Years ago, as an ambitious 25-year-old in Sime Darby Berhad’s corporate venture capital unit in Malaysia, Sarah Chen-Spellings’ first big win was negotiating a US$30 million deal in line with the publicly listed conglomerate’s investment in later-stage biotech companies. Surrounded by people who were almost twice her age at the time, she savoured the opportunity to rise to the occasion, not quite internalising the high-stakes nature of what she was doing.
“I was naive—I didn’t realise what a big deal it was, but I just did the best that I knew how,” says the Washington DC-based
