Zhanping Wu – Vivo Capital

Zhanping Wu, partner, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Vivo Capital, was drawn to Vivo Capital almost ten years ago in part because it’s a firm (currently just under six billion dollars under management) founded and managed by Asian Americans committed to doing well by doing good while providing professional opportunities for women and minorities along the way.

After working at Vivo Capital for a decade, Zhanping remains passionate about her work. As a global healthcare investment firm, Vivo prides itself on finding the best cure for various diseases and satisfying the needs of patients around the globe despite cultural differences and geopolitical climate. The first in-house counsel at Vivo (since April 2015), she’s been able to carry through her—and the company’s—shared focus of building bridges between countries and people by building her legal team with culturally adept members who come bearing diverse perspectives.

Biopharma enabled

Through Vivo Capital’s bankrolling of biotech companies, established and startup operations, many drugs have been brought to market. As Wu reminds us, it’s a capital-intensive and time-consuming process to shepherd any medication through the FDA maze, which many companies couldn’t do without an investment partner. As its website has shown, Vivo Capital has made more than 410 global investments and helped its portfolio companies obtain more than 65 regulatory approvals through 27 years in business. It is in perpetual growth mode.

Wu’s legal team has been instrumental in Vivo’s overall growth and is involved in many aspects of Vivo’s operations. She and her team members work closely with the investment team, managing the initial structure of the deal, doing due diligence throughout, handling transaction documents, and going through to a successful exit. The legal team plays a dual role: to facilitate transactions and sometimes hit the pause button on a deal when necessary.

When first taking on her role, Vivo Capital was a single-fund investment firm. Now, it’s a multi-fund investment platform in venture capital, public equities and private equity. The complexity and legal load having grown vis-à-vis the firm, she now leads a staff of five, some in the U.S., some in Asia, all of whom are women. Perhaps unusual for most financial firms, she emphasizes that individual experience and ability, not gender, resulted in their hiring, and their collective competence is vindicated by the firm’s ongoing success.

It’s become her dream job, and against formidable odds, the Chinese-born Wu tells Vanguard from her Palo Alto, California, office. While she earned her undergraduate and law degrees with high honors from the prestigious Peking University in 1997 and 2000, those credentials didn’t mean much on this side of the Pacific—but have since been critical in giving her a unique perspective as someone who works on multiple continents.

Faced with taking an enviable position in China or following her fiancé as he pursued his doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Wu opted for the latter. Much as she came to love Northern California, it wasn’t an easy transition professionally.

“It was tough to get established in American legal society,” she says, noting that she was rejected for her application to take the New York bar examination after she finished the LLM program from the University of California, Davis School of Law in 2002. “I had to think hard about how to re-establish myself if I wanted to continue to pursue a legal career.”

A necessary step back

That was a humbling experience: an honors law graduate from China spending a year as a law clerk at a boutique law office before her 2003 enrollment in the JD program at the University of California, Davis School of Law. With the support of many professors she studied with during the LLM program, including late professor Floyd Feeney and professor Robert Hillman, Davis School Law agreed, for the first time in the law school’s history, to apply her LLM program credits to her legal curriculum of the JD program. For that and so many other supports, Wu says she is always indebted to that school and her professors.

By 2005, two-and-a-half years after commencing her studies, Wu had her JD degree in the United States. Business-minded, she practiced venture capital practice and supported emerging companies from 2006 to 2013 at Perkins Coie in Palo Alto. Then came her first in-house role, a year-and-a-half as director and corporate counsel at FibroGen Inc., a biopharma that launched its initial public offering during her tenure. A Perkins Coie partner then referred Wu to Vivo Capital. The firm reached out to her, and it’s been a match made in heaven from day one.

“This investment firm was founded more than 20 years ago in Palo Alto by a Chinese immigrant who originally came from Taiwan and a Stanford professor. Managed by Asian Americans, I hadn’t seen any investment firm like this in the Valley back then,” Wu says. “I was so impressed with them, and they were impressed with me. They saw me as a perfect fit for this position.”

In-house, Wu says she sees the entire operation, something she didn’t receive during her years in private law. She lauds Vivo Capital as people-first and, as mentioned, especially committed to advancing the role of women and minorities. As a bonus, she’s able to apply both her Chinese and U.S. legal skills here and in Asia, where the firm has investments.

“We’re building an economic exchange between the U.S. and China,” she says. “We’re trying to satisfy patients’ needs in the two biggest markets in the world. For me, it’s not just a job. It’s what I’d like to dedicate myself to doing.”

She’s also a committed mother with a teenage daughter and son at home. Despite challenges at times, she and her husband always make sure to put their family first. California has proven an ideal home, with its multicultural population and recreational attributes, though the family loves exploring other states and countries as often as possible.

Vivo Capital also has its share of challenges along the growth. Even though it’s been rooted in Northern California since 1996, the firm is sometimes mistaken for a Chinese operation. However, whatever the perception, Wu’s ambition remains the same.

“My goal is to play a part in continuing to grow Vivo Capital into a premium global healthcare investment firm that discovers, funds and supports medical breakthroughs that create value for patients, portfolio companies and investors,” she says.  She shares her vision for the future when asked about goals outside her day-to-day work. “I’d like to become more involved in my community, whether volunteering in general and serving on boards (non-profit or for-profit). Also, I would be very honored to share what I’ve learned through my work and in life by helping to enhance communications and promote cultural and economic exchanges between the United States and China.”