Advisory Board
Rich Robinson
Founding Chair, Intercognitive | Making The Physical World Accessible to AI | Entrepreneur, Executive, Investor & Professor
Rich Robinson has spent more than three decades in Asia as an advisor, entrepreneur, executive, professor, and investor. He is the founding chair of The Intercognitive Foundation, an industry group working to make the physical world accessible to artificial intelligence.
Robinson has worked with eight startups as a co-founder or senior executive and with dozens of others as an investor, board member, advisor, or mentor through organizations including HAX, Chinaccelerator, and 500. He previously served as a senior executive at three companies during their transitions from private to public. He later founded five companies, three of which were acquired by publicly listed companies.
For more than a decade, Robinson has served as a clinical professor of entrepreneurship in Peking University’s Guanghua International MBA Program. He has also mentored Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University’s Schwarzman College (苏世民书院) for six years. In addition, he has taught senior executives through Tsinghua University’s BI-Tsinghua program and taught the Spirit of Entrepreneurship at Alibaba University. He frequently guest lectures at institutions around the world, including Harvard University, the University of Southern California, the Technical University of Munich, and the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.
Active in the technology and startup communities across Asia and around the world, Robinson is also a sought-after keynote speaker and event emcee in the fields of technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation. His entrepreneurial journey in China was profiled by The New York Times.
Robinson grew up in Greater Boston before traveling “wicked fah away” to study at the University of Southern California and the University of Cambridge. After college, he worked his way around the world as a bartender in the Virgin Islands, a concierge and ski bum in the Swiss Alps, an English teacher in post-revolution Prague, a house painter in Norway, a grape picker in France, and a BMW factory worker in Munich.
In 1993, Robinson traveled overland from Switzerland to Hong Kong via Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway and became captivated by China’s potential and promise. From 1994 to 1996, he earned his MBA from the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, where he also developed an early interest in the internet. After graduate school, he completed a solo, 4,000-kilometer bicycle journey from Nairobi to Cape Town, traveling from Africa’s equator to its southern tip.
Robinson’s creative pursuits include writing children’s books through Creatribute, with all proceeds donated to charity, and producing and emceeing stand-up comedy shows across Asia featuring comedians such as Jim Gaffigan, Louis C.K., and Russell Peters. He also began podcasting during the COVID-19 lockdown.
After nearly a quarter century in China, Robinson has spent the past six years based in Bali, Indonesia. He lives there with his entrepreneur wife and their three children, all “Made in China,” and remains a dedicated student of Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia. More information about his work is available through his Linktree.