Tom is a co-founder and partner of Gobi Partners. He has over fifteen years of experience in venture capital, fund management and investment banking in China and the United States. Tom has lived in China for the past thirteen years. He joined WI Harper Group (“WIH”) in 1999 when it only had two offices in Taipei and San Francisco. Tom was instrumental in building out WIH’s presence in the Greater China region where he opened offices in Hong Kong and Beijing, and hired and trained local management teams.
Tom was part of the team that made the add-on investment in Commerce One (“C1”) in 1999. He worked closely with C1’s entire senior management team to roll out its Asian strategy. Tom helped architect C1's strategy in Hong Kong by bringing together i-Cable, Sun Hung Kai, Swire, Jardine Matheson, New World, Beijing Enterprises, C1, and WIH to create Asia2B.Elected Chairman of Asia2B, Tom helped recruit the senior management team. In January 2001, Asia2B announced the largest Asian new economy merger at the time, the US$72 million merger between Asia2B and SESAMi.com, the B2B subsidiary of SingTel. Tom also led the investment into MyRice.com, one of China's largest Internet portals, in 2000 and became a member of the Board of Directors.In January 2001, Lycos Asia acquired MyRice.com.
As a co-founder of the US$60 million Beijing Technology Development Fund (closed in November 1999), Tom initiated and structured the first international venture capital fund backed by a Chinese state-owned company, Beijing Enterprises Holdings Limited, and a major Chinese University, Tsinghua University, via its subsidiary Tsinghua University Enterprise Group.
Prior to joining WIH in June 1999, Tom was a Director of Investment Banking at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson (China), covering the media and telecommunications sectors. Among his responsibilities, Tom covered Hutchison Telecommunications, SmarTone, and Golden Harvest. From 1996 to 1998, Tom worked for Seapower Financial Services Group. Together with the senior management team, Tom helped transform Seapower from a local securities broker into a leading Hong Kong merchant bank. As the Director of Corporate Strategy, Tom was part of the management buy-out team and responsible for helping to close the sale of Seapower Corporate Finance to Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and Seapower Asset Management to Shanghai Industrial Holdings Limited.
Tom first joined Seapower as an Associate Director for Seapower Asset Management where he was a fund manager focusing on Asian smaller companies and technology stocks. Tom was featured in the Asian Wall Street Journal’s Dartboard Competition. In 1997, Micropal, Lipper, and Fortune ranked the Seapower Asian Smaller Companies Fund as the #1 Asian smaller companies fund.
Prior to Seapower, Tom was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in New York and Hong Kong, where he focused specifically on corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. Tom graduated with honors from Harvard College where he received a Bachelor’s degree in economics. In his spare time, he is involved with the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) organization and the Hugh O'Brian Youth (HOBY) Leadership Foundation.