A dozen years ago, the largest internet company in China wasn’t Alibaba or Tencent, but game developer Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd. Its founder was a young man named Chen Tianqiao, who had become a billionaire at 30.
Chen was more prominent than Alibaba’s Jack Ma for much of the last decade -- then he disappeared. He left China, dropping out of public view almost completely. He took his Nasdaq-listed company private in 2012.
Chen is finally ready to talk publicly again. Now 44, he’s living in Singapore with plans for his next act. During a visit to his office there, he explained what led him to give up his life’s work and cede the market to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., whose founders are now the country’s two richest men. It started with panic attacks in his 30s, then escalated amid the rising stress of competition and government regulations. He eventually decided he had to salvage his own health.
“As I watched the sunset every night, I thought I would never wake up,” said Chen, sitting near the painting of a swirling dancer with his wife in a two-story colonial house that serves as their office.
His experience ultimately led him to a new path. The struggles with his own mental condition, combined with his Buddhist beliefs, convinced him to focus on research of the human brain.
He has set aside $1 billion for the effort, out of a personal fortune of at least $2.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That includes $115 million that Chen and his wife have already given to the California Institute of Technology to establish the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. The rest will be used to directly fund young scientists and set up Chen University somewhere in the U.S.
The concept for the school is unusual to say the least: It will bring together academics in everything from neuroscience, biology and psychiatry to philosophy and divinity studies, and encourage them to work together. Chen thinks it’s time to focus on improving humans’ emotional well-being after centuries of effort to increase living standards.
“This will be a university whose mission is to try to answer who we are and where we come from,” he said. “For thousands of years, we improved our happiness through changing the physical world. We now have to solve this problem by exploring inward.”
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Chen was born in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, south of Shanghai, in 1973, and grew up as the country began to embrace capitalism in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. He graduated from Fudan University a year early, with a degree in economics. He met his future wife, Chrissy, while the two of them were working at a securities firm. They were married within six months, then soon quit to start Shanda in 1999.