Head of Ventures Platform at Gold House
Gold House unites Asian Pacific leaders to advance representation, success, and impact, supporting 115+ startups that have raised $2B+.
My journey in entrepreneurship and venture capital started back when I was in college. In my sophomore year at Stanford, I was part of the entrepreneurship club and I put on an event called the product showcase, where more than 50 Stanford students showed their product prototypes. Imagine smartphone applications, consumer electronics, hardware gadgets, medical devices, musical instruments. After my time at Stanford, I then worked at Google, where my very first job was working as a speech writer for the CMO. That opportunity taught me to understand product messaging, product strategy, marketing, communications. And it was actually through that job where I got exposed to a variety of different Google products. I relocated to Asia, I was based in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. And at some point, I realized that I wasn't much of a big company person. I always knew that I wanted to work at a smaller company, to be in a more entrepreneurial environment. And so after Google, I actually went to business school. And since business school, I joined two early stage startups as their first business hire. I worked very closely with the founders and got a taste of what it was like to build a company from zero to one. I came across the opportunity at Gold House Ventures. We've been deploying a $30 million fund one, where we invest in Asian Pacific founders. Over the last two and a half years, we've now invested in close to 80 different Asian Pacific founded companies across both consumer, tech enabled businesses. My path to venture was a little bit serendipitous. But it's been really fun so far.
The one book that I'm currently reading is called Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. It was actually recently adapted and made into a TV show on Hulu, featuring Ronnie Chang and Jimmy O. Yang. I've been really enjoying it. It talks a lot about Asian Pacific stereotypes and I was actually born and raised on the East side of LA where there was a really large Asian population. Reading the book has brought up a lot of personal childhood memories.
Whenever I hear founders talking about seed capital, the first thing that I always tell them is to try to articulate a vision and not just a transaction. What milestones are you trying to hit with this funding? Are you hiring a team? Are you exploring different go to market channels? Are you testing out different marketing channels? What do you hope to do over the next few years? What's the bigger picture? And then, given how crowded certain industries are, it's just really important to understand how the founder will use the money to build a competitive advantage. That could be testing out a specific use case, that can be testing out a specific marketing channel. The key part is when you're asking or looking for different capital opportunities, try to articulate a vision and not just make it a transaction.
We like to be a little cautious around terms like AI-powered and personalized because they are trendy. When we're looking through the pitch deck, we're looking through a bit of the user research, a bit of your market research. We always try to look for clarification around the specific AI technology. Is it natural language processing? Is it computer vision? Is it machine learning? Is the AI proprietary? Are they using off the shelf solutions? It's very easy in the current environment to use buzzy terms like AI powered and personalization, but we're really looking for founders that understand their problem space and how they're actually using AI in those spaces.
I've been on the Gold House Ventures team for just over two years now. Joining a team that's so accomplished, but also highly collaborative, down to earth, really made it attractive for me to be a part of this team, and also being a part of the team that was fully Asian Pacific. When we look at the numbers, Asian founders receive around 17 percent of venture funding. When we look at our black and brown founders, collectively, they receive less than 3%. There's a lot of opportunity for just any diverse underrepresented founder to be able to get more venture funding, and tap into opportunities that are historically not as accessible. Being able to be a part of this team, being able to deploy out of a fund with top Asian founders, executive celebrities means a lot because we're able to support founders at the earliest stages. For us, economic empowerment, economic parity really comes from investing at the earliest stages. And for us, that's really at the pre-seed, seed level.
Just over a year ago, we took on a company called Ruck. Think of them as the DoorDash for construction supplies. When they first joined, they were doing about 70,000 in gross merchandise value. And through the accelerator, they actually surpassed 200,000. We connected them to the founder of Caviar as their mentor and we were able to broker introductions to Home Depot and other large construction companies. The value of partnering with Gold House Ventures is that we can help turbocharge efforts around go to market, around sales, but on the softer side, part of the founder journey is that it's actually incredibly lonely. We really want to connect our founders with mentors from the industry. It's really putting the the network of Gold House behind a company, connecting them to great talent and also helping them with their future fundraising.
There's still a long ways to go for AAPI founders to receive venture funding, especially when it comes to subsequent funding rounds. When we take a step back, when we think about Asian American executives, Asian American women are the least likely to be promoted to senior management. There's still a lot of opportunity, whether it's investing in a pre seed founder or helping Asian founders and executives excel in the ranks of corporate America. One of the efforts that we are proud of at Gold House is we've been able to work on a board diversity effort called the One House Leadership Coalition. Two years ago, we partnered with 12 other multicultural funds and organizations, anyone from Gaingels to Mac Venture Capital to Harlem Capital, to the NAACP and most recently NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. We all recognize that there's a board diversity problem. We've actually been able to place 70 diverse board directors onto publicly traded and privately held companies. I'd say that at the founder level, at the executive level, at the board director level, there's still a lot of progress to be made. We want to do this in effort and in allyship with a lot of our black and Hispanic counterparts. We can't just do this alone. We really need to do it in allyship with other communities as well.
We've now been able to have 10 accelerator cohorts. 115 alumni have gone on to raise more than two billion follow on capital. We're really proud that many of these alumni and founders come back to future accelerators to share their advice, their guidance, and many of them mentor future companies as well. Once we make the investment, we're there for you through both the great and the not so great times. For example, we've had some companies that had to pivot their business, and we've been able to be a sounding board for helping them test customers, test markets, test use cases.
Our investment focus is on any founding team that has at least one Asian Pacific founder, and they're building in tech, tech enabled services and businesses. So anything with an ecommerce, SaaS B2B software. We don't do as much CPG or consumer as much anymore. For this upcoming accelerator, we do have a focus on New York City based companies. For the last four years, our accelerator has been primarily virtual. This is a pilot for us to really focus on New York City based Founders in partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation. If you happen to be based in one of the five boroughs of New York City, consider our founder fellowship that starts in 2025. It's a 14 week program. Every week of the program, we have different master classes from fundraising to go to market to communications training to pitch practice and the program itself actually wraps up with a public demo day, where we bring the entire Gold House community of investors, founders, partners, all together.
The short answer is no. We have no preference between solo founders or co founding teams. Oftentimes, you're really early and you may not have a product, you may not have a prototype yet. One of the things that I'd advise as part of your pitch to investors is to really highlight your proximity to what you are building. For example, questions you should ask yourself include, Why are you the right person to build this product? Do you have prior industry experience? What is your familiarity with the pain points of this space? Why are you the best person to solve for this space? For us, we really just want to understand your story and understand why you are the best person to solve this problem.
In our current portfolio, we're proud to back companies like Sanzo Sparkling Water, Emi Eats, Emi Ramen, as well as Fly by Jing, one of my favorite chili oil brands. And many of these consumer brands, they started from a personal story, a personal place of motivation, and that thread of why they are creating this product really flows in their marketing and their product messaging and their product positioning and in their storytelling. Why are you the best person to represent this brand, to tell the story? What are the insights to show that there's a gap in the market, there's a demand for this product? That storytelling is just so essential to building a brand and a business, but also, thinking about digital channels, ecommerce, influencer outreach, creator marketing, being able to bring that experimental mindset to trying out different channels will be key.
Every single day we get inbound cold requests via email, sharing pitch decks and materials. Being able to be concise, share your progress, revenue traction, market research, user research. Be really pithy in your pitch. We oftentimes will reach out asking for more information as part of our due diligence. We don't really invest off a cold call. It really takes a few steps as part of our due diligence process. But for any founders, you're more than welcome to share your company or your fundraising details to investments@goldhouse.Org. And in the email, just try your best to summarize what you're building, what is traction so far, and any sort of data to help us make an informed decision. We will try our best to run a full due diligence process before we make a formal investment.
Because we're investing at such an early stage, the thing that I look for is a lot of emotional discipline. There have been founders that have gone through our accelerator that have gone on to pivot their businesses or change their target market, target audience, their ideal customer profile. We're looking for founders who can be scrappy, able to bring that discipline to how they research, they test, they experiment. In today's market, it's very easy to make impulsive decisions to panic a little bit. We're looking for founders who can be calm, level headed and can ride the highs and lows of building a business. For those who are able to bring that discipline, we're able to put our resources behind them and help them raise subsequent rounds, help them think about go to market, be a sounding board as they're expanding. Bringing a bit of that emotional discipline is key.
Find a problem space that you understand, that you potentially have experience in, that you love, that you actually have personal understanding of. We're not expecting a product or service with an incredible amount of traction, if there is any traction at all. Oftentimes, a lot of these ideas are really early. When we're evaluating candidates, we just want to understand that you're doing what you love, you understand the problem space, you understand the market.
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