FINIAN TAN

Tan took the long way to venture capital. He was a chief trader at Shell in Japan, a regional director at Goldman Sachs, and head of Credit Suisse First Boston's banks in Singapore and Malaysia.

Then he switched to government, becoming Deputy Secretary at Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry. There he chaired the Technopreneurship Investment Fund, Singapore's billion-dollar push to build a startup scene from scratch.

That led him to venture capital proper, at Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet, where he made the Baidu bet. In 2005 he founded Vickers Venture Partners with a group of partners and has run it ever since.

Vickers is Finian Tan's firm, and it hunts differently from most. It goes global and it goes deep, backing hard science as much as software.

Its biggest winner is Samumed, a life sciences company working on regenerative medicine, which Vickers marked up many times over. Other bets include Focus Media, the Chinese advertising network, and Matchmove, a payments platform.

Before Vickers, his defining move was Baidu, made while he was at Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet. That one deal set the standard for everything after.

Tan likes hard problems with patents on them. His rule is simple.

If a company has patentable technology, it is easier to win, because rivals cannot just copy it. Without that, all you have is a head start, and head starts get erased.

He also splits risk into pieces. Over the years Vickers stopped taking on technology risk and demand risk at the same time, and he says the failure rate dropped once they did.

In plain English, he bets on science that works and on markets that clearly want it, not on hope.

Baidu, and it is not close. In 2000, at Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet, Tan led a $7.5 million investment for about 25% of Baidu, plus two board seats.

The timing looked insane. The dot-com bubble was bursting and nobody wanted internet stocks.

But Tan bet that what worked in the US, a dominant search engine, would repeat in China. He was right.

Baidu became China's Google and went public in 2005 in one of the hottest IPOs of the decade. The stake turned into a fortune and made his name across Asia.

Tan's honest problem is the shadow of Baidu. No bet since has matched a deal that returned a fortune, and every fund he raises gets measured against it.

His style also carries a specific danger. Vickers marks up its winners aggressively.

Samumed, its life sciences star, was once valued around $12 billion and marked up many times over on paper. But paper is paper.

Samumed later hit clinical setbacks, a reminder that deep-tech bets can look brilliant for years before the science has to actually deliver. The lesson Tan lives with is that a huge markup is a promise, not a result.

Tan's rules are shaped by both a trading floor and a science lab. Rule one, demand a clear path to profit, or walk away.

Rule two, prefer companies with real, patentable technology, because a patent is a wall competitors cannot climb. Rule three, do not stack risks.

Take on the technology risk or the market risk, but try not to bet on both being solved at once. Rule four, go global, because the next Baidu could be anywhere and a fund stuck in one city will miss it.

Underneath all of it is a trader's respect for odds.

Tan holds a doctorate and carries the title Dr with obvious pride, a nod to the deep-science bets he loves. He is Singaporean and built a career that spanned oil trading in Japan, banking, government, and finally venture capital.

He keeps his family life private. What comes through in interviews is a competitive streak.

He genuinely enjoys being the person who saw the big thing before everyone else did.

Tan studied at Singapore Polytechnic, then the University of Glasgow, and later the University of Cambridge, earning a doctorate along the way. The science training is not decoration.

It is why Vickers is comfortable betting on regenerative medicine and hard technology that scares generalist investors away.

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