PEOPLE

JUN 22, 2016

How Lawrence Ng Built a $200M Company Before He Turned 30

how lawrence ng built a $200m company before he turned 30   |   By Stephen Liu

Lawrence Ng Privy Profile Interview Cover Photo

Occupation: Serial Entrepreneur, Investor

Based in: Taipei, Los Angeles

Last Education: University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business

 

When others retreat, Lawrence Ng fearlessly advances - and gets results.

When the dot-com bubble collapsed in 2000, investors quickly fled the wreckage. At that time, building an internet-based company wasn’t an attractive prospect.

Lawrence Ng, however, wasn't deterred. He understood how to convert internet traffic into profit, using the search engine optimization and marketing strategies he learned at his previous job at Smartpath (one of the victims in the dot-com collapse).

Excited to utilize this knowledge, he co-founded Oversee.net with Startpath colleage Fred Hsu that year. They started off with only $10,000 in initial capital and a 400-square-foot office in a sketchy Downtown Los Angeles neighborhood. The internet company steadily and organically grew into a business worth $200 million in annual revenue in under a decade - all before Ng turned 30.

Oversee became a giant in the domain name industry, receiving several awards in 2007, including Best Places to Work and Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies from “Los Angeles Business Journal.” Lawrence Ng received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Greater Los Angeles in the Technology category.

In 2008, Ng sold the majority of his shares to private equity firm Oak Hill Capital, and has since resided as Oversee's Chairman of the Board.

But keeping up with his entrepreneurial spirit, Ng founded SimplyBridal.com in 2011. He started the company after realizing how much his friends were overpaying for their wedding dresses. The the online bridal retailer with physical showrooms cuts out the middleman and makes high quality dresses affordable for brides and bridesmaids. Bridal gowns range from $200 to $1800, and come in sizes 0 to 30. SimplyBridal has been featured in VentureBeat.

In 2015, Ng launched a new venture, OnRamp Fund, written up in Business Wire, an early stage startup incubator that works closely with select portfolio companies.

He is also the principal at his own asset management company, LNG MGMT, which focuses on investments such as private equity, venture capital and real estate, especially real estate in the Asian markets.

In 2015, Lawrence Ng was selected as Finalist for an Asian Business Award by “Los Angeles Business Journal.”

 

1.

 

You’ve founded several successful companies. What do you think gives you that x-factor that drives you into entrepreneurship?

 

I’ve always been driven to look for opportunities that have not been “discovered.” In 2000, when most people were focused on the dot-com bust, I envisioned how the Internet could change advertising and add performance metrics. At Oversee, I used my knowledge of search technology and focused on driving search-based traffic to advertisers. This created new revenue streams for Oversee and drove us to find new methodologies and approaches. And with this vision, we grew the company from 3 employees to a team of 250 without raising any outside funding. This eventually led to me selling a majority interest in Oversee to Oak Hill Capital in 2008 when they invested $150 million. We also incubated many new businesses at Oversee which were successful and this had impacted my new company, LNG Management. We look for companies and ideas which could disrupt an existing industry or bring completely new technology to the world.

 

I really like

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Debugging Information
ColdFusion Server Standard 2016,0,10,314028
Template /magazine/index.cfm
Time Stamp 22-Dec-19 07:21 AM
Locale English (US)
User Agent Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 3.0x; Windows 98)
Remote IP 172.6.167.56
Host Name 172.6.167.56


Execution Time

Total Time Avg Time Count Template
158 ms 158 ms 1 CFC[ D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/Application.cfc | onRequest(/magazine/index.cfm) ] from D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/Application.cfc
144 ms 144 ms 1 CFC[ D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/controllers/go.cfc | people(rc = [complex value]) ] from D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/controllers/go.cfc
65 ms 65 ms 1 CFC[ D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/model/services/articles.cfc | getPosts(pt = people, limit = 5, orderby = date, map = 1, exid = 276) ] from D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/model/services/articles.cfc
43 ms 43 ms 1 CFC[ D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/model/services/articles.cfc | getFeaturedPosts(pt = people, flds = verbose, limit = 8, orderby = popular, map = 1) ] from D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/model/services/articles.cfc
34 ms 34 ms 1 CFC[ D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/model/services/articles.cfc | getPosts(fieldid = 276, flds = verbose, limit = 1, map = 1) ] from D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/model/services/articles.cfc
7 ms 7 ms 1 D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/views/go/articleinfo.cfm
4 ms 4 ms 1 D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/layouts/people.cfm
2 ms 0 ms 10 D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/views/common/rectangle.cfm
1 ms 1 ms 1 D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/views/common/featured_pmicro.cfm
1 ms 1 ms 1 D:/www/www.privy.com.magazine/magazine_app/views/common/header.cfm
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3 ms  STARTUP, PARSING, COMPILING, LOADING, & SHUTDOWN
161 ms  TOTAL EXECUTION TIME
red = over 250 ms average execution time


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PMico (Datasource=, Time=1ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
                            	SELECT ID FROM session.CacheQuery WHERE ID = '17' AND EventName = 'POSTS'
                            
PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
                            	SELECT ID FROM session.CacheQuery WHERE ID = '16' AND EventName = 'POSTS'
                            
PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
                            	SELECT ID FROM session.CacheQuery WHERE ID = '15' AND EventName = 'POSTS'
                            
PMico (Datasource=, Time=0ms, Records=1) in D:\www\www.privy.com.magazine\magazine_app\model\services\articles.cfc @ 07:21:24.024
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Debug Rendering Time: 6 ms