From Bloomberg via the Financial Post:
In 2014, as their video app Kuaishou began to take off, Su Hua and his co-founders started looking for money to expand. They quickly got a proposal from Ruby Lu, a venture investor who had spotted them earlier as promising engineers and given them feedback on previous businesses.
But Lu’s proposal was trumped by a larger venture firm with a much higher offer, according to people familiar with the matter. She refused to concede. Lu pitched Su and his team that she would give them more than money, offering her personal engagement and the support of her partners at DCM Ventures. She won, even with a lower offer.
On Friday, Kuaishou Technology started trading in Hong Kong after the biggest initial share sale for an internet company since Uber Technologies Inc. in 2019. By any yardstick, Lu’s investment has been a home run: the roughly $40 million that DCM put into Kuaishou is now worth about $14 billion after the stock more than tripled over its first three days.
“There is a methodology in building a company from scratch,” said Lu, 50, in her first interview in years. Part of her strategy is to identify talented engineers like Su, but they also need to have the right strategy and mindset. “You have to endure more pain than the usual person.”
Lu belongs to an unusual group of female investors who have risen to the forefront of China’s venture capital world. In 2019, she started her own firm, Atypical Ventures, which seeks to groom China’s next generation of tech darlings using finance from U.S. institutional investors.
It was the next step in a life spent as a bridge between the two countries, which started when an American couple invited her to live with them in Maryland and ended up paying for her undergraduate education. Then came a stint working on IPOs at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s investment bank at the height of the dot-com bubble, and later a pivot into startup investing....
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