To read more unpublished excerpts from this interview, click here.

Alan Tse

Alan Tse jokes that he is one of the few Asian men you'll evermeet who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley without ever taking a math or science course. Yet Tse, whose family moved to San Francisco from Hong Kong when he was seven years old, has spent his entire legal career in the technology industry.

Although he says he's not a gadget guy, Tse was drawn to Silicon Valley during the 1990s by a culture of people passionate about their work and driven by the entrepreneurial spirit.He began his legal career doing IPO, M&A and venture capital work at Brobeck Phlegar & Harrison in Palo Alto during the 1990s. “Things were exploding” during that time, he says, so his on-the-job training was intense. In three years at the firm, Tse says he completed more transactions than many associates and partners do in a decade.