Hans Tung is a managing partner at Notable Capital. Born in Taiwan and raised in Los Angeles, he worked on Wall Street, co-founded two startups and invested across Asia before returning to Silicon Valley. His portfolio includes companies such as Airbnb, ByteDance and Slack, and he has appeared repeatedly on the Forbes Midas List. — Notable Capital.

Infographic for "Lessons from Hans Tung".

On Investment Philosophy & Strategy

  1. Think Beyond One Market: Tung viewed mobile internet as a cross-border trend and looked for businesses able to use it across multiple markets. — Forbes Interview.
  2. Back Globally Experienced Founders: He said GGV liked entrepreneurs with heavily stamped passports: founders prepared to learn across borders. — Forbes Interview.
  3. Match the Founder to the Market: He looks for founders whose experience and temperament suit the market they are building for. — CKGSB Interview.
  4. Test the Market's Scale: He asks whether the market can plausibly support a billion-dollar company, alongside founder and product fit. — CKGSB Interview.
  5. Build a Social Reason to Buy: In his commerce essay, Tung argues that curation and community can give shoppers reasons to use a specialist app; he cites Airbnb and Xiaohongshu, not Ibotta, as examples of community-building. — Beyond Amazon and Alibaba.
  6. Treat Global Scale as a 2016 Thesis: In 2016 Tung argued that a future $20 billion company would need to be global. This was his investment thesis, not a rule proven for all companies. — Forbes Interview.
  7. Distinguish U.S. Sector Patterns: In the 2018 interview, he said consumer and enterprise businesses produced many more U.S. unicorns than deep-tech startups in GGV's experience. — CKGSB Interview.
  8. Recognize China's Consumer Base: He described consumer technology as a major source of Chinese unicorns at the time of the interview. — CKGSB Interview.
  9. Watch China's Enterprise Shift: He expected rising labor costs to create demand for Chinese enterprise software that helped firms work more efficiently; this is a dated forecast. — CKGSB Interview.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

  1. Stay in the Game Across Technology Waves: Tung says tenacious founders can learn from missed earlier waves and apply that learning to later ones. — Garry Tan Interview.
  2. Know Your Kind of Founder Fit: He contrasts Max Levchin's affinity for fintech with John Foley's persistence around a specific product to show why founders should understand their own fit. — Garry Tan Interview.
  3. Learn Across Iterations: Tung argues that founders who absorb lessons from earlier platform cycles improve their chances in later ones. — Garry Tan Interview.
  4. Remember the Founder's Isolation: His own startup experience taught him how lonely it can be to make difficult decisions with few people to consult. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  5. Look for Learning and Cohesion: Across different founder styles, Tung favors teams that learn quickly, adjust and rally people around a shared purpose. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  6. Expect Business-Model Iteration: In comparing early-stage companies, he observed that U.S. founders often changed models before finding a workable one. — CKGSB Interview.
  7. Distinguish Direction from Product: He observed that Chinese founders in his sample often held a clearer early direction even while changing the product. — CKGSB Interview.
  8. Learn the Local Policy Context: Tung said both local and foreign startups in China had to learn to work with the government; foreign teams also faced cultural and technological adaptation. — CKGSB Interview.
  9. Serve the Mass Market Well: The original Accel episode summary attributes to Tung an emphasis on low-cost, high-quality offerings for Chinese mass-market users. — SeedToScale Podcast.
  10. Account for Time as Well as Income: The same episode summary says lower-income mass-market consumers may have more time to engage with a service; this was a market observation, not a universal rule. — SeedToScale Podcast.
  1. Date the Mobile-Globalization Bet: In his 2016 interview, Tung described mobile internet as a worldwide efficiency trend that shaped GGV's cross-border investing. — Forbes Interview.
  2. Keep Silicon Valley Open to Talent: He argued that Silicon Valley would continue attracting innovative people if immigration remained relatively open. — CKGSB Interview.
  3. Learn From the Super-App Model: Tung pointed to China's super-app model as a service-platform idea U.S. companies were studying, without claiming every company should copy WeChat. — CKGSB Interview.
  4. Consider 5G-Enabled Services: In a 2021 hardware interview, Tung expected faster and more reliable 5G to create opportunities in live streaming, gaming and cloud services; he did not make the original VR/AR guarantee. — Consumer Hardware VC Interview.
  5. Track Frontier Technology Selectively: In 2017, Tung described GGV's interest in AR/VR, machine learning, AI and autonomous driving as possible sources of new services, not assured outcomes. — Cooley GO Interview.
  6. See New Problems as Markets Grow: Tung connected population growth to opportunities to solve problems in food, agriculture, finance and other sectors. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  7. Look Beyond Dominant Retail Platforms: Tung argued that specialist e-commerce brands could still grow by curating experiences and community outside Amazon or Alibaba. — Beyond Amazon and Alibaba.
  8. Expect Cross-Border Commerce: His signed essay argues mobile adoption and logistics made international commerce more feasible, while warning of local operational risks. — Cross-Border From Day One.
  9. Learn Across U.S. and Chinese Markets: He described Airbnb's work on China partnerships as one example of U.S. firms learning to adapt to the Chinese market. — Cooley GO Interview.
  10. Study Generational Values Across Borders: Tung's signed 2017 essay argues that some U.S. and Chinese millennial consumer values were converging, while local payment, logistics and density still demanded adaptation. — Millennials Without Borders.

Learnings from a VC Career

  1. Follow the Industry Shift That Interests You: He says investment banking taught him he cared more about technological and societal shifts than dealmaking, drawing him into venture investing. — Garry Tan Interview.
  2. Use Cross-Cultural Context: Tung connected his Taiwan, U.S. and China experience to a cross-border view of mobile and consumer technology. — Forbes Interview.
  3. Get Close to a Changing Market: He spent years investing in Asia after moving to China in 2005, before returning to Silicon Valley in 2013. — Notable Capital.
  4. Do Not Assume China Was Sheltered: The Accel episode summary says Tung found China's startup competition fiercer than he had expected, contrary to the idea of a protected local market. — SeedToScale Podcast.
  5. Use History to Read Industry Shifts: Tung says his interest in history and rising and falling innovation centers shaped his approach to technology investing. — Garry Tan Interview.
  6. Back Access-Expanding Products: Gold House's honoree biography describes his portfolio as helping broaden technology access for consumers and businesses; that is a stated portfolio theme, not a quantified impact result. — Gold House Bio.
  7. Learn From Failed Startups: Tung says his two unsuccessful founding experiences helped him understand and advise entrepreneurs and build GGV. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  8. Make Inclusion an Actual Initiative: Gold House records that Tung oversaw GGV's DE&I initiatives; the original claim that diversity automatically improves decisions is not established. — Gold House Bio.
  9. Use Interviews for Reciprocal Learning: Tung says podcasting lets him share experience with founders while learning from the people he interviews. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  10. Serve Founders Beyond Capital: He says his own startup experience gave him empathy for founders and made him better able to support them through hard decisions. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  11. Frame Entry Valuation as His Recollection: Tung recalled GGV entering Musical.ly at roughly a $100 million valuation before its later sale to ByteDance; this is his recollection, not independently verified transaction data. — TiNDLE Podcast.
  12. Invest in a Founder You Understand: Tung says he backed Xiaomi because Lei Jun's vision made sense to him at an early stage. — CKGSB Interview.
  13. Help Portfolio Companies Localize: In a 2017 interview, Tung said GGV was helping Airbnb explore local business partnerships for China. — Cooley GO Interview.
  14. Connect Companies Across Markets: Tung said he introduced Uber to Didi before their later rivalry; sources differ on the exact year, so the lesson omits it. — AVCJ Interview.
  15. Look Beyond a Hardware Label: In 2018 Tung argued investors would come to see Xiaomi as a broader gadget ecosystem rather than a conventional hardware company. — Forbes Xiaomi IPO Report.

Sources

  1. CKGSB Knowledge: Unicorn Factory — Interview with Hans Tung
  2. TiNDLE: Hans Tung — Finding Opportunity in Failure
  3. Garry Tan: Hans Tung and the 16 Unicorns
  4. Forbes: The Humanist — Hans Tung's Global Investing
  5. Accel SeedToScale: Hans Tung on the Chinese Startup Ecosystem
  6. Cooley GO: Hans Tung on Venture Capital Investing
  7. Notable Capital: Hans Tung Biography
  8. Hans Tung: Beyond Amazon and Alibaba — What's Next for E-Commerce?
  9. Hans Tung: Millennials Without Borders