The Impact of Individuals

Lulu Chow Wang

A transformative philanthropist, she channeled her own success in her milestone investment firm to mentor and empower the next generation of women leaders in the fields of business, science and the arts.

Decades before she launched her own investment firm, Lulu C Wang was already clear about the principles that would support her success...

Her family were first-generation immigrants to the US, leaving a comfortable life behind in Shanghai in 1948 to forge a challenging new life in America. Ms Wang’s father was optimistic about their future and deeply grateful that most of his family had made it to the US. Ms Wang's mother, equally positive and determined that her four daughters would find success and happiness in their new country, always told them to never be afraid. Long before Nike coined it, she urged her girls that when in doubt, “just do it.”

By 1998, Ms Wang was ready to start her own firm. Very few women ran large portfolios, and even fewer ran their own firms, but Ms Wang founded Tupelo Capital Management, LLC— a firm that would develop its own culture of ”client first,” total transparency among professionals, and a "just do it" approach to smart risk-taking.

Ms Wang believed women were often natural investors, able to invest with both quantitative and qualitative skills and often possessing a natural empathy that earned the trust of their clients. Ms Wang encouraged women to hone these attributes, to turn what men had thought were unimportant skills into winning skills. No longer allowing men to define success for them, women could succeed on their own terms.

Ms Wang had already enjoyed financial success before starting Tupelo, so very early on she decided that the successes of Tupelo would accrue to her family foundation. The funds would support philanthropy via the non-profits to which her family were deeply committed. The beneficiaries of the family’s philanthropy were the educational and cultural institutions that Ms Wang and her husband believed had deeply influenced them. In 2000, they endowed Wellesley with a then record-breaking gift to a women's college that was also the largest gift given to the school by an Asian donor.

They followed this with a comparable gift to Wellesley in 2015 and other pioneering gifts to Yale, Columbia Rockefeller University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). In each case the Wangs also gave their time, expertise, and credibility to advance these non-profits. At the Met, Ms Wang founded the Women and the Critical Eye program, which has become the Met's signature series on women's connoisseurship and a significant source of funding for the museum's acquisitions of works by women artists.

When asked what in Ms Wang’s career gave her the greatest satisfaction, she would say, without hesitation, it was the young women she sponsored throughout her life, and her family's privilege to be able to give back as Chinese Americans to this great country, which has been home for most of their lives.