About the event

In this rare public appearance, APL Founder & CEO Bill Schoenfeld will distill a career's worth of hard-fought insights into practical advice for the next generation of entrepreneurs, iconoclasts and innovators. Drawing on his experiences growing businesses, investing across multiple asset classes and geographies and building a family, Bill will discuss ways to help understand one's real goals, analyze and minimize risk and balance the competing demands of life and work. Bill's unconventional principles on how to build a life, accentuated by colorful, humorous anecdotes accumulated over thirty-five years as a foreigner in markets, countries and cultures new and unfamiliar to him, will leave listeners with a fresh perspective on business, relationships and impacting the world.

William Schoenfeld founded APL in 1994, and currently serves as its Chairman and CEO. Under Mr. Schoenfeld's leadership, APL has completed $19bn in transactions. Unlike its peer set, APL invests a no-mandate pool of its own internal capital. The investments tend to be in complex, concentrated private market transactions where APL has identified a substantial mispricing and the firm has the ability to add value through active management. Acquiring assets using its own internal capital, as opposed to a fund, allows APL to retain all of the profits from its transactions for future growth and investment. It also allows the company to hold any asset it chooses for an unlimited amount of time and benefit from future growth or long term value-added strategies. 

A New Yorker by birth, Mr. Schoenfeld was compelled from an early age to challenge convention and question orthodoxy. Foreseeing the path of structural growth in Asia, he studied in Beijing from 1985-1986 and moved to Tokyo to learn Japanese and work in 1987. Entrepreneurial by nature, Mr. Schoenfeld's first three jobs out of college were the lowest-paying offers in each instance, which he took because they allowed him to build the skills he needed to create the company he envisioned, which has since become APL.

He founded APL at the age of 28 with $120,000 in savings in a 10x10 windowless office in Hong Kong. From its earliest days, Mr. Schoenfeld differentiated APL by its willingness to pursue unorthodox, contrarian opportunities in new and unfamiliar markets with few other foreign investors. APL quickly developed a reputation for creating clarity and value in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. As this reputation grew over time, it enabled the company to gain access to some of the largest and most high profile off-market transactions in Asia.

More recently, Mr. Schoenfeld has steered APL towards additional expansion through the creation of new lines of business, including private equity, renewable energy and venture capital. The company has also expanded geographically, developing a fully integrated global team with the capacity to execute transactions in multiple geographies and asset classes.

Mr. Schoenfeld graduated from Williams College with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. He continues to nurture a lifelong passion for learning, with a particular emphasis on languages. Mr. Schoenfeld speaks Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Guests from both Tsinghua and other universities may register for this event by scanning the QR code. Attendees must show their confirmed reservation and valid university ID to access this event. Attendees will be admitted to Schwarzman College on condition that they adhere to all building and event policies. This event is not open to members of the media and will be held off the record. No attributions or descriptions of this event may be published or shared online without the written consent of both Tsinghua University and Schwarzman College. This lecture will be delivered in English.