Venture Investing in Emerging Ecosystems

On August 20, 2021, two remarkable Born Global VCs, Irving Kau and Eunse Lee joined our General Partner of Born Global Ventures, Dr. Sunny Zhang for a virtual event. Irving and Eunse shared their stories about getting into venture investing and talked through the current changes in the financial landscape, the pros and cons of emerging ecosystems, the opportunities in those emerging ecosystems, and some advice for early-stage founders and emerging fund managers. 

Irving Kau has extensive work experience working in both public and private equity including venture capital. He has worked on the buy-side, sell-side, and company side. Having built up a sizable network across all growth sectors, Irving serves as the Managing Partner of both Elementz Ventures and KW Capital Partners, as he has successfully completed over $100M in companies across geographies, sectors, and stages, and taken 12+ companies public to a Nasdaq listing. Irving prides himself on quantitative approaches including economic, financial, and market penetration modelling (Bass Diffusion), and as a detail-oriented global leader focuses himself on follow-through, execution, and task completion. He deeply values character and ‘doing the right thing’ in each circumstance despite any potential short-term effects. He also served as the head of Asia at GHS (now known as Seaport Global Holdings LLC) which possessed seasoned leadership from Jeffries and DLJ. He was named Top 40 under 40 finance professionals (2012, M&A Media).  

Eunse Lee is a founder-turned early-stage investor and the founder and Managing Partner at a current stealth mode VC to globally empower early-stage high-tech startups with Asian founders. Prior to this position, Eunse was the Managing Director at Techstars Korea – Techstars’ first-ever program for Korea, where he built the full cycle of investment and operations of the accelerator, and invested in high-growth companies from Korea, US, Singapore, Australia, Canada and Japan. He also co-founded two LA-based VC firms and was involved in raising two funds totaling $250mn. He started his career in strategy at a firm he founded in Korea and served Tier-1 companies in both Korea and overseas as a strategy and management consultant. He also served as an advisor to the Korean Government and many of its agencies in formulating and implementing strategies for the Creative Economy.

Special thanks to our event partners, Women in AI USA,  The Cannon Community and Z LAB Global for their kind support.

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