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Two long-time partners in the mortgage business find new roles as founders of a high-tech mortgage compliance company.
Some people are lucky enough to create one successful company in their lifetime. John Vong and Anita Kwan founded two. The first company attracted the attention of a bigger firm, which acquired it. The second company also attracted the interest of a larger firmbut this one just bought a piece of the action and is content, for the moment, to go along for the ride. All in all, not bad work for two first-generation immigrants who, oddly enough, arrived on these shores from the same place and in similar circumstances, but never knew each other back in their home country. Vong came to the United States from Hong Kong in 1979 to attend Brea College, in Kentucky. At about the same time, Kwan, also from Hong Kong, arrived in the United States to study at another small school, the University of La Verne, in California. They met in the mid-1980s, and by 1986, along with one other partner, they founded Integrated Capital Group Inc., a San Francisco-based mortgage banking company. Integrated Capital was successful enough to attract the attention of The Money Store Inc., Union, New Jersey, which bought it in 1997. Two years later, The Money Store itself was acquired by First Union Corporation, which is now part of Charlotte, North Carolina-based financial giant Wachovia Corporation.
Vong and Kwan initially stayed with their old company after its sale to First Union, but were savvy and wealthy enough to eventually do something different: They left the company and the corporate world to try their hand at venture capital, investing in a number of technology startups. Unfortunately, being venture capitalists didn't turn out to be much fun, especially when the Internet boom collapsed at the turn of the millennium.
"We ended up managing some of the startups, because the founders did not have a lot of management background," Vong recalls. But managing someone else's companies wasn't what they wanted to do, so Vong and Kwan decided to once again get back into the world of entrepreneurial enterprise. They basically started with two requirements: They wanted to be in the technology space and work within the mortgage industry.