First foreigner in Taiwan listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia

富比士亞洲 30 位 30 歲以下精英榜首位台灣外籍人士

American left China for Taiwan's less restrictive laws on foreign ownership


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — An American residing in Taipei has become the first foreigner in Taiwan to be listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Asia, having left China due to its overly restrictive regulations on foreign ownership of companies.

On Thursday (May 18), Forbes released its eighth annual “30 Under 30 Asia” list, which included 300 "young entrepreneurs, leaders, and trailblazers" from across the Asia-Pacific region under the age of 30. Among the awardees is the first foreign national based in Taiwan to make the list, Clayton Jacobs, the 25-year-old CEO and founder of CreatorDB.

Jacobs, who originally hails from Chicago, told Taiwan News that he was the youngest Program Manager at Microsoft when he was 18. After discontinuing his studies at Purdue University, he left for Shenzhen when he was 19 to work for a U.S.-headquartered accelerator called ReadWrite that had opened a branch in the city, before joining a venture capital group tied to Tsinghua University.

In 2018, he came to Taiwan to work as a product manager for a computer vision start-up called ULSee, where he worked as a product manager. Jacobs said that he started CreatorDB after seeing the need to approach influencer marketing from a quantitative perspective, having observed how some of his friends' companies were spending money on influencers "without much of an intelligent decision-making process."

He said that he met his co-founder, also a foreign resident from Australia named Noah Hynam, on the Taiwan subreddit when he was looking for partners with which to play Dungeons and Dragons. Jacobs founded the company in 2019 at the age of 22 and set up its headquarters in Taipei.

According to Jacobs, CreatorDB has garnered an annualized revenue of over NT$123 million (US$4 million) and now employs over 30 full-time employees. The marketing agency connects businesses with influencers and notable clients include VPN service Surfshark and the online game World of Tanks.

Jacobs says that Taiwan has significant potential for startups and has been an outspoken advocate for the country’s "rich opportunities for foreign talent." He considers his success with CreatorDB to be "a shining example of Taiwan’s thriving startup ecosystem."

When asked why he left China for Taiwan, Jacobs said that China has quite restrictive laws around foreign ownership of Chinese companies. For example, no foreigner can own more than 50% of a company, while Taiwan does not have such a restriction.

Jacobs said that even though he moved to Taiwan for a position as a product manager and did not start a company right away, he knew that "down the line, I wanted to be a founder, so it seemed better to position myself long-term in Taiwan."

Beyond his work with his startup, Jacobs says he intends to publish a book covering the creator economy in early 2024.

Other outstanding young professionals from Taiwan who made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list are Candace Chen from Fluv; the trio of Chan Yu-An, Lin Yu-Fan, and Wu YuChuan from Heptabase; Alice Li from Rosetta.ai; and Storipress founders Chang Yu-Sheng, Alex Pan, and David Peng.