“He knows how to innovate, but he also knows how to have fun. That makes for a great partner” 

— Sean Muller, CEO, iSpot

By Jon Lafayette

Vizio founder William Wang, who changed the television business as a smart-TV pioneer, learned to speak English watching The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and Three’s Company. 

Wang said his favorite subject was art when he came to America from Taiwan as a 12-year-old. His mother urged him to become an engineer instead, but after graduating from the University of Southern California, he couldn’t get a “real engineering job” and accepted a post in tech support for a computer monitor maker. Understanding what customers wanted would guide the rest of his career.

“He was answering the customer service calls, so he knew exactly what consumers wanted, right?” said Ben Wong, former president and chief operating officer of Vizio. “That’s a big difference. I truly always had faith in his vision. He always predicted correctly what will be coming next.”

Before he was in the TV business, Wang was making computer monitors for companies including Gateway.

“He set the standards in the computer industry for what the resolution was, what the scan rate was, the size of monitors,” said Ted Waitt, a co-founder of Gateway. With a network of vendors back home in Asia, Wang was able to make bigger screens with more resolution for lower prices than the big companies he competed with.

When Gateway jumped into making plasma TVs, Wang “was the man behind the scenes making the magic happen, “ Waitt said. “And, you know, delivering us a really high-quality product at a great price.” 

Smart TV Pioneer

Wang decided to merge the computer with the TV set, creating the first smart TV in 1998, but it was ahead of its time. “I lost a lot of money at that time because connectivity was pretty weak,” Wang recalled. People didn’t want to wait five minutes for a modem to produce a picture. 

On Oct. 31, 2000, Wang was one of the few who survived a Singapore Airlines crash near Taipei, and he quickly went back to work.

Wang started Vizio in 2002 and by 2009, it was the No. 1 LCD HDTV in the U.S. At that point, “I said let’s go back to connect the TV to the internet,” he said. YouTube and Netflix were eager to have Vizio incorporate their streaming apps. 

Having a two-way connection to consumers via the internet also gave Vizio a way to generate recurring revenues through data and advertising. “If I know what that viewer is watching and what the TV is playing, just like Google and Yahoo, I can do targeted ads,” he said.

One of the first companies to take advantage of the data Vizio got from its viewers was audience measurement company iSpot. 

“That opened up a whole new world and allowed us to be able to connect these impressions to outcomes,” iSpot CEO Sean Muller said. “This is the holy grail for advertisers.”

The deal was signed over dinner. “William knows how to work hard,” Muller said. “He knows how to innovate, but he also knows how to have fun. That makes for a great partner.” 

“I'm proud that Vizio grew to be bigger than me. It’s really an enterprise of many, many talented people besides me. It’s not like it’s my baby anymore.”

— William Wang

Emmy-Winning OS

Wang won an Emmy for Vizio’s smart TV operating system, which reshaped the television landscape in 2024. By the third quarter of that year, all of Vizio’s gross profit came from its advertising and data business.

Wang took Vizio public in 2021. By 2023, Vizio’s biggest distributor, Walmart, came to him wanting to do a strategic deal. 

“With the support of Walmart, we can build a great TV and great operating system and get a lot bigger,” he said. “In the beginning, I really didn’t want to sell. But after talking to my team, I think it was the best decision.”

The deal closed in 2024 and, after a year-and-a-half transition, he’s no longer part of the company.

He still loves TV and has been watching Lucky on Apple TV and Lioness on Paramount+, which is available via Walmart+. 

Wang is proud that Vizio grew to be bigger than him. “It’s really an enterprise of many, many talented people besides me,” he said. “It’s not like it’s my baby anymore.”

He believes his legacy is that he helped make TV more affordable and gave viewers more entertainment choices and a better experience.

Since leaving Vizio, Wang has done a lot of traveling, driving Porsches in Spain and Sweden. He’s taking his daughter, another engineer who has started a robotics company, to the Galapagos Islands.

But he’s not sitting on his laurels. “I’m looking for other problems,” he said. “I’m an engineer, so I love to solve problems.”