Profile: Vickers Capital's Finian Tan

He may have generated a return of 100x on one of his first VC deals, been offered scholarships by the world's top universities and attended parties with Prince Charles, but when Finian Tan was an adolescent, he wasn't sure what he'd be good at.

Born to an accountant-turned-CFO and a schoolteacher, the young Tan preferred to be a generalist where his love of music was concerned, mastering the drums, flute, bass, saxophone and organ, as well as singing in a group. When it came to thinking about his future, he was again torn between multiple options - medicine, law and academia. In the event, he opted for engineering, but not before undergoing two and a half years of national service with the Singaporean Armed Forces.

Tan was placed within the Armed Forces Counseling Center, where he helped support his peers who were experiencing social problems. "I had homosexual clients who refused to take showers with other men, people who just wanted to leave the army, people who had pregnant girlfriends and wanted to escape from the army to be with them," he recalls.

The biggest challenge of all came one night when Tan was manning a 24-hour hotline that offered support to those with suicidal tendencies. "A person phoned up saying he wanted to commit suicide, so I talked with him for two hours - 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. - trying to persuade him not to take his own life. It was very tough because I was worried that I wouldn't say the right thing."

Tan was ultimately successful, and stark memories of that night stay with him to this day.

Royal appointments

At 21, Tan began his engineering studies, first at the Singapore Polytechnic and then at the University of Glasgow. Despite finding Glaswegian an almost impossible dialect to understand, he excelled in his degree and received scholarship offers from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Stanford. One of these was the Shell Cambridge Scholarship, awarded to the best three candidates annually from 11 countries, which he duly accepted to do a PHD and Masters in engineering. "Singapore had never won it before so it was a real honor for me," says Tan.

The only condition of Tan's Shell award was hardly an arduous one: every year he was to attend a party hosted by its patron, Prince Charles, at Kensington Palace. "All of us went because we were hoping to meet Princess Diana, but we never did," Tan says. These meet-and-greets weren't his only brush with royalty: the Duke of Edinburgh visited Cambridge during his tenure there and Tan was selected to demonstrate a laboratory experiment. "He was with me for about two hours and I was so nervous because everything had to go smoothly," he says.

Despite these early successes a career in engineering held little appeal for Tan. Aged 28, he returned to Singapore to work in supply and trading for Shell. There he was responsible for chartering ships and moving cargoes of oil around Asia and the Middle East, an occupation he took to with such passion that he was eventually sent to Japan to become a trader. Four years later, he was chief trader for Shell Japan and had thrown himself into learning the local language.
"In Japan everything is in Japanese - you can't read any road signs; you go to the supermarket and don't know whether you're buying beef or pork," explains Tan, who in his frustration decided to attend Japanese classes twice weekly.

Trading to politics

After three years in Japan, Tan returned to his homeland to work as an oil trader for J Aron, the commodities arm of Goldman Sachs. It wasn't long however before his career took another dramatic turn: he was asked to join the Singapore government as deputy secretary in the Ministry of Trade and Industry. "You never know what it's like to run a country unless you actually are in government," says Tan. "It's a thankless job to some extent - you work very hard and there's always a group of people who feel you haven't done enough."

In spite of the challenges, it was during this stint in government that Tan's passion for venture capital was unearthed. Tasked with helping to turn Singapore into a Silicon Valley for the East, Tan recommended the city state establish the $1 billion Technopreneurship Investment Fund, of which he became chairman.

It wasn't until 2000 that Tan was to make his biggest impact on the Asian venture industry though. Having left his government office, he became a founding partner for Draper Fisher Jurvertson ePlanet in Asia, and managed to convince a reluctant DFJ to let him make his first investment in China. "After several proposals, I finally got them to agree to invest in a small shop with 15 employees and no revenues - that company was called Baidu," he says.

A runaway success, this investment made DFJ a money multiple of more than 100x when the company listed in 2005.

Tan went on to lead 13 investments for DFJ - reaping six IPOs and three home-runs - but before long, he says, it was only natural for him to want to branch out on his own. Vickers Capital Group, an investment house with offices in Shanghai and Singapore, was founded in 2004 by Tan and three partners, who have all remained together for four funds.

Having accomplished far more than most in the various vocations he has tried, Tan is settled in venture capital and has no plans to change profession once again. Indeed, he is optimistic about the future of the industry in Asia. "China is such a fertile place; entrepreneurship is blossoming everywhere," he maintains. "It's the right time to be a venture capitalist here and in the south of Asia."

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