Lip-Bu Tan

As a graduate student in nuclear engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, Lip-Bu Tan thought he had a clear career path ahead of him in nuclear power. Then the Three Mile Island accident happened, and America's nuclear-power industry shut down with it. So Tan dropped out of his PhD program and headed to Silicon Valley. After getting an MBA from the University of San Francisco, the Malaysian-born Tan set up his own venture-capital firm with a focus on tech startups in Asia.

At the time, few mainstream Silicon Valley VCs paid much attention to the region, so it wasn't hard for Tan to decide on a name for his firm: Walden International, named after the pond made famous by 19th-century American essayist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was known as a nonconformist; Tan's goal was to be "contrarian, rather than just following the trend."