Mr. Michael Cheng has over 17 year experience in venture capital, leading early stage investments and working with private companies in China. Prior to Recipco, he was a private investor and served as Director on the Board of a number of companies, mostly in China. Most notably of these was Red Octane, the inventor of the Guitar Hero game, where he was a first round investor. Red Octane was sold to Activision Blizzard for over 30 times return.
Recently, Mr. Cheng was a partner at Fidelity Ventures, a proprietary fund of the Fidelity Investments Group. He worked at Fidelity from 1996 to 2005 and was primarily responsible for looking at early stage companies in China in the communications, Internet, IT software, media and healthcare sectors. Investments made by Mr. Cheng at this time were almost all first round fundraisings in which Fidelity led the round. In 2003, he was sent to Shanghai to open an office for Fidelity Ventures, where he has been ever since. Mr. Cheng was one of the earliest venture capitalists looking at ventures in China and was fortunate to have worked on one of the first venture success stories in China, AsiaInfo. During his time there, the fund also invested in leading entrepreneurial companies in China such as Hurray! and Wuxi Pharmatech that had successful IPOs. One investment, Alibaba Group, completed its initial public offering on the NYSE on September 1, 2014 and is the largest US listing in history.
Mr. Cheng earned a BA and MBA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and 2001, respectively.
