It is a glorious spring Sunday, the day before commencement at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Among the many alumni returning to the campus is billionaire Chinese financier Zhang Lei, 41, who is a familiar figure here. In 2010 he announced a gift of the propitious amount of $8,888,888 to Yale School of Management, the largest donation made to the business school from one of its graduates.
In the world beyond Yale, however, Zhang is little known. Yet he runs a $13bn fund in China, Hillhouse Capital, which has a focus on investing in Chinese internet entrepreneurs and start-ups. The fund is named after an avenue in New Haven that’s a block from where the Yale investment office used to be located. This office, which manages the university’s $20bn endowment, is where Zhang got his start in finance as a student intern.
It is tempting to compare Zhang with the US financial entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s who started the now-public buyout firms, such as KKR or Blackstone, although he rejects such parallels. Zhang built his investment firm by being among the first to back Chinese mainland internet entrepreneurs, among them Tencent’s founder and chief executive, Pony Ma. Tencent, along with Jack Ma’s Alibaba, is one of the most valuable internet companies in China. It is more accurate, perhaps, to liken him to Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists.