Isaac Mao


Isaac Mao is a Chinese venture capitalist, software architect, and social media researcher. He is also known for co-founding CNBlogs.org, doing research in social learning and for developing the philosophy of Sharism. He is the director of the Social Brain Foundation, a vice president of the United Capital Investment Group and was fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Life and work

Mao is a venture capitalist, blogger, software architect, entrepreneur and researcher in learning and social technology. He divides his time between research, social works, business and technology. Mao has written extensively about on-line journalism, and advises Global Voices Online and several web 2.0 businesses. Mao's essay "Sharism: A Mind Revolution" appeared in the Freesouls book project.

Blogging and blog advocacy

Mao is a co-founder of CNBlogs.org and a co-organizer of the Chinese Blogger Conference. He started a movement in 2005 to adopt Chinese bloggers on overseas servers.
Mao is a regular speaker at global conferences about Internet culture, in China and more broadly and other global events on Internet culture. In 2009, he was a speaker at the 40th anniversary of The Internet Conference held at UCLA As a trained software engineer, he has a long history of developing both business and consumer software. He worked as a Chief Architect in the Intel HomeCD project and Tangram BackSchool suite.
As of 2008, Mao published an open letter to Google, challenging the search engine giant to support anti-censorship efforts and change its strategy on China.