Double The Park

Nelson and Terence Loh took a gamble on their careers. Now there’s no stopping the cousins who are changing the rules that health care has played by for far too long.

- Germaine Cheong

The white ball bounced off slot after slot, chasing down the spinning roulette wheel that it had been set upon. It was getting too lively for cousins Terence and Nelson Loh to bear, for at stake were their cushy investment banking positions at JP Morgan. “Red, and we’d stick to our jobs; black, and we’d strike out on our own,” Nelson, 38, recalls with a chuckle.

“It was the wildest idea – inspired by copious alcohol consumption – we’d ever come up with,” Terence, 40, chimes in.

This move wasn’t a mindless gamble on life, albeit one made at a Las Vegas casino. Dorr Group, which they set up in 2008 after the roulette wheel had determined their path, currently has over US$4 billion (S$5.4 billion) in assets under management.

If you know the cousins, they are anything but conventional. Major decisions have been made with a childlike mischief that they don’t seem to have grown out of. Like staking their future on a resin sphere. Like naming their private investment vehicle after the two ringmasters (using their initials) in their favourite movie, Ocean’s 11. Like shocking the aesthetics industry by offering skin laser treatments to the masses at a fraction of the market rate.

“The way Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan dealt with situations and came up with ingenious plans; the way they improvised and organised a team of oddballs for the job – that is what we relish. In business, you deal with all sorts of people,” explains Terence, whom friends have nicknamed Rusty, regarding the inspiration behind the name Dorr. “Dorr is just a formality; we’ve always been doing something together.”