Partner at 500 Startups opens up on her story and how founders can impress

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Edith Yeung is a partner at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm 500 Startups. Edith is a true Silicon Valley geek. She started off her career as a developer and then joined Dolphin Browser as the VP of Marketing. Dolphin Browser was a Sequoia-backed Android mobile browser with over 150 million installs worldwide. It was sold to Chung Yo, the NASDAQ-listed Chinese gaming company in 2014.

After that exit, Edith joined the 500 Startups family and now oversees the funds investment in greater China. So for all the startup founders out there looking to pitch to Edith for funding, she shares some tips on how to get her attention.

Who is Edith Yeung and how do you make a living?

[…] I was born and raised in Hong Kong […]. I moved to the US […] almost 23 years ago. I [went there] for high school and then stayed for university and moved to […] Silicon Valley for a long time (since ’98).

[…] I started as a developer, doing a lot of coding and working with a lot of enterprise companies. I spent six years with Siebel System, which is a CRM company, and did a lot of different orientation around the world for Siebel. And then Oracle bought Siebel, so I went to Oracle. After that, I just thought, ‘Oh man, this is such a huge company.’ I think at the time it was a 100,000-people company. I thought it was too big and I left and went to Autodesk.

So anyways, I did 10 years mostly in software and I thought, ‘Enterprise is interesting, but it’s so boring.’ And I felt like it was time for me to move on and do something else.

Then […], I started this meetup group in San Francisco. Actually, that’s how I met Dave McClure and a lot of investors and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley […]. It was by accident. And I did that for a couple of years […].

So after I started that, I realized […] it was a great cash business, but it was the type of business […] that is not really a high-growth startup. […] I started to think that maybe I should really learn more about consumer, which is something I never had done before. One of my attendees from my conference—it’s called Biztech—is the founder of Dolphin browser […].

I didn’t know anything about consumer at the time, and [Yongzhi], the founder, showed me [about it] […]. I met him every month and, finally after six months, he went to me and said, ‘You should really join my company.’ And I asked him, why [I should] care because I have my own thing. And he basically convinced me that he’s going to be the next Jerry Yang (of Yahoo) because they have the same last name.

So I figured this could be a really interesting ride; I will be able to learn something that I’ve never done before […]. So I joined and, a couple of months later, we raised series A from Sequoia Matrix Partners. And it was a great ride.

And then we sold the company, two years ago now, to a Chinese gaming company called ChangYou for US$179 million […].

[…] I think why I started to get involved early on with some of the 500 Startups activities was I really wanted to learn. […] I realized, ‘OK, I really understand mobile user growth, I want to really invest in things that I understand.’ So that was sort of the beginning of it.

[…] Now what I do for a living is I invest and, for the last two years, […] I’ve done 35 investments so far. And I would say still a majority of them are in the US—in Silicon Valley. I have to say […], my biggest epiphany after 35 deals is if there are certain companies or industries I know too well, it’s probably too late for me to invest.

Were your parents supportive of your career decision?

If I’m a startup founder, how do I position myself to get under your radar?