Meet Linus Liang, Managing Partner at Kyber Knight Capital

In this month’s Asian Tech Collective feature, we sit down with Linus Liang, Managing Partner at Kyber Knight Capital, for a wide‑ranging and candid conversation that traces his path from growing up in the Bay Area’s early tech scene to building companies across continents and eventually stepping into venture capital.  He reflects on how culture and upbringing shaped his instincts, how AI is reshaping the way founders build, and why this moment in technology feels unlike anything he’s experienced before.  His perspective offers a grounded, introspective look at the personal experiences and values that guide his approach to investing and company‑building today.

Judy: Tell us about your background and what led you to venture capital.

Linus: I grew up in San Jose, right in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech ecosystem, at a time when the region was undergoing a profound shift: from a silicon, hardware‑first economy to the early waves of software that would redefine it.  My parents were both immigrants who came to the U.S. for college and stayed after attending U.C. Berkeley.  They built their careers in tech, which meant that from a very young age I was surrounded by computers, curiosity, and a sense that technology could create real opportunity.

That early exposure shaped my entire trajectory.  I learned to program when I was young, built simple games, spent countless hours tinkering, and fell in love with how software worked.  That passion eventually took me to UC Berkeley, where I studied computer science.

After graduating, I spent a year at Microsoft, partly to pay off student loans, but also because it felt like the natural next step for someone who loved technology.  Even then, though, I knew I ultimately wanted to start a company.  At that time, the entrepreneurship ecosystem looked very different from today.  There was no Y Combinator, no proliferation of incubators, no clear path for someone who wanted to build a tech company. Many of the founders I admired - people behind companies like Yahoo, Google, YouTube - had spun their startups out of academia.  To me, that seemed like the clearest and most credible way to become a founder.

With that, I went to Stanford for graduate school in computer science.  Within my first few months there, everything shifted.  I joined a research group working on what would eventually become core cloud technologies, long before cloud computing became mainstream.  Around that exact time, Facebook launched its developer platform, giving small teams access to millions of users overnight.  The combination was catalytic: we realized the technologies we were building in our research group could solve real‑world scaling problems that new apps on Facebook were running into.

To test our system, we built a few simple Facebook games…and those games unexpectedly went viral.  At one point, they were generating around $30,000 a day, which as a graduate student was unbelievable.  That momentum pulled us into conversations with a small social‑gaming startup that would soon become Zynga.  We merged our teams, combined our technologies, and helped build and launch dozens of games.  During the period I was there, Zynga grew from 10 people to hundreds and eventually went public.  Being part of that rocketship gave me firsthand experience with hyper‑growth, fundraising, product velocity, and what it looks like when a small idea becomes a global business.

After leaving Zynga, I co‑founded another company - this time focused on mobile apps, since the iPhone ecosystem was taking off.  That company was later acquired by Meta.  But after several years in gaming, I felt burnt out.  Gaming had never been my core love; I had entered that world because of the timing and opportunity, not because the category itself was deeply meaningful to me.

I went back to Stanford, this time to the Graduate School of Business, to figure out what my next company might be.  And one elective changed everything.  I enrolled in a class that brought together students from all seven Stanford graduate schools to solve global problems through an interdisciplinary lens.  Our team chose to tackle infant mortality, specifically the lack of access to baby incubators in low‑resource settings.  That project turned into a low‑cost, no‑electricity infant incubator, which I spent nearly seven years bringing to life.  I lived in India for years doing field work, operations, and distribution and lived in China to oversee manufacturing.  It was meaningful work that had real impact - but also incredibly demanding, both emotionally and physically.

By the time we reached market, I was completely exhausted.  I returned to the Bay Area without a clear next step.  A friend at Andreessen Horowitz encouraged me to come work with her, and that’s where venture capital finally clicked for me.  It was the perfect blend of all the worlds I’d lived in: building, technology, supporting founders, and learning.  I fell in love with the craft of investing, and I wanted to take it seriously, not just as a temporary stint, but as a long‑term career.

To do that, I went back to Stanford GSB again, this time with a singular focus: to study venture capital formally.  I took every VC class offered, learned from professors who had founded iconic firms, and asked every one of them: What does it actually take to build a great venture firm? Their answers varied, but they all agreed on one thing: you must see companies from their very first check all the way to exit.  You can’t shortcut that experience.

Instead of returning to a large firm, I joined Signia Venture Partners, a smaller fund where I could write my own checks, work closely with founders, and get the full spectrum of experience across the life cycle of a company.  Years later, when the senior partners retired, my partner and I spun out and launched Kyber Knight Capital, a early‑stage VC firm focused on pre‑seed and seed software companies, especially those building on top of the new wave of AI technologies.

When I look back, the through‑line is actually pretty simple: I’ve always loved building, whether it was games as a kid, cloud technologies in grad school, companies across continents, or now a fund.  Venture is just another form of building.  It lets me work with founders who remind me of earlier chapters in my own journey, while also giving me the chance to keep learning every day.

Judy: AI is top‑of‑mind for everyone. What is your perspective on the space and what types of companies are you investing in?

Linus: When I think about AI, I don’t think about it as a hype cycle or a technology trend.  I think about the feeling I get every morning when I wake up, open my laptop, and see five new breakthroughs released over the weekend.  It reminds me of what it felt like in 2006 and 2007, when the Facebook platform first opened up and suddenly millions of users were at your fingertips overnight.  Except now, the acceleration is 10x that and it’s touching every industry, not just consumer apps.

To understand where the opportunity is, I often break the AI world into three layers, not as an investor framework, but because that’s how my brain organizes what’s happening.

At the base is the model layer, the frontier work being done by OpenAI, Anthropic, and the open‑source community, huge teams with massive compute budgets pushing the boundaries of what these models can do.  It’s exciting, but it’s not where I spend my time. Competing at that layer is like trying to join a space race with a paper airplane.  Only a handful of companies in the world have the resources for it.

Above that is everything that makes AI usable in practice. It’s the behind‑the‑scenes tooling that lets companies put AI safely into production: guardrails, observability, systems that decide which model to call when, how to evaluate outputs, how to keep everything running reliably.  I watch this space closely, but it’s getting crowded, and I think many of the point solutions won’t survive long‑term.

Where I’m most energized, and where Kyber Knight focuses, is the application layer, where AI meets real work done by real people.  This is where AI stops being an impressive demo and turns into something that changes someone’s day.  It’s also where I see everything coming together: the rapid technical advances, the changing expectations of how people want to work, the parts of industries that were rigid for decades suddenly becoming flexible again.

That’s what excites me about this moment.  AI isn’t just making software faster; it’s reshaping how entire professions function.  Industries like healthcare, legal, logistics - places where the same processes have been used for decades - are being re‑examined from the ground up.  When you watch a founder rebuild a workflow that has been static forever, there’s this sense of something unlocking, like you can physically feel an industry start to breathe again.

The speed at which founders can build now is staggering.  Things that once required large engineering teams and long timelines can be prototyped by two people over a weekend.  As someone who started companies long before any of this existed, I still have moments where I look at what’s possible and think, I can’t believe how quickly this is all moving.

And what makes all of this even more meaningful is seeing how our own community at Kyber Knight plays into it.  We have more than a hundred LPs - operators, founders, domain experts - who don’t just invest capital but genuinely want to help.  They pick up the phone.  They introduce founders to the right early adopters.  They provide the kind of feedback that would normally take months to access.  When we invest, we aren’t just giving a check; we’re activating a network that can move with the same speed as these founders.

That’s why the application layer is where I want to be.  It’s where AI intersects with human behavior, where friction gets removed, where work becomes easier and more intuitive.  It’s where you can see immediate, tangible impact.  And when I think about the companies we choose to invest in, the common thread is always the same: these founders are using AI not because it’s a trend, but because it finally allows them to solve a problem that people have been struggling with for years.

That’s the opportunity. That’s the energy in the air right now. And, maybe surprisingly, that’s the part of AI that feels the most human.

Judy: Is there a founder trait you’ve grown to value more over time?

Linus: The longer I’ve been in venture, both as a former founder and now as an investor, the more I realize that the trait that matters most isn’t what I originally thought it would be.  Early in my career, I believed technical brilliance or resilience or domain expertise would be the biggest predictors of success.  Those things absolutely matter but the trait I’ve grown to value more than almost anything else is coachability, though not in the simplistic way people often use that word.

When I first joined Andreessen Horowitz, every pitch we reviewed had to be logged into Salesforce with dozens of fields: team size, product category, round size, revenue, all the basics.  But there was one field that always struck me because it was so starkly binary: Is the founder coachable?  Just “yes” or “no.”  No nuance, no slider, no explanation.  And back then, I honestly didn’t fully understand what that question meant.

Over the years, after sitting beside founders through layoffs, pivots, broken deals, brutal hiring cycles, and once‑in‑a‑lifetime successes, I understand exactly why that question matters.  “Coachability” doesn’t mean a founder who just takes your advice or does what you say.  The best founders rarely do that and, honestly, I wouldn’t want them to.  If a founder simply followed every investor suggestion, they wouldn’t be solving a real problem, they’d be trying to please everyone around them.

The kind of coachability I value is more subtle, more emotional, and much harder to spot in a single pitch meeting.  It’s the founder who listens deeply - not quietly, but intentionally.  The founder who can sit with uncomfortable feedback without becoming defensive.  The founder who absorbs multiple perspectives, holds them up to their own instincts, and then makes a decision only they can own.

Some of the most exceptional founders I’ve worked with never took the advice I offered but they always engaged with it.  They’d push back, ask questions, refine the edges of their thinking and you could tell they understood that you weren’t there to steer the ship for them.  You were there to help them avoid sailing off a cliff they couldn’t yet see.

On the flip side, the hardest investments (the ones that went to zero) were often founders who refused to listen to anyone.  Not just investors, but employees, customers, data, the market.  They had the unshakable conviction, but none of the self‑awareness.  And conviction without self‑awareness becomes a liability, not a strength.

What makes this trait so complicated is that the very same intensity, stubbornness, and almost delusional belief that make a founder extraordinary can also make them impossible to support.  You want them to be bold enough to run through walls, but wise enough to hear when everyone is screaming, “Hey, that wall has a cliff behind it.”  You want to give them room to build, to experiment, to be wrong, to find their way. But you also want them to trust you enough to hear you when something feels off.

And as a VC, you can feel when a founder has that balance.  They’re intense but grounded; Confident but not threatened by new information; Opinionated but curious.  They don’t take feedback as criticism, they take it as input.

At Kyber Knight, this trait has become one of the strongest signals we look for.  Not because we want founders who follow direction, but because we want founders who can evolve, adapt, and grow, especially when everything gets hard.  Building a company is a constant storm.  Coachability isn’t about teaching founders what to do; it’s about knowing they won’t shut the door to help when the storm hits.  And I’ve learned that founders who can hold both conviction and openness…those are the ones who tend to build companies that last.

Judy: Has being an Asian VC shaped your experience in the industry? Any unique challenges?

Linus: This is a question I’ve thought about a lot, not because I’ve personally felt barriers in the industry, but because the cultural lens I grew up with has influenced me in ways I didn’t fully understand until much later in my career.

I grew up in the Bay Area, surrounded by a large Asian American community, so in many ways I had a pretty sheltered experience.  I never felt direct discrimination.  I never felt like I couldn’t break into certain rooms or that people dismissed me because of who I was.  If anything, I’ve been incredibly fortunate, and I want to acknowledge that upfront.  But that doesn’t mean there weren’t challenges.  They just came from a different place.

The real challenges, for me, were cultural - things that were instilled in me long before I ever stepped into venture.  Like a lot of kids with immigrant parents, I grew up with a quiet but powerful message: work hard, get good grades, keep your head down, stay humble, and if you deliver great work, people will notice.  Don’t ask for anything.  Don’t draw attention to yourself.  Don’t make wave.  Let the results speak for you.

And that mindset works in school.  It works in engineering.  It even works in the early days of being a founder.  But in venture capital, it falls apart almost immediately.

In VC, so much of the job requires advocating for yourself.  You’re pitching LPs who back you, not a product.  You’re competing for allocations in great companies.  You’re trying to win deals against firms with bigger names, bigger platforms, bigger everything.  And the founders you want to work with don’t automatically know who you are, so you have to show them your value.  You have to speak up and you have to ask.

I wasn’t raised to do any of that. In fact, I was raised to avoid it.

It became even more obvious when I met my current partner at our previous firm.  He’s South Indian, and culturally, he was raised very differently.  There’s a comfort in speaking up, in asking directly, in advocating for yourself in ways that don’t come naturally to me.  And when you look around the industry, it’s hard not to notice: the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM - they’re overwhelmingly South Asian.  They’re extraordinarily smart, but they also have a different cultural relationship with leadership, visibility, assertiveness.  Seeing that forced me to confront parts of my own conditioning.

It made me realize that some of the challenges I faced weren’t external - they were internal. They were the parts of myself that defaulted to working quietly in the background instead of asking for a seat at the table.  The parts that thought results alone would be enough.  The parts that felt uncomfortable saying, “Here’s what I need,” or “Here’s what I’m great at,” or “Let me tell you why we should be your partners.”

Even today, I still have to push myself to ask for help.  I didn’t grow up seeking mentors, I grew up believing I shouldn’t burden anyone.  But in venture, mentorship is essential.  Community is essential.  You cannot do this alone.  The industry is built on networks, on relationships, on being willing to reach out and say, “Can you help me think through this?”  That was never something I was taught.

When I think about being an Asian VC, it’s less about the industry imposing limitations and more about realizing the limitations I inherited without even knowing it.  And now that I have kids of my own, I’m trying not to pass those same limitations on to them.  I want them to be hardworking and humble, yes - but also confident, expressive, willing to advocate for themselves.  I want them to have the full range.

I’m still working on all of this. I’m learning to be more intentional about how I show up as a leader. I’m figuring out how to build a firm that reflects who I am and who I want to become. And a lot of that work is unlearning things that were baked into me from childhood.

To answer your question: yes, being Asian has shaped my journey in VC but not in the ways people usually assume.  The challenges weren’t about how the industry saw me.  They were about how I saw myself and acknowledging that has been one of the most important steps in growing into the kind of investor as well as the kind of leader I want to be.

Judy: If you weren’t a VC today, what would you be doing?

Linus: I think about this more often than I’d like to admit.  Part of it is curiosity, and part of it is that being a VC keeps me so close to early ideas that I can’t help imagining what I’d build if I stepped back into the founder seat.  And the honest answer is that if I weren’t doing venture, I’d almost certainly be building something again.

I spent the first 15 years of my career as a founder before I ever entered venture.  It’s the world I know best: the pressure, the chaos, the sense of possibility.  Right now, with the tools we have, it feels like the best time in history to start a company.  It has never been easier, faster, or cheaper to build.  Entire categories that were off‑limits even a few years ago are now accessible to anyone with insight and conviction.  You don’t need a huge engineering team anymore.  You don’t need massive infrastructure.  You just need a problem worth solving and the willingness to go deep.

If I weren’t a VC, I’d probably be doing exactly that - finding a pain point that technology has finally caught up to and trying to solve it.  Every week I meet founders who remind me of what it felt like to be in that stage of my life, and a part of me still lights up every time I see a product that didn’t exist the week before.

But there’s another part of me that’s been thinking about something much bigger, and much more personal.  As a parent, I spend a lot of time wondering what the world will look like when my kids are older, and what skills will truly matter. When I compare what they’re being taught in school today to the pace of technological change, I find myself questioning what “education” even means anymore.  Do we emphasize math and physics the way we used to?  Or should we be focused on resilience, creativity, communication, EQ - skills that AI can’t replicate?

I don’t have the answers yet, but I’m deeply curious. And if I weren’t doing venture, I could imagine myself diving into that space, rethinking how we prepare kids for a world that will look nothing like the one we grew up in.  Because the next generation isn’t just going to interact with technology; they’re going to live inside a world shaped by it.

For now, though, I’m exactly where I want to be.  Venture gives me the best of both worlds.  I get to stay close to the frontier, work with founders who inspire me, and learn every single day.  After this call, I’ll probably spend some time exploring new video‑generation tools or speech‑to‑animation models or whatever came out this weekend.  That’s the beauty of this moment - there’s always something new to explore.