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23-03-2014, 12:32 PM
http://www.forbes.com/sites/shuchingjean...use/print/
Shu-Ching Jean Chen, Contributor
FORBES ASIA | 3/12/2014 @ 4:53PM |4,084 views
Today Horizons Ventures is closely associated with Li Ka-shing, Asia’s most celebrated tycoon, but he waited two years after its founding before deciding to join in through his Li Ka Shing Foundation.
Li Ka-shing’s Sentries
The common investor behind a parade of success stories in global high technology, including Skype, Facebook, Spotify, Waze, Siri, DeepMind and Summly, was a venture capital firm started by two Hong Kong women as a personal investment vehicle. The pair had their own investing history before bringing in a tycoon.
Today Horizons Ventures is closely associated also with Li Ka-shing, Asia’s most celebrated tycoon, but he waited two years after its founding before deciding to join in through his Li Ka Shing Foundation.
Together, they have made $350 million cumulative investment.
In turn Horizons became the bridge connecting Li, at age 85 the world’s 20th richest person, with an estimated $31 billion fortune off stalwarts Hutchison Whampoa, Cheung Kong Holdings and Husky Energy, with the digital upstarts.
Solina Chau Hoi Shuen, the 52-year-old public face of Horizons, sheds light for the first time on the inner workings of Hong Kong’s venture powerhouse. She discloses, in a written reply to FORBES ASIA, that she founded Horizons in 2002 with her longtime business partner, Debbie Chang Pui Vee, now 63, to seek high-tech opportunities. Chang’s cousin Tung Chee Hwa, scion of the billionaire shipping family behind Orient Overseas Container Line, was then chief executive of Hong Kong, engaged in a futile attempt to create a Silicon Valley in its midst.
Chau will not comment on what share of the $350 million cumulative investment has come from her close companion Li or how proceeds are divvied up. His gains are to be allocated to the Li Ka Shing Foundation, which she heads.
“Mr. Li does not participate in day-to-day review and the selection work,” is what she says. “He loves disruptive innovations and sees it as kind of predictive lenses into the future. He loves to meet and geek with the founders and CEOs of companies within our ‘disruptive’ portfolio to understand their concepts and missions.”
The “disruptive” portfolio within Horizons’ 50-plus stable, mostly in Internet and mobile, refers to those “offering price competitive solutions to a host of real problems and that would be of meaningful impact to the world.” Other big Horizons groups focus on “data guzzling” and, since 2010, artificial intelligence.
For more than a quarter century the two Horizons founders have worked together in the same office in Wan Chai. “Solina and Debbie work hand in hand in all deals,” says Wendy Yu, a spokeswoman, “They are good friends, like a family.” Today they are joined by an investment group of eight other managers and a digital group, also of ten, to support the portfolio companies.
The Horizons pair had worked with Li at least twice before in hatching startups in China. In the early 1990s they took part in incorporating Beijing Oriental Plaza, which grew to become a sprawling upscale commercial complex not far from Tiananmen Square after Li got involved. The project forms the core assets of Hui Xian Real Estate Investment Trust, whose $1.6 billion IPO in 2011 heralded the world’s first RMB-denominated REIT.
Then, in 2000, two years before Horizons’ founding, the triumvirate joined again in listing a China-focused online startup, now known as Tom Group, in the process sparking a dot-com buying frenzy on Hong Kong’s fledgling second board. Chang was one of several strategic investors, extending a hand to founders Chau and Li, and has served on Tom’s board since.
Horizons’ investing model is unlike other venture capital firms that typically raise a pool of funds and set about to invest. Investments are initiated on a case-by-case basis, with Li “invited” to join in.
He schmoozes with young tech wizards of varied other pursuits–rock climber, backpacker, visual performance artist, navy commander, derivatives quant and trader. Nick D’Aloisio, founder of Summly, was only 15 years old when he brought his idea for an app that uses artificial intelligence to summarize large amounts of text. The company was sold to Yahoo a year ago for $30 million.
In February, with Horizons hosting, Li watched Hampton Creek Foods CEO and founder Josh Tetrick make a patented plant-based scrambled egg before sampling it. Tetrick got Horizons and Li to jointly inject $15.5 million in its latest $23 million financing round.
Li’s presence has been seen as a stamp of confidence in many money-losing startups. In 2005 Horizons got into Skype, one year before eBay paid $2.5 billion for the voice-over-IP service provider. The most successful was an early sliver of Facebook that would fetch nearly $1.5 billion today. Chau and Chang personally pitched the social site to Li in December 2007.
The Li Ka Shing Foundation, in turn, has put back its winnings in ways such as a $130 million donation to the Tel Aviv-based Technion Institute of Technology to foster knowledge transfer between China and Israel, where, through Horizons, Li has become the most active foreign investor.
Another Horizons bet is Medial Research, an Israeli firm using proprietary algorithmic analysis of medical data to assess patients’ risk levels and help physicians make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions, such as in colorectal cancer.
With its tight funding arrangement, Horizons can decline to speak of such common measures’ return ratios. Yu, the spokeswoman, says it “has a quite satisfactory exit rate.” No doubt.
[Image: 0311_solina-chau_650x455.jpg]Solina Chau
[Image: 0311_debbie-chang_650x4551.jpg]Debbie Chang
Shu-Ching Jean Chen, Contributor
FORBES ASIA | 3/12/2014 @ 4:53PM |4,084 views
Today Horizons Ventures is closely associated with Li Ka-shing, Asia’s most celebrated tycoon, but he waited two years after its founding before deciding to join in through his Li Ka Shing Foundation.
Li Ka-shing’s Sentries
The common investor behind a parade of success stories in global high technology, including Skype, Facebook, Spotify, Waze, Siri, DeepMind and Summly, was a venture capital firm started by two Hong Kong women as a personal investment vehicle. The pair had their own investing history before bringing in a tycoon.
Today Horizons Ventures is closely associated also with Li Ka-shing, Asia’s most celebrated tycoon, but he waited two years after its founding before deciding to join in through his Li Ka Shing Foundation.
Together, they have made $350 million cumulative investment.
In turn Horizons became the bridge connecting Li, at age 85 the world’s 20th richest person, with an estimated $31 billion fortune off stalwarts Hutchison Whampoa, Cheung Kong Holdings and Husky Energy, with the digital upstarts.
Solina Chau Hoi Shuen, the 52-year-old public face of Horizons, sheds light for the first time on the inner workings of Hong Kong’s venture powerhouse. She discloses, in a written reply to FORBES ASIA, that she founded Horizons in 2002 with her longtime business partner, Debbie Chang Pui Vee, now 63, to seek high-tech opportunities. Chang’s cousin Tung Chee Hwa, scion of the billionaire shipping family behind Orient Overseas Container Line, was then chief executive of Hong Kong, engaged in a futile attempt to create a Silicon Valley in its midst.
Chau will not comment on what share of the $350 million cumulative investment has come from her close companion Li or how proceeds are divvied up. His gains are to be allocated to the Li Ka Shing Foundation, which she heads.
“Mr. Li does not participate in day-to-day review and the selection work,” is what she says. “He loves disruptive innovations and sees it as kind of predictive lenses into the future. He loves to meet and geek with the founders and CEOs of companies within our ‘disruptive’ portfolio to understand their concepts and missions.”
The “disruptive” portfolio within Horizons’ 50-plus stable, mostly in Internet and mobile, refers to those “offering price competitive solutions to a host of real problems and that would be of meaningful impact to the world.” Other big Horizons groups focus on “data guzzling” and, since 2010, artificial intelligence.
For more than a quarter century the two Horizons founders have worked together in the same office in Wan Chai. “Solina and Debbie work hand in hand in all deals,” says Wendy Yu, a spokeswoman, “They are good friends, like a family.” Today they are joined by an investment group of eight other managers and a digital group, also of ten, to support the portfolio companies.
The Horizons pair had worked with Li at least twice before in hatching startups in China. In the early 1990s they took part in incorporating Beijing Oriental Plaza, which grew to become a sprawling upscale commercial complex not far from Tiananmen Square after Li got involved. The project forms the core assets of Hui Xian Real Estate Investment Trust, whose $1.6 billion IPO in 2011 heralded the world’s first RMB-denominated REIT.
Then, in 2000, two years before Horizons’ founding, the triumvirate joined again in listing a China-focused online startup, now known as Tom Group, in the process sparking a dot-com buying frenzy on Hong Kong’s fledgling second board. Chang was one of several strategic investors, extending a hand to founders Chau and Li, and has served on Tom’s board since.
Horizons’ investing model is unlike other venture capital firms that typically raise a pool of funds and set about to invest. Investments are initiated on a case-by-case basis, with Li “invited” to join in.
He schmoozes with young tech wizards of varied other pursuits–rock climber, backpacker, visual performance artist, navy commander, derivatives quant and trader. Nick D’Aloisio, founder of Summly, was only 15 years old when he brought his idea for an app that uses artificial intelligence to summarize large amounts of text. The company was sold to Yahoo a year ago for $30 million.
In February, with Horizons hosting, Li watched Hampton Creek Foods CEO and founder Josh Tetrick make a patented plant-based scrambled egg before sampling it. Tetrick got Horizons and Li to jointly inject $15.5 million in its latest $23 million financing round.
Li’s presence has been seen as a stamp of confidence in many money-losing startups. In 2005 Horizons got into Skype, one year before eBay paid $2.5 billion for the voice-over-IP service provider. The most successful was an early sliver of Facebook that would fetch nearly $1.5 billion today. Chau and Chang personally pitched the social site to Li in December 2007.
The Li Ka Shing Foundation, in turn, has put back its winnings in ways such as a $130 million donation to the Tel Aviv-based Technion Institute of Technology to foster knowledge transfer between China and Israel, where, through Horizons, Li has become the most active foreign investor.
Another Horizons bet is Medial Research, an Israeli firm using proprietary algorithmic analysis of medical data to assess patients’ risk levels and help physicians make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions, such as in colorectal cancer.
With its tight funding arrangement, Horizons can decline to speak of such common measures’ return ratios. Yu, the spokeswoman, says it “has a quite satisfactory exit rate.” No doubt.
[Image: 0311_solina-chau_650x455.jpg]Solina Chau
[Image: 0311_debbie-chang_650x4551.jpg]Debbie Chang