Andrew Chung: Building Bridges to the Future

As someone who studied and performed music at a high level, Andrew Chung has internalized the ability to focus on the current moment while always being aware of what comes next. Performing music epitomizes that duality — excellent execution in the present, continuously readying oneself for the future.

Musical training during his youth gave him the skills to be a national champion in Chinese-American Idol when he was a senior at Harvard and later a finalist in Hong Kong Idol — one of the shows that inspired American Idol. Over the past two decades, he has built a career that has not only been about building top-performing portfolios in the present moment, but also one marked by being constantly attentive to futuristic technologies that seek to solve sustainability problems in such crucial areas like climate change, food supply, agriculture, and education.

Combine this deeply rooted methodology of always keeping one eye on the future with Chung’s having grown up enveloped in Chinese culture — he speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese — and his career in finance has naturally led from its Silicon Valley beginnings to China. The interweaving of his informal and formal educations has made him an entrepreneur working in the world’s two largest economies at the highest level.

Life Lessons Spanning Two Worlds

His parents fled China during the Cultural Revolution and first settled in New York’s Chinatown, where Chung was born. They later moved to a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that it was a safer and less hectic place to raise a family (especially compared to lower Manhattan in the 1980’s). As the son of Chinese immigrants, Chung not only grew up with the stereotypical expectations of doing well in school and carving a place for himself in realizing the American dream; he also had access to real-world educational opportunities that still serve him well today.

“My entrepreneurial journey actually stretches back pretty far, with my parents. They started a Chinese restaurant business, like many Chinese immigrants who don’t speak English do. They put me to work at age 5,” Chung related to VentureBeat in a 2013 interview. “I did a lot of the outbound marketing, customer service, cash register, calculating tax, and everything. I spoke English, and I was good at math back in the day. So they put me to work. I have to say that I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and how to think about customers, how to think about relationships, from watching them and doing it myself at a very early age.”

This early understanding of the intricacies of running a business — and what it takes to make one successful — has permeated Chung’s career and the companies that he now invests in and mentors. The fact that his youth was also directly imbued in Chinese culture is also something that is now a vital part of his career, since a significant part of it is centered on building and expanding relationships in mainland China.

“The first thing is the language and cultural barrier, which is not trivial over there. A lot of executives don’t speak any English and there’s very little Chinese over here. Even in the subtleties of how you sit in a room, how you address the chairman, and the number of people who show up at a meeting can translate into profound implications in whether you get them to work with you or not,” Chung explained to AgFunderNews in 2016. “You’ve got to be willing to be creative about how to work with the Chinese. You can’t assume traditional business practices will work. It’s simple things like networking. Over here, I can connect with someone on LinkedIn and can meet them and get a deal done relatively quickly. The Chinese work in very long cycles and have to build trust up to a level where they want to work with you. They want to feel like you’re part of the family, and that’s very different here.”

These are not the kind of Chinese-infused “business smarts” you can simply learn in the classroom. Though after Harvard he earned an MBA from Wharton — and that is certainly an important building block of his later success — the self-taught lessons he picked up being raised by first-generation Chinese-American entrepreneurial parents are the foundation of much of his career. 

The seeking out of tech solutions in a wide range of sectors, including energy, education, healthcare, and agriculture and food production, has been the focus of that career. First at Lightspeed Venture Partners and then Khosla — before the founding of his own investment firm, 1955 Capital, at which he now serves as Managing Partner — Chung has been driven to understand the current economic moment while anticipating the innovative solutions that are bound to be on the next page of the score.

“Because of the Asian parental decree, I was supposed to be a doctor or an engineer. Once I got them over that, they maybe wanted me to be an investment banker, something on Wall Street. I ended up turning down an offer to go to Goldman [Sachs] to join Trilogy, which was the high-flying enterprise startup of the time,” Chung related in his VentureBeat interview about the beginning of his tech-driven career. “I started life as an entrepreneur because I wanted to find the next great idea, the next big idea, and work on something that would change the world. As a venture capitalist, what we’re in a great position to be able to do is to look for technologies that have the potential to change the world and do it across multiple companies, multiple sectors, multiple stages.”

1955 Capital: His Own Baby

Chung is now dedicated to managing the firm he established in 2015. It was founded with the intent of investing in the most innovative tech being created in the Americas and Europe and translating it to the developing world — with the ultimate goal being to provide answers to emerging issues. The company’s mission is to be a pivot point between solutions and challenges.

The name honors the year 1955, which Chung finds iconic. Legends like Albert Einstein, the inventor of penicillin Alexander Fleming, jazz innovator Charlie Parker, and all-time baseball great Cy Young died that year. Rosa Parks all but launched the civil rights movement that year. And tech giants Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born (not to mention Disneyland threw open its doors and the first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois). Chung’s old partner Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems and preeminent investor from Kleiner Perkins and his eponymous firm Khosla Ventures, was also born that year.

1955 Capital’s premise is that the same kind of seismic innovations are ready to happen in the developing world — especially China and India — and there is a need for conduits for new ideas and technological innovation to move where they are needed. Chung has found that a bridge between cultures is vitally needed — and that his background makes him a well-equipped bridge builder.

“I had a lot of educational training and a lot of study in areas like energy and environment, study of how people do business in Asia, and the ability to take a lot of those skills and try to have a significant ‘in’,” Chung related at a Solve at MIT roundtable discussion. “And [to] really solve one of the great challenges of our time, which is how do you create better opportunities and a better life for people in developing countries, where they don’t have the resources that we have here in the United States and don’t have access to a lot of healthcare, education, or clean living that we have here in the U.S.”

The mission of Chung’s investment firm is to open direct access to the huge Chinese and Indian markets for entrepreneurial innovation. The focus is on four broad areas where new tech can expand economic opportunity — while also directly tackling issues of concern. The sectors that 1955 Capital is specializing in include energy and environment (with a specific goal of curtailing health issues related to air pollution), health and education (countering the rise of “Western” conditions like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes), food safety and supply (bettering water quality and farmland health), and supporting emerging technologies (like 3D printing, robotics, and the Internet of Things).

Chung wants to be an agent of change who gets entities who don’t understand one another well — or even know of one another’s existence — working on the same page. The conductor of the score, if you will.

“It’s a very challenging problem, because you have a lot of distrust among partners in-between the United States and China. Many of the companies that I’ve represented in my time at Lightspeed, Khosla, and now 1955 don’t know [who] the large companies are in China or Malaysia or Indonesia,” he explained at the Solve at MIT event. “They don’t speak the same languages, they don’t understand the local customs, or the way to negotiate. And many of the times when we have a great technology here in the United States — that is bursting at the seams to expand in countries that are desperate for their technology — we run into this issue of how you can bring the two sides together to transact and really deploy those technologies in these geographies that are, again, very desperate for it.”

That is not to say that Chung sees this as a simple one-way street. Having been deeply embedded in the Chinese economy for over a decade now, he also realizes that innovation and entrepreneurship are growing forces in China. His ultimate goal is to develop ways to communicate and build mutual trust and understanding.

“Contrary to popular belief in the U.S., I think there are incredible amounts of innovation happening in China. I think the common wisdom is that because in the U.S. the university systems have been around longer in terms of the fundamental science research … and also there’s venture capital in Silicon Valley, in New York, Boston, and sort of this entrepreneurial mindset that’s been around for a long time that the U.S. is the center of the innovation world and China is playing catch-up or copycat,” Chung explained in an interview with Asian Venture Capital Journal. “I actually don’t think that that’s the case. I think that while it’s true that the U.S. probably has more depth and breadth in terms of fundamental research … Chinese companies are incredibly innovative when it comes to market strategy [and] getting access to this new consumer base that is coming in from the countryside. The emergence of this middle-class that is thirsting for new products. The Chinese are incredibly creative and innovative on how to get to this new class of consumer.”

This too fits into the guiding principles of 1955 Capital. The company’s webpage outlines its goal to serve as “a cultural bridge” and develop “strategic partners” for “cross-border execution.” The investment firm is not simply about investing financially in companies but investing time and cultural resources into building effective partnerships and facilitating productive cross-pollination.

1955 Capital Is an Extension of What Came Before 

In founding his own company, Chung brought with him the experience and goodwill he had developed over nearly five years as one of six general partners at Khosla Ventures, a firm with $5 billion in committed capital that specializes in supporting a wide range of innovative companies. Chung left the firm with not only his large Rolodex, but a deep understanding of emerging markets. This allowed him to raise significant venture capital right out of the gate for 1955 Capital. While at Khosla, Chung managed over $500 million in assets and advised over two dozen companies, including BioConsortia, Impossible Foods, Lanzatech, Quantumscape, and Wattpad.

“In a lot of ways, this [founding 1955] is a very natural extension to the five years I spent as a partner at Khosla. I was helping a lot of different entrepreneurs think through their global strategy, and went to China thirteen times last year, which is probably more than any other investor in Silicon Valley,” Chung explained to AgFunderNews in early 2016, soon after founding his own company. “Having that kind of experience at Khosla, where we had the largest portfolio in cleantech, gave me a really great position to get to know a lot of powerful companies in China and then, fast forward to late last year, I got the entrepreneurial bug again. The fact that I was able to raise $200 million in a relatively short period of time is validation that this type of firm is needed.”

Prior to Khosla, Chung spent five years as a principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a firm that specializes in enterprise technology and consumer companies. It too has significant plays in China and India. Chung concentrated on cleantech, education, and genomics while there and played a role in the firm’s investments in such breakout companies as Natera, Nest Labs, Orbis Education, Personalis, SolarEdge, and Solazyme.

Having played a role in the development of such a wide range of tech sectors, from agriculture to genomics, from foodtech to carbon mitigation, gives Chung a bird’s-eye view of possibilities in the developing world.

“The large ag firms are going through some big changes, whether it’s pesticides not working out so well, crop productivity going down, or soil quality issues rearing their head. And lots of folks think that the large companies don’t necessarily have all the answers, but that they need more fundamental breakthroughs to improve the global situation,” he explained in the AgFunderNews interview. “Then on the other hand, with advances in machine learning, computer vision, big data, drones, genomics and all that’s going with the emerging bio-ag companies, it’s a perfect storm of increasing market need and great tech innovation. It’s a great time for entrepreneurs to be looking at this space, and the investors that have generally been quiet in this space, are now looking more carefully at it.”

This broad embrace of international economic development and technological change has led Chung to be a trusted source in not only the world of investment and finance, but also broader policy development as well. During the administration of President Barack Obama, he was part of an official White House roundtable on advanced manufacturing and represented the investor community as an advisor on a historic U.S.-China presidential trade mission in 2015 led by then Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.  He has advised the California Commission for Economic Development. He has been a featured speaker at numerous conferences around the world.

He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, MIT, the Paulson Institute, and Peking and Tsinghua universities in China. He is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Cabinet at the Harvard John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and held a similar position on the Wharton Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership (IGEL). Chung helped found the Cleantech Board for The Indus Entrepreneurs group (TiE) and serves as its Founding Chair; it supports entrepreneurship around the globe and is one of the largest organizations doing so. He also serves in lead advising positions for the Cleantech Open (CTO) and the Future Food-Tech Conference. 
Chung still dabbles in music — call it his side hustle. He loves baseball with the clear passion of a son born to immigrant parents and is also an avid skier and photographer.

from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/business/andrew-chung-building-bridges-to-the-future/