Caspar Lee : co-founder
UC Berkeley, MS, Electrical Engineering. Santa Clara University, MBA. National Taiwan University, BS, Electrical Engineering. Senior Vice President of Hotung Venture Capital. Intel Corporation. Texas Instruments. In his ten-years IRR of 30% over 200 deals.
As a co-founder of Paradigm, Mr. Lee brings to bear a wealth of private equity management and investment success. As a true veteran of Taiwan’s private equity sector for more than 23 years of experiences, Mr. Lee has been involved in over 250 venture deals of which more than 70 companies are listed. During his decade-plus tenure at the Hotung Group, Mr. Lee helped Hotung Group to grow from a small venture capital firm to a leading financial services and investment banking giant, which is listed in Singapore stock exchange. Prior to his career in direct investments, Mr. Lee worked at Intel Corporation and Texas Investments as well.
Mr. Lee graduated from National Taiwan University with a B.S. degree and then from U.C. Berkeley with an M.S. degree, both in EE major.
The following deal epitomize Mr. Lee’s acumen in terms of the entire private equity value chain in which a brand new technology was introduced and a booming LED industry was then established in Taiwan and China:
After earning his Ph.D. in Material Sciences from Northwestern University, Dr. Kuo-Hsin Huang worked at Hewlett-Packard for a number of years. During that time, Dr. Huang obtained several personal patents related to ultra-bright LEDs. Endeavoring to pioneer Taiwan’s first advanced optoelectronics start up, Dr. Huang resigned from HP and returned to Taiwan in 1993. With no prototype, Dr. Huang exhausted most VC’s in Taiwan and none would support his project. Only Mr. Lee, with his detailed due diligence and product/industry insight, recommended this investment opportunity to the Board of Hotung Group. Hotung subsequently seeded United Epitaxy (UEC) in 1993.
UEC became the first company in Taiwan to develop successfully ultra- bright AlGaInP red, orange and yellow LED chips and wafers applying the Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) technology. UEC first went public on Taiwan’s OTC market in November 1998 and later listed on the Mainboard in September 2000. Hotung’s ROI on this case was over 3000%.
The significance of investing in UEC was not only on the financial return but on the establishment of a brand new industry for Taiwan and China. Before UEC was founded in 1993, Taiwan could only purchase LED wafers from Japan and only low level process such as slicing and packaging into LED chips were done in Taiwan. After the establishment of UEC, the technology flourished throughout Taiwan and China. Today, Taiwan plus China has surpassed Japan as the largest production base for LED wafers in the world, illustrating the contribution of venture investment to a nation/region.
