Decisive Consulting and Dark Horse Investment

18 November 2015

Dr Dominic Chan, 1993 Croucher scholar, is the founder of Decisive Consulting and Dark Horse Investment, and a former management consultant at McKinsey and Company. Over the years, he has made significant contributions to the entrepreneurship community in Hong Kong.

After completing his PhD in Digital Signal Processing at Cambridge University, Chan joined McKinsey & Company, a leading management consulting firm, with a focus on finance and technology companies. He stayed at McKinsey for 3 years , acquiring skills and experience in strategy and business development, and later founded and managed a number of technology startups, in the areas of Voice Over IP, e-commerce, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), and e-learning platform.

A few years later, through connections with a former partner at McKinsey, Chan founded the Asia subsidiary of a staffing company for independent business consultants called a-connect. He found working as an independent consultant to be a good fit with his skillset in management, consulting and technology. As a result, he later started his own consulting firm: Decisive Consulting, which provides consulting and project management services for companies in Hong Kong and East Asia. In addition to helping clients on their projects, Decisive Consulting also offers advice on people development, by coaching management and executives on problem solving, project management, change management, risk management, and building high-performing teams.

Separately, because of his interests in technology and entrepreneurship, Chan has also co-founded Dark Horse Investment, a company focused on angel investment in technology startups in Asia. The idea began in 2008, when one of Chan’s friends started a social media company and needed investment. Through this experience, Chan realized that there was potential in investing in early-stage startups, but very few angel investors in Hong Kong. As a result, he started Dark Horse Investment to not only provide financial resources for startups in Hong Kong and Asia, but also offer coaching to entrepreneurs on how to develop business plans, how to secure different resources for their business, and how to pitch to an investor– skills necessary to transform a great idea to a sustainable business for the long-term. To further promote entrepreneurship in Hong Kong, Chan has partnered with the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, to coach and advise budding entrepreneurs in Hong Kong as well as future angel investors.

Chan thinks that over the recent years, entrepreneurship in Hong Kong has gained a lot of momentum and the critical mass is starting to form to make the community sustainable. However, comparing the entrepreneur environment in Hong Kong to that in other countries such as the United States or Israel, Hong Kong needs to continue to improve its appeal to startups, which extends beyond technology and funding to legal, accounting, and infrastructure supports. In addition, Chan finds that valuation of startups in Hong Kong tend to be higher than those in Israel, which could hinder the level of interests investor has in Hong Kong.


Dr Dominic Chan received his PhD degree in 1997 from the University of Cambridge in Digital Signal Processing. He is the founder of several companies, including Dark Horse Investment and Decisive Consulting. He is also a visiting lecturer in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a focus on teaching technology and entrepreneurship in Hong Kong.


To view Dr Dominic Chan’s personal Croucher profile, please click here.