Talent and Taiwan - The Gold Card Program

We're proud to host our first joint event with the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club on a hot topic in Taiwan right now.

The Taiwan Employment Gold Card is a combined visa, work permit and residence permit launched in 2018. Its aim is to attract high-level professional talent across different fields. To date, more than 900 have been granted.  While the application process seems simple, the requirements to qualify are often vague and arbitrarily high in many fields, which risks hindering the core goal of developing Taiwan's talent pool.  Our speakers are two Gold Card Holders, who've been through the process and understand what it takes to attract talent as Taiwan seeks to build an innovation economy.  

Tom Fifield worked with CERN's large-hadron collider, and his projects include large-scale distributed computing with a team of Nobel Prize-winning particle physicists. He also ran one of the world's largest open-source communities, OpenStack, and is a published author on the topic.   Since arriving in Taiwan he's become a co-creator of the Website TaiwanGoldCard.com. Most recently, Tom became one of the few foreigners allowed to take up Taiwan Citizenship, becoming naturalized through the High Level Professional channel (without relinquishing native nationality).  

Susan Wu started her career as a software and operations engineer and has gone on to become an entrepreneur, investor and Taiwan Gold Card holder. She's one of the earliest employees at Stripe, and as an angel investor and advisor she's worked with high-growth startups including Square, reddit, Canva, Twitter and others.   She was named among the "100 Most Creative People in Business" and "Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company. Susan is an Edmund Hillary Fellow and has been a founding team member for high-impact communities including YC120 and Above All Human. She now lives in Taipei.   

We're sure you'll learn a lot from our conversation with Tom and Susan and hope you can join us.

NOTE:

• This event will not be recorded.
• Please register by COB Wednesday 23 September - the link will be emailed by Thursday morning