Profile: Upshot's Huoy-Ming Yeh

To Huoy-Ming Yeh, it was a classic supply-demand imbalance. Having spent six years in Shanghai managing a VC fund under Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), she was well aware of the growing amount of capital in Asia looking for a home with Silicon Valley start-ups. AngelList, meanwhile, was always looking for backers to get the nascent companies on its platform beyond the angel investor stage.

"The start-ups often raise one round of funding but find it difficult to raise follow-on rounds because there aren't many large institutional venture capital funds on the platform. As a result, many leave the platform and raise further capital from traditional VC firms," Yeh explains. "AngelList needed to bring in more institutional capital to become a long-term player that supports deals sourced by syndicate leads and make whole ecosystem more open and connected."

She founded Upshot to fill this gap. Its first fund, worth $400 million, was created earlier this year with China Science & Merchant Investment Management Group as the sole LP.

When I get out of the business school, I wanted be an investor. I wanted to be with young companies and help them grow

The AngelList model begins with a syndicate lead - usually a successful entrepreneur - indentifying a start-up he wants to back. He seeds a syndicate and other angel investors are able to contribute capital. The syndicate lead and AngelList get a portion of any carried interest arising from the investment on exit. Upshot's support will enable the best start-ups to raise more money in less time.

"In the US, companies are taking longer to exit than originally anticipated and some VC firms are raising larger funds to support these companies. These funds don't deploy too much capital in the early-stage space because it isn't worth their while - it might take the same amount of time to manage $1 million investment as a $10 million investment," Yeh adds. But this is our sweet spot."

Engineer to investor

Upshot represents a unique cross-border opening for Yeh, who was born in Taiwan and was raised there until the age of 15 when she moved to the US, but also a compromise. While she has spent her career chasing opportunities, ambitions have guided - perhaps increasingly - by considerations beyond work. "Once I had a family, somehow I felt life had its priority and focus," she says. "And you just have to keep focus on the right things for you. Then everything else counts."

A graduate of Wellesley College, Yeh spent 10 years as an engineer before completing an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her classmates included Kelvin Laws, who went on to co-found AngelList in 2010.

More significantly, it was at MIT that Yeh got a first taste of entrepreneurship and a sense of how technical knowledge and experience could crystallize into a company rather than just a product. "When I get out of the business school, I wanted be an investor," she recalls. "I wanted to be with young companies and help them grow."

After a stint with Lehman Brothers, Yeh set up PacRim Venture Partners, a small venture fund based in Silicon Valley. Then SVB came calling and in 2008 she was dispatched to Shanghai. It was an agreeable move for the whole family. Yeh's husband had a job opportunity in China and they wanted to raise their daughter, then aged two, in a bi-cultural environment. SVB's China operation was even younger.

"When I first came to Shanghai, my home was my office," she says. "I built the team, hiring people they have there today. I also helped them raise the first fund. After five-and-a-half years, SVB Capital had about RMB600 million ($97 million) in assets under management."

Yeh's tenure coincided with a push by the Chinese government for renminbi-denominated PE and VC funds. SVB was one of the first to launch one of these vehicles, working closely with the Shanghai authorities. A combination of fund and direct investments followed as SVB became an LP in the first renminbi funds raised by the likes of Qiming Venture Partners and Northern Light Venture Capital.

"Now, when you look at Chinese fund managers, everyone that has a US dollar fund has a renminbi fund as well, or is at least considering raising one, because the Chinese government is strongly encouraging the use of renminbi," she notes. "It has actually become a lot more difficult to deploy US dollar funds in China."

There and back again

Having moved to Shanghai together, Yeh's family departed as a unit in 2014 - a decision partly driven by a desire to redress the Sino-US balance in her daughter's upbringing. "You need to have people around you, and for my husband and me, that's the family," she says. "As for my career, I want to follow my passion and mix together all my experience in China and in the US."

Despite returning to the US with no job in place, Yeh was confident she could find something, having developed a resilience building the SVB business in China. As a woman in venture capital, she questions whether it would have been possible to follow the same evolutionary path in the US.

"The Chinese market is still developing and this allows women to come in whereas in the US venture capital is very much an old boy network - unless you have been to Stanford Business School or Harvard it's very difficult to break in," Yeh observes. "When I went to China, Jenny Lee of GGV, Ruby Lu of DCM and Tina Ju of KPCB were all there around the same time. We were part of that wave."

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