Sonny Vu

Vietnam

Founder of Misfit (Acquired by Fossil for $260 million)

Sonny works with founders to build companies that will have a positive, lasting impact on a lot of people. Much of his work is about getting technology resulting from scientific breakthroughs to market quickly. Current themes include materials science and chips that enable energy-related and other engineering breakthroughs and novel biotechnology that can massively scale synthetic biology for delicious, affordable and clean food production.
Most recently, Sonny served as President and CTO of Fossil Group, Connected Devices, using fashion and design to make technology more beautiful and useful. Before that, he started and built a number of companies: Elemental Machines (IoT for complex processes), Misfit (wearables for fashion; acquired by Fossil Group for $260m), AgaMatrix (biosensors and digital health for diabetes; ongoing partnership w/ Sanofi), FireSpout (natural language processing for information retrieval; acquired by Ask Jeeves). Before doing startups, he worked at Microsoft Research in NLP under Kai-Fu Lee, worked on a PhD in Linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky, and studied math at UIUC.
Sonny lives in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) with his wife Christy and two kids, Mary and Manny. He’s mostly at home studying or playing with his kids, though he’s often on a Zoom call with a startup founder.