Andrew Chung turned down Goldman Sachs to join Trilogy, a software startup, then moved through Bain, Bain Capital, and Lightspeed before Vinod Khosla recruited him to Khosla Ventures. He pioneered investments in clean tech and personalized medicine, areas his firm didn't focus on, building a career on unconventional bets.
Chapters
So a little bit about me. That was a great introduction. But again, kind of along the lines of inventing the future, I had to invent my own future because I came from a very different background from some of the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. My parents were immigrants that came over from China, didn't speak English, so they put me to work at age 5 as a cashier at the restaurant, right? Because I was the only one that could speak any semblance of English. I was lucky enough to be able to go to Harvard and Wharton to study. And along the way, I did a lot of things that were orthogonal to what my friends and family thought were the right things to do or the things that were part of the normal path. So I had an offer out of college to go to Goldman Sachs fixed income to do mortgage-backed securities and all kinds of really bad things as it turns out. And instead I decided to go to Trilogy, which was this enterprise software company that was really hot down in Austin, Texas in the middle of nowhere. Got to Trilogy, and within several weeks I decided that, hmm, maybe I should start a company and get the CEO of Trilogy to fund my company. And that's exactly what I did, you know, weeks into my experience there. Shortly thereafter, I decided to flee the US and work for Bain and Company in Hong Kong and spend a few years learning about international stuff. And along the way, almost, almost chose a career in professional singing. And both Tim and Andy have put me up on the spot. I have to sing a few bars at some point, so I might do that. So I actually competed in a couple of different idol competitions, in the Hong Kong Idol and Chinese American Idol, and I won them and got to finals, singing stuff like, Something like that. Something like that. So instead of doing that, I ended up going to Bain and then Bain Capital because the terms were really bad. And then I was lucky enough after my interaction with Tim to have an opportunity to work at Lightspeed. Which was my first sort of real venture gig. I was there for about 5 years, was the X-Man in the sense that I helped start a lot of new areas that were outside of the power alleys of Lightspeed, things like clean tech 10 years ago, personalized medicine, education, a lot of things that were off the beaten path, which led Vinod Khosla to sort of take notice over a 4-year period. We did a bunch of investments together and then he brought me on board. Suffice it to say, that was my back in the fun days.
