, England, United Kingdom. , the total market value of all companies trading on LSE was £3.9 trillion. Its current premises are situated in Paternoster Square close to St Pa ...

in October 2010. David Yu stood down as CEO and from the Board on 31 December 2011 after a 60% drop in share value in the year after listing and the subsequent appointment of Breon Corcoran as his replacement.

Tech investor

He is an early stage tech investor. He was among a group of individual investors and firms that invested seed money in

TransferWise Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a London-based financial technology company founded by Estonian businessmen Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus in January 2011. History Wise was founded by Taavet Hinrikus (Skype's first employee) and fi ...

, a payment transfer company.

References

External links

Interview with Silicon.comVideo of TechCrunch interviewSuccession process for CEO of Betfair to begin
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yu, David 1967 births American computer businesspeople British chief executives American people of Chinese descent American technology chief executives American expatriates in England Gambling in the United Kingdom Living people American chief technology officers UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Stanford University alumni