This man quit an impressive 20-year investment banking career for startups

For the past 20 years, Gabriel Fong was living the dream of any aspiring business executive. Two years after graduating with a degree in economics from the Cambridge University in 1992, Singapore-born Fong landed a job at Wall Street investment banking giant Goldman Sachs. There, he worked on several high-profile capital market deals in Asia, particularly Hong Kong, where he has since been based. In his final year with the company, he handled private equity investments – an area he would remain an expert on for years to come.

In 1996, Fong joined Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, another big gun on Wall Street, where his boss was Tony James, currently the president and COO of Blackstone Group. He kept climbing the industry ladder. He joined Morgan Stanley as executive director from 1999 to 2006, then finally, Och-Ziff Capital Management, where he sat as managing director until 2013.

That year, however, Fong quit his long and impressive finance career for the uncertainty of startups.

I had wanted to be a banker since I was 16, but I decided to leave that behind. I wanted to control my own destiny and make a difference.

Fighting for everything

The transition was short for Fong, who quickly joined GoGoVan, a Hong Kong-based Uber-like company that pairs people with delivery vehicles, as first-round angel investor and mentor. By the end of 2013, he became executive chairman of the company and around the same time, his fate as entrepreneur was sealed with the founding of his own company, technology incubator Jaarvis Labs, also in Hong Kong.

“The 20 years of investment experience has allowed me a much easier transition into being an entrepreneur,” he tells Tech in Asia.

Yet the journey was never easy. And his success came with a price. Fong worked 18 hours a day, even on weekends, for many, many years in his career. Like many driven executives, the 46-year-old, who’s married with four kids, often missed out on family affairs and social events.

“Slogging out 18 hours a day leaves you with little time for sleep, let alone social events. So while my friends were out on Friday evenings and the weekends, I was busy with colleagues in the offices working on time-sensitive business presentations. Many times, my family travelled on holidays without me. Even when I was with them, I was constantly on the phone so while I was there physically, I was somewhere else mentally.”

His upbringing had a lot to do with his relentless work ethic. Fong grew up in a very modest environment. He was raised by his mom, a shipping clerk and single parent, who barely made enough to make ends meet. In primary and secondary school, he had to do really well because the three best students in class would get free tuition. He was able to obtain a full scholarship to Cambridge from DBS Bank under a bond that required him to serve eight years at the bank upon graduation. So when he left a few months into that term to join Goldman Sachs, he was forced to take on massive amounts of debt, including credit card advances, to pay DBS. “I had to fight for and earn everything,” he recalls.

The competition would only get worse when he entered corporate. The world of investment banking was filled with high-energy, ambitious, and untiring hotshots like him.

But all his hard work paid off. Fong stood out from the rest and landed the most-coveted posts in leading firms. This tremendous exposure gave him what he needed to become an effective entrepreneur: ability to handle long hours, willingness to take risks, a solid understanding of business issues, the drive to always score a deal, and an enormous amount of grit.

“Investment banking teaches very valuable skillsets, which are key to being an entrepreneur,” he says.

Institutionalizing experience

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