Xiaoyong (Jack) Fu is an Assistant Professor of Finance at HKU Business School, where his research and teaching focus on corporate finance and venture capital. He completed his undergraduate studies at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, earned his master’s degree at Columbia Business School, and received his PhD in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Before entering academia, Prof. Fu spent many years engaged in competitive chess. He began playing chess at the age of six, later becoming a national champion in his age group and representing China at the World Youth Chess Championships. Through this experience, he developed habits of discipline, concentration, and reflection that continue to influence how he approaches research and problem-solving.

Chess taught him to think carefully about both success and failure. Each match required reviewing past decisions, learning from mistakes, and adjusting strategies going forward. Prof. Fu sees a close parallel between this process and academic research. In both settings, progress often comes through repeated trial and error, careful evaluation, and persistence in the face of uncertainty.

His interest in startups and venture capital developed gradually. During his PhD at Wharton, Prof. Fu served as a teaching assistant for his advisor, Professor Luke Taylor, in a Venture Capital course. Through this experience, he became more familiar with how venture investing works in practice and began to develop research questions related to early-stage investment decisions. Over time, venture capital became a central focus of his academic work.

Prof. Fu is currently working on a paper titled “Due Diligence and the Allocation of Venture Capital” with Professor Luke Taylor. Academic research on due diligence is scarce, and this project seeks to help fill the gap by analysing novel data on investors’ due diligence activities. Using cellphone signal data, the study measures the duration of pre-investment, in-person meetings between venture capitalists (VCs) and startup employees. These meeting durations capture one important component of VC due diligence. The research examines how investors choose how much due diligence to perform and how these choices affect the efficiency of capital allocation.

In the classroom, Prof. Fu focuses on helping students develop a solid and practical understanding of corporate finance. His teaching emphasises core financial concepts and how they apply across different industries and institutional settings. By combining theoretical frameworks with real-world examples, he aims to help students better understand how financial decisions are made in practice.

To learn more about Prof. Fu, visit his HKU Business School faculty page here.