William Wang, B.S. ’86, founder and CEO of Vizio, rings the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of his 2023 Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering. Photo Credit: NYSE
William Wang spent much of his time at USC destroying robots.
In the mid 1980s, in a now vanished arcade under the old USC Commons, Wang, a young electrical engineering student from Taiwan, fed quarters into a game called Robotron, staying for hours at a stretch, running up high scores while his grades ran in the opposite direction.
“I can put one quarter in and stay there all day,” Wang, B.S. EE ’86, recalled recently, laughing. “Until my finger had blisters.”
He barely graduated. His GPA was somewhere in the low 2s. His friends went on to USC master’s programs; he got rejected. He sent out hundreds of resumes into a Los Angeles job market cratered by the end of the Cold War and never got a real interview.
Four decades later, Walmart paid $2.3 billion for the company he built.
This summer, as Wang prepares to step down as CEO of Vizio, he and his wife Sakura are writing a different kind of check — one that leads directly back to the campus where his engineering education began.
The couple has made a $10 million gift to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Office of Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship, known as tiehub — launching what will now be called the William W. Wang Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub.
It is one of the largest gifts of its kind ever made to an engineering school’s entrepreneurship office in the United States, and one USC Viterbi believes could help establish a national model for how engineering schools cultivate the next generation of founders.
“I want the kids to be proud to be an engineer,” Wang said, “and be comfortable that they can take some chances and be more daring.”
William and Sakura Wang at the 2024 Unforgettable Gala (UNFO 2024), celebrating Asian and Pacific Islanders in entertainment.
“The Next William Wangs”
The gift to USC Viterbi is, in part, a reckoning with his own story.
“Part of this is,” Wang said, “if you’re not a great engineer, you might be a great problem solver. You might be a great businessman. And if you’re a great engineer, even better!”
He sees in today’s USC Viterbi students something he didn’t have when he was the kid at the arcade: an institution willing to meet him where he was.
“When I started my first business, I didn’t know how to spell entrepreneur,” he said. “I couldn’t even pronounce it. It took me a while to figure out what ‘entrepreneur’ even means. Back then, there was no venture capital in Los Angeles. There was no startup culture. Nobody could tell me what any of this was.”
He wants to change that for the students who come after him.
“First thing, first goal: make sure they’re not afraid,” he said. “Because the biggest problem is how do you fight yourself? How do you make yourself uncomfortable? If you look at the statistics of being an entrepreneur, the success rate is pretty low. Any kind of logic tells you: don’t do it. Go find a job somewhere.”
Professor Ellis Meng, USC Viterbi’s vice dean who oversees tiehub, took the point directly.
“We are always looking for the next William Wangs,” she said, referencing students who may be academic underachievers and yet budding entrepreneurs. “We do not screen based on academic performance. Our hope is to make sure our students are aware of us and what we do. If they connect, we can help.”
Managing Director Ralph Lin said: “Our fundamental belief is that students want to build the world they want to live in. The most innovative companies come from a mixture of talent.” Tiehub hackathons, he noted, intentionally draw more than half their participants from outside the engineering school.
What the Gift Builds
The entrepreneurial landscape at USC is already quite different than 40 years ago, when Ronald Reagan was in office.
At USC Viterbi alone, the school boasts three major startup competitions.
- Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition, established through a gift from Fariborz Maseeh, is the largest non-dilutive entrepreneurship prize at USC, awarding $100,000 to the winning team.
- The Min Family Challenge, established through a gift from Bryan and Julie Min, focuses on social entrepreneurship and sustainability, supporting teams working to address real-world problems aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, awarding $50,000 to the winner.
- Das Family Innovate x LA Student Competition, established through a gift from Santanu and Kelly Das, provides a $20,000 grand prize to startups in civil and environmental engineering that tackle the most pressing challenges facing the City of Los Angeles.
Bilisense, winner of the Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition, with USC Viterbi Vice Dean Ellis Meng and Dean Yannis C. Yortsos.
Indeed, USC Viterbi has ranked among the top five engineering schools in the country by number of unicorn founders.
The newly named Wang tiehub already supports more than 70 ventures each year, which accumulatively have amassed $3.8 billion in VC funding — all with just two full-time staff members. In addition, recent alumni-founded companies include Physical Intelligence ($600M Series B, frontier models robotics), Harvey ($200M Series G, AI legal contracts), and Baseten ($1.5B Series F, ML compute).
This past year, applications to tiehub programs nearly doubled — a record, on top of the previous year’s record.
The Wang gift changes the program’s capacity to match that momentum. Over the next five years, the philanthropy aims to train more than 2,000 USC founders and launch 100 startups led by USC Viterbi engineers — through expanded venture-building programs, a curated mentorship network and AI-native infrastructure that lets student teams build faster and at lower cost than any previous generation.
“USC has the talent and momentum,” Lin said, “but scaling personalized mentorship, venture support and programs requires dedicated infrastructure.”
Said Yannis Yortsos, who recently stepped down as USC Viterbi dean after 21 years: “William Wang personifies two of the most important traits of an engineering entrepreneur: technical ingenuity and resilience. Through his company, Vizio, he envisioned and implemented new ideas and new technologies, reinventing relentlessly and with exceptional resilience. In the process, he charted unique pathways for engineering graduates.”
When Customers Swear at You…
Wang was born in Taipei and moved to Hawaii at age 12, speaking no English, knowing no one.
Early on, screens were a place of safety. TV screens depicting “Charlie’s Angels” and “The Six Million Dollar Man” taught him English.
Later, in the fall of 1986, when Wang couldn’t find a job, he found work staring at a different type of screen: computer monitors. A company called Tatung — a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer with an office in Long Beach — hired him as a tech support representative at $1,750 a month.
Nobody at Tatung understood personal computers. Nobody calling Tatung understood them either. Wang’s job was to sit at a desk, pick up the phone, and figure it out.
“They gave me a personal computer, gave me a monitor, and said, ‘Here’s the telephone. When people call, you answer it,'” he said. “That was my test.”
The calls were often infuriating. Customers yelled. They swore. They had plugged their monitors into nothing and wondered why the screen was dark. One customer, asked to insert a floppy disk and close the drive door, stood up and walked across the room to shut a literal door.
Wang learned something that would define everything that came after.
“Usually there’s something wrong, and they want to solve the problem — just like me,” he said. “Even though they swear at you, it doesn’t mean they’re really mad at you. They swear because they’re so passionate. If I just help them, be their friend, deflate their ego — they will become the best brand ambassadors we’ve ever had.”
Within three years, he was running the entire U.S. sales and marketing operation for a company that had hired him to answer phones. He had quadrupled their sales.
His boss wouldn’t promote him — his seniority, they said, was too low. So, Wang told them he was leaving to start his own company.
“He said, ‘I’ll invest,'” Wang recalled. “‘Whatever you’re going to do — I think you’re going to do a startup. How about I invest in you?'” The man who had denied his promotion handed him $150,000. A Taiwanese supplier who had built products for Tatung kicked in another $150,000. Wang had never done a pitch deck. He had never done a formal presentation.
“I think I earned their trust,” he said simply.
Making It, Losing It, Learning EverythingWang’s first companies — MAG Innovision and Princeton Graphic Systems — made him a millionaire before he was 30. Then, in his late 30s, he lost $45 million.
He is not defensive about it.
“I paid $45 million for a business school education,” he smiles. “My biggest mistake was I failed to convert the company from entrepreneurship into enterprise. I believed in myself more than I believed in other people. I was micromanaging everything. I thought my decision was the best decision.”
He paused, then named the lesson that ultimately built Vizio.
“My biggest takeaway is you’ve got to know what you don’t know. You’ve got to appreciate what you don’t know and not just use everything that you know.”
In 2000, he survived the crash of Singapore Airlines Flight 006, which killed 83 people. Two years later — having closed every prior business, reset his life, and mortgaged his house a second time — he started Vizio with $600,000 and a conviction that great technology ought to be affordable.
“The reason I’m here,” Wang said, describing his motivation, “is that I think I qualify to solve that problem. I watch a lot of TV. I think I qualify.”
By 2007, Vizio was the leading HDTV brand in America. In December 2024, Walmart completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of the company. Wang stepped down as CEO at the end of June 2026, leaving behind a team of 1,500 people, more than 100 million devices sold, and a brand that became the largest U.S.-based flat-panel TV maker in history.
“When we sold 100 million devices — 100 million users — that made me proud,” he said. “That made me prouder than the $2.3 billion.”
In 2024, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to William Wang, the founder and CEO of Vizio. Said Wang: “My life has been dedicated to bringing great technology to consumers in America.”
The Next Chapter
Wang is already thinking about what comes after the screen.
He has spent 24 years democratizing the television — bringing theater-quality images into living rooms at prices families could afford. He sees the next frontier as the inverse problem: reimagining shared, communal entertainment experiences that no home screen can replicate.
“My job before, as a TV manufacturer, was to democratize that theater technology into people’s homes,” he said. “Now, if you look at the widespread digital TV, the resolution is just as good. TV is getting bigger. So now — look at the theater. What do you get? You go to a theater. It should be more than a dark room with a big TV.”
The immersive venue company Cosm — whose 90-foot LED dome at Hollywood Park near SoFi Stadium lets fans watch live sports in wraparound 8K alongside hundreds of fellow fans — represents the kind of experience he finds compelling. He described watching the New York Knicks’ NBA Finals comeback at a San Francisco sports bar as one of the most memorable moments of his life.
“It was standing (room) only. I had to buy a beer. You know what? It cost me ten bucks. That ten-dollar experience — so much better than watching it on an augmented reality glass by myself, drinking water, not sharing the excitement. Not sharing the experience.”
He is careful not to announce anything specific yet. But the philosophy is the same one that produced Vizio.
“With all that combined — my knowledge, my relationships, my resources — what else can I do to benefit the whole industry, the whole world, or any kind of consumer?” he said. “If I can marry that engineer problem-solving mind with a business-solving mind together — if I can put it all together — it’s not easy. It’ll take me some time. But I will do something.”
He already has. Twice. And now a third time — this time, on a campus where a kid from Taiwan once spent his afternoons playing Robotron, dreaming of something he couldn’t yet name.
Published on July 30th, 2026
Last updated on July 30th, 2026