Danny Yeung

No major brand in Hong Kong would give a daily-deals site with no track record a discount, so Danny Yeung bought Starbucks vouchers at retail and resold them at half off. He expected the cease-and-desist letter and it came, but by then the marquee name was on the site and he could convert it into real deals with Starbucks's competitors.¹

Yeung is the chief executive of NASDAQ-listed Prenetics and the co-founder, with David Beckham, of the supplements company IM8. He previously founded uBuyiBuy in Hong Kong and ran Groupon's Asia business, which he left in 2014, a move he has said everyone around him thought was crazy, to start a genetic-testing company in what he calls a niche that became a billion-dollar public company.² He is a high school dropout who was expelled from three schools and describes himself as street-smart rather than academically able.

Each of his companies has followed the same shape: find a business model already proven somewhere else, move to a market where it does not yet exist, and get there first with no domain background, closing the gap by reading obsessively. He relocated to Hong Kong within a month of reading about Groupon's funding round and grew uBuyiBuy to roughly two hundred million dollars in revenue by the time Groupon acquired it and he exited in 2014.¹ He built Prenetics on the same instinct, teaching himself genetics from white papers before recruiting the company's founding scientists, then pivoted its COVID testing business to eight hundred million dollars in revenue over three years before shutting it down and laying off two thousand people rather than let it decline the way comparable public companies did.¹ IM8, co-founded with Beckham in 2024, reached roughly one hundred million dollars in annualized revenue in under a year.¹

Yeung runs every company on total personal presence: he gives every employee twenty-four hour access to him directly, keeps decision chains deliberately short, and requires the whole team to be, in his words, AI native. His angel investing follows the opposite discipline of due diligence entirely, he says he backs the person rather than the numbers, and his two cited wins, Honey and the French insurer Alan, returned roughly three hundred times and two hundred times his initial checks.²