One of the main reasons I started Hyphen Capital was to change the narrative around Asian American founders. Representation matters. Whether it’s on the big movie screen or in a children’s book, being able to see yourself as part of a story is so impactful for a young person. But being included is not enough, it’s just as important, if not more important, how those characters are portrayed. I rarely saw any Asian characters in books when I was a child, except for offensive books like Tikki Tikki Tembo. And the only actors that looked like me that I saw…

Teens today are spending more of their time with online friends vs. offline friends. Over half consider only the people they’ve known online as friends. As the first generation to be digitally native, Gen-Z uses multiple online identities in pursuit of self-discovery. Over half identify as non-heterosexual (25% gender fluid and 70% LGBTQ+ sexuality fluid) to explore their gender and sexuality. While running Fanpop, I regularly observed this behavior among our teenage user base as well. We had communities for different topics of interest and users wanted to have a unique persona for each of those communities. Our users would…

Anyone who has had to manage a hiring process knows how painful coordinating interviews can be. From coordinating schedules with your team to coordinating schedules with your candidate, it can be such a mess. ModernLoop is changing all of that. By automating interview scheduling, ModernLoop makes the entire experience better for your candidates and that’s critical to making a good first impression.

I first connected with Persona cofounder and CEO Rick Song after their Series A in February 2020 before COVID. Our VP of Engineering at Pared had talked to him about verifying identities on our platform. It was something that was challenging but critical to our business and many other businesses. When someone onboarded to Pared, we wanted to know that they were who they said they were. They were still building out their product at the time and we didn’t end up working together then, but it was clear that they were trying to solve a very important problem that…

When Belinda Mo shared with me the origin story of Viva Translate coming out of one of her Stanford classes as a real world challenge that faced legal organizations, I knew that this was a big opportunity. Most of us go through our daily lives in the U.S. not thinking twice about the support we are able to get as native English speakers. Meanwhile, a significant percentage of the American population does not speak English as their primary language. These people require the same services from customer support to medical advice to legal counsel that they cannot get if there…

People are often surprised when they find out what incredible companies were started by Asian American founders. I’ve been told by many founders that seeing our list of Hyphen Capital LPs is inspiring because they never realized that some of these companies were founded by Asian Americans, and they are Asian themselves! One founder even told me that he forwarded the website to his parents to prove to them that you can actually be successful by starting your own company. Seeing these logos and this list of names assembled together in one place is extremely powerful.

These are just a…

I first heard about Offsyte when co-founder and CEO Emma Guo reached out to me cold off of LinkedIn after reading my post announcing Hyphen Capital (and thankfully we were reconnected by our one of our LPs and amazing founder and investor Holly Liu). I saw her impressive background from her masters at Carnegie Mellon to being a software engineer at Cisco working on WebEx to MuleSoft and then becoming a rising star at Lyft. I would later find out that she was named one of the top engineering managers in the company. One of the reasons she was so…

I’m thrilled to announce that Hyphen Capital has made an investment in Runway. Runway helps teams and founders better understand the financial health of their business. It has been called the Figma for finance because it gives visibility into valuable business data and financial metrics to leaders across the entire team rather than being limited to just the finance team. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, Dylan Field (co-founder of Figma), Henry Ward (co-founder of Carta) and many others, Runway is one of the most competitive early stage startups to invest in right now.

How did a small…