One minute with: Timothy Tsui, Arbutus Capital Partners

Timothy Tsui is managing partner of Hong Kong-based multi-family office Arbutus Capital Partners. He is also a responsible officer advising on securities and asset management at Abacus Asset Management and a board director for FansWiFi, a social media data analytics company.

Tsui has previously worked at Goldman Sachs, UBS Wealth Management and China Life, where he oversaw $13 billion of investments across fixed income, real estate and private equity, and was in charge of asset-liability management. 

Q What’s your favourite restaurant?
Smith & Wollensky Grill in New York. Great steaks, great side dishes, a grand old New York institution, very New York style decor, especially grill restaurant on the side. I go there every single time I visit New York.

Q What’s your favourite hotel?
The Mandarin Oriental in Tokyo. Top-notch service, well trained staff and nice interior design. The staff greet you and know your name, and most speak very good English. They arranged for a surprise anniversary cake for my girlfriend to be delivered to the room.

Q Which sport(s) do you enjoy watching and/or playing?
I enjoy watching Formula 1 and I like swimming. I like the F1 driver Max Verstappen, who drives for the Red Bull team. I think he is a rising star of F1. He is talented, brave, humble and professional.

Q What’s your favourite country and/or city?
I like Hong Kong a lot and, for a country, I like Finland. It is a unique country. Its people are polite, generally well-educated and hard working. Many people live in quite a harsh environment, climate-wise, and they understand the value of doing a job well.

This can be seen in how generally clean the streets of Helsinki are, how tasty the food in bakeries and various small restaurants and food stalls is, how well organised the annual Slush start-up conference is. They take pride in doing their job well. They embrace nature; approximately 78% of land in Finland is forestry land.

[The Finns] are quite an innovative group and have started companies like Nokia, mySQL, Rovio, F-Secure, Linux, Ittala, Kone Corporation. They also have a large amount of prominent racing drivers: Mika Hakkinen, Kimi Raikkonen, Keke Rosberg, Jarno Saarinen, Tomi Makinen.

Q What’s your favourite hobby?
I enjoy travelling the world. I love driving vacations because I like the freedom of travelling by car. You can stop and take a break or see the sights any time. You can drive to the beach for a swim, you can go off road and drive in a desert on sand dunes (I tried that in the Moroccan desert), you can drive to a castle or a museum, you can drive fast on a race track. Unless I learn how to drive a train or boat or fly a helicopter or plane, no other mode of transportation allows you that kind of freedom.

Q What’s the best business book you’ve read?
'Zero to one' by Peter Thiel. My main takeaway from the book was [that you should] dominate a small niche in a specific market and grow from there, and that first-movers may not have the advantage after all. Most important is to have an innovation and make it the last great innovation in that market.

Q What’s your favourite drink?
Lime soda.

Q What’s your favourite piece of music?
'Where the streets have no name' by U2.

Q What do you sing in the shower?
Chinese and English pop songs.

Q Which famous person would you most like to meet, and why?
Elon Musk, the co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors. I would like to find out what drives him and why he does what he does.