不用说这哥们是个成功人士。他这个钱要是从美国市场赚来的,我除了敬佩还是敬佩。然而,从他自己的介绍来看,这哥们捐的钱是从中国赚来的:
Lei Zhang ’02, Managing Partner, Hillhouse Capital Management
I was born in 1972, in Central China, during the height of the Cultural Revolution. By the time I went to university in 1989, the country was opening up, but there still wasn’t much choice for people, whether it was the goods in a store or where they could go to school. I finished first out of about 100,000 in my province on the university entrance exam. This allowed me to go to People’s University of China, where I studied international finance. I didn’t even know what international finance was. I just knew it was what the best students studied.
By 1998, when I applied to graduate schools in the U.S., more and more Chinese were studying abroad. I got into a number of great schools, but I chose Yale for a couple reasons. For one, it was the only school my parents had heard of. Throughout China, people know and respect the Yale name. It’s actually one reason I want to give back to the school. Yale has been helping China for more than 100 years. Many Chinese leaders were educated at Yale. But the relationship has been one-way for too long and I want to help change that.
It’s no overstatement to say that SOM changed my life. I learned so much there, and not just finance or entrepreneurship. I learned about freedom and the spirit of giving, which to me is a great reflection of the American spirit. I took a year off while at SOM and launched an internet startup in China. This was just before the crash, and when the internet bubble burst, I returned to school. I did some work with David Swensen at the Yale Investments Office and Emerging Markets Management in Washington, D.C., both of which gave me invaluable experience. I moved back to China in 2005 to start my own investment fund. We started with $30 million and we currently manage $2.5 billion. Hillhouse Capital Management — named for Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven — is the biggest independent fund in China.