Hans Tung has funded some of the most iconic billion dollar startups: Bytedance, Airbnb, Wish and Affirm just to name a few. He's been on the Forbes Midas List for 7 years straight now, this year at #10. He has seen it all, and we discuss war stories (don't miss the discussion of Alibaba in a global financial crisis and pandemic!), founders, and the future of food tech, software, and robotics.

00:00 Intro
00:50 Hans's journey to venture capital
03:18 Hans met iconic founders very early
05:00 The Alibaba story in 2003: Pandemic and global financial crisis with 5 months of runway (MUST WATCH)
08:18 The perseverance of Brian Chesky and Airbnb
09:23 The perseverance of Peloton
10:36 Global consumer trends now first emerge outside of the US
13:06 Software eats the world is a onetime shift
13:45 Foodtech in China: Darkstores and clean data
16:14 Global food tech trends: Automation
17:06 All food distribution will be automated and tech enabled: better, faster, cheaper
18:20 What Uber did to consolidate taxis (a fragmented, notech business) will happen everywhere
20:19 Software in business: first backoffice, then frontoffice, now wholeoffice
21:10 Each successive wave of software is more powerful than the last. We're on the 5th or 6th wave now.
21:59 On foundermarket fit
23:36 Max Levchin and founderdistribution fit at Slide
24:16 Platform shifts create distribution opps that open, then close quickly
25:02 5G and the future of distributed computing
25:33 Timing your startup idea
26:22 WeChat as a growth channel for Pinduoduo
27:55 Autonomy and our robotic future
28:53 Characteristics of great founders
31:24 What Hans wishes he knew at 18 or 22



Hi, I'm Garry Tan I'm a designer, engineer, and investor in early stage startups. Cofounder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital fund that was earliest in Coinbase and Instacart. We're a team of 8 investing partners with over $500M in assets under management and our startups have created more than $45 billion in market value in the past 8 years. We focus on preproductmarketfit seed. Selected for Forbes Midas List Top 100 Best Global Venture Capitalists for 2019 and 2020.

Previously a partner at Y Combinator. Invested in and directly worked with over 700 companies in 5 years from the earliest possible stage, often just an idea.

Before that, I cofounded Posterous and helped build it to a worldclass website used by millions. (Acquired by Twitter) I also cofounded the engineering team for Palantir Technology's quant finance analysis platform, and designed the current Palantir logo and wordmark.

I love building things.