Good afternoon,
Welcome to the Zino Ventures’ KungHo Fund Launch Party! My name is George Kung, the Chairman of Zino Ventures and CEO of the KungHo Fund. I am delighted to see so many friends here today.
As an entrepreneur and angel investor, I believe there are so many rewards to angel investing beyond financial returns. Angel investment gives more opportunities to entrepreneurs who endeavour to change the world by innovating new products and creating new jobs. It also helps investors to forge strong relationships with future business leaders. In this way, by working together to create new value, we can prosper together, especially at a time when our world seems to be getting more unstable.
The COVID pandemic has been a challenge of enormous scale, and perhaps the largest faced by us in our lifetime. To defeat the virus without stripping human rights and privacy, and to avoid economic collapse, we had to rely on innovation, science, and technology. Scientists and entrepreneurs tipped the scales to turn the worst of times into opportunities. They fought their way to a new normal.
Over the last 2.5 years, I too had to ask myself what I could do to fight my way to a new normal. I re-examined my own investment philosophy and recognized how COVID has forever changed the way people connect, teach, learn, do business, and organize as humankind. The result has been an enormous and continued demand for new innovations in many industries which will continue beyond COVID.
The education industry is the first place where we have all seen a transformation. I never believed that a 70-year-old violin teacher could use Zoom to teach my daughter, until I saw it. However, there is still a massive demand for better solutions from both educators and learners; this can be translated as a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs. Zino Ventures’ most successful portfolio companies, Kami and WuKong, reflects this philosophy.
Similarly, e-commerce and fintech are additional industries where COVID has led to demand for new technologies. When all restaurants were in a situation of “contactless service” during the pandemic, small bakery, restaurant, or cafe owners were desperate for a simple and affordable online ordering and payment system just to survive. Zino Ventures’ portfolio company Minitable is an excellent example of an innovation that empowered thousands of small businesses serving millions of customers every day, allowing these businesses to survive AND thrive over the course of the pandemic.
And before the pandemic, no one could have imagined that new vaccines could be developed and rolled-out to protect billions of people in such a short time. But the innovation doesn’t stop there: the AI-based approaches used in developing COVID vaccines can also be used to tackle other diseases, presenting enormous opportunities for start-ups in this space.
Two years ago, I started to latch onto these new COVID-era investment trends. Today, the Zino Ventures’ KungHo Fund brings this idea to scale. This new Boston-based angel fund helps edtech, E-commerce & healthcare start-ups to expand their business in the U.S. market – where we believe the most opportunity lies at the moment – via AI, cloud computing and big-data technology.
We also believe that we have a good approach to finding the most promising companies relying not just on review of business plans, but engaging entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur. We feel that our Zino Ventures’ track record reflects the success of this approach.
In closing, I hope that this afternoon we can provide an opportunity for each of you to learn something new and consider how YOU can best make an impact and fight your way to a new normal. And perhaps you will choose to join us as an investor, partner, portfolio company or friend. At the KungHo Fund, we welcome you.
Thank you!
– George Gong, September 18th, 2022 Cambridge, MA