GARY RIESCHEL

Rieschel did not start in finance. His first job out of Reed College was testing integrated circuits at Intel.

In 1984 he joined Sequent Computer. Five years later he got shipped to Japan to run its joint venture with Panasonic.

That Asia experience changed everything. In 1995 he built SoftBank's US venture group from scratch.

He backed twelve companies there that each grew past $1 billion in market value. Then in 2005 he did the crazy thing.

He moved his family across the world to Shanghai and co-founded Qiming Venture Partners in 2006 with Duane Kuang. Most Western investors were still treating China as a factory.

Rieschel treated it as the future.

Qiming is the firm that made his name. Its most famous bet is Xiaomi, the phone maker it backed early and watched grow into a company worth more than $45 billion at IPO.

Qiming also went deep into Chinese healthcare and biotech, an area most foreign VCs ignored. It backed drug and device makers like Gan and Lee Pharmaceuticals and a long list of others.

The firm spans both tech and health, which is unusual. Rieschel likes betting where other people are not looking.

Rieschel's rule is simple. Get in early.

He has said the real money in China came from being there first, before the crowd showed up. He treats venture capital as a service job, not a genius job.

His line is that when a company wins, the CEO did that, not the VC. So he backs strong founders and tries to stay useful without grabbing credit.

He also likes markets everyone else is scared of. When money floods out of China, he sees less competition for good deals, not a reason to run.

Xiaomi. Qiming backed the phone maker when it was young and unproven.

By its 2018 Hong Kong IPO the company was worth more than $45 billion. For an early investor that is a life-changing return.

It also proved his whole thesis. Getting into China early, before the rest of the world noticed, was the entire game.

Xiaomi is the deal that put Qiming on the map.

His biggest bet was also his biggest risk. Rieschel built an American-led firm at the center of China venture capital.

He assumed US and Chinese money would keep flowing to each other. Then the two countries started pulling apart.

By August 2025 Qiming had cut the target for a new China fund to just $600 million as US investors backed away. The companies were fine.

The politics were not. That is the one variable a great deal picker cannot control.

Rieschel thinks most VCs are far too impressed with themselves. His view is that the entrepreneur builds the company and the investor just helps.

Stay humble. Be useful.

Get in early. He also believes fear creates opportunity.

When everyone else pulls their money out of a market, the few who stay face almost no competition for the best deals. He expects the next decade of China returns to reward exactly that kind of patience.

The most human fact about Rieschel is the 2005 move. He did not just relocate for a job.

He moved his whole family across the world to Shanghai to chase a bet on China. That is a lot to ask of the people you live with.

Years later he shifted his base back toward the US, spending time in the Seattle area and Big Sky, Montana. He keeps his personal life mostly private and lets the work speak.

Rieschel earned a BA in biology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He later got his MBA from Harvard Business School.

The biology background is not a footnote. It helps explain why he leaned so hard into healthcare and biotech investing later, a corner of China VC most of his peers skipped.

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