Experts & Staff

Tao Zhang is currently Chief Operating Officer of New Ventures at the World Resources Institute. New Ventures is WRI’s center for environmental entrepreneurship, helping environmentally-focused small and medium enterprises in six key emerging markets compete in a global economy. In this role, Tao manages New Ventures’ Global Hub in Washington DC and its global network of six Local Centers in Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Before joining New Ventures and WRI, Tao was Co-Founder and Managing Director of a cross-border Sino-US government and investment consultancy firm where he led a team in advising private equity and venture capital investors, SMEs and multinational companies in the IT and clean energy fields. Under his leadership, his firm assisted a number of investors and multinational companies in evaluating, negotiating and closing a variety of transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars. During his tenure at the firm, he and his partners influenced and provided support to drafting of China’s first anti-monopoly legislation that went into effect in 2008.

Prior to this, Tao worked in the corporate venture capital arm of MCI, later merged with Verizon to become Verizon Business, where he advised the company in identifying strategic acquisition and investment target companies across the globe to complement its enterprise product portfolio, resulting in acquisitions and venture investments worth over $2 billion. Before this, Tao also held Asia-based senior management positions at a multinational technology company in the capacities of Greater China General Manager and Assistant Asia-Pacific President where he helped quadruple the company’s revenue from the region.

Tao started his career working both as a journalist and a policy analyst, including a stint in Brussels where he covered the European Union (EU) and advised China’s central government on EU-related commercial and economic policies.

Tao received a BA from Beijing Foreign Studies University, an MBA from Wake Forest University as a Babcock scholar, and an MPA from Harvard University as a Mason Fellow. Tao is an avid reader, a frequent speaker, and a prolific writer when he has the time – his articles have been published and re-published extensively in leading Chinese and international media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily and online portals such as Sina.com. Tao is a native speaker of Mandarin and has an associate degree in French.