SOLINA CHAU

Chau was born in Hong Kong in 1961 and studied economics at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She became the long-time companion and business partner of Li Ka-shing, for years the richest man in Hong Kong.

In 2002 she co-founded Horizons Ventures with her partner Debbie Chang. The firm invests Li's personal money, not corporate funds, which lets it move fast and take wild bets.

Horizons got into Facebook, Spotify, Slack, Waze, and Zoom early. It has backed more than 200 companies and minted at least 14 unicorns.

Chau also helps run the Li Ka Shing Foundation, one of Asia's biggest charities.

Horizons Ventures is the vehicle for everything Chau does. Think of it as Li Ka-shing's personal bet on the future, run by her.

The fund was an early shareholder in Facebook, buying in well before the 2012 IPO. It backed Spotify before streaming was a sure thing.

It got into Zoom and Slack before the world worked from home. It bankrolled navigation app Waze, later sold to Google, and energy drink maker Celsius, which became a Wall Street favorite.

The style is lots of small early bets and a few enormous winners.

Chau hunts for what she calls disruptive companies, the ones that make an old industry look silly. She travels between tech hubs looking for founders before they are famous.

Several companies she backed, including Waze and Zoom, were not even raising money when she showed up. Here's the thing about her edge.

She invests Li Ka-shing's own cash, so she answers to no outside partners and no fund clock. That freedom lets her make strange early bets and hold them for years.

She also likes companies that fix real problems, from clean food to health tech, not just ones that print money.

Facebook. Horizons put money into Facebook years before anyone was sure social media would pay.

Li reportedly committed $60 million after a short pitch, then doubled the bet. When Facebook went public in 2012, it was valued above $100 billion.

The early stake turned into a fortune. Most Hong Kong tycoons were busy buying property and ports.

Chau was buying a slice of a college website that would go on to eat the world.

Here's the honest part. Chau has no famous public blow-up, mostly because she never talks.

But her fund leaned hard into pandemic winners like Zoom, and that trade did not age well. Zoom soared during lockdowns, then fell around 85% from its October 2020 peak as the world reopened.

Riding a rocket up is easy. Knowing when to get off is the hard part, and paper gains have a way of melting.

The lesson is old but real. A great company and a great stock are not always the same thing.

Chau's rule is simple. Find the technology that changes how people live, then get in before the crowd.

She is not chasing quarterly numbers. She wants the company that will look obvious in ten years and insane to have missed.

She also believes money should do more than compound. She has said the rich should aim their funds at fixing inequality and climate change, and she means it, steering both the fund and the foundation toward big problems.

In her words, we are fighting a war for our future.

Chau is the long-time companion and business partner of Li Ka-shing, who was widowed in 1990. The two have kept the details of their relationship almost entirely private, which in Hong Kong's gossip-hungry press is its own achievement.

She guards her personal life fiercely and lets almost nothing slip. For someone with this much influence, the silence is the point.

Her real family, as far as the public can tell, is the fund and the foundation.

Chau studied economics at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She has said she never consciously chose a career path, and that choice itself is a luxury.

From economics student to the person deciding where a tycoon's billions go. Not a bad run.

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