Meet Steven Hong, Serial Entrepreneur (Kumu, Oculii) and Investor

Steven Hong grew up in Ohio in an academic household shaped by engineering and research. His father was a professor of electrical engineering, and much of his childhood unfolded among the families of other professors, in a community that valued curiosity and learning more than ambition or status. For years, he assumed he would follow the same path into academia. Instead, a series of turns, from studying electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan to earning a PhD at Stanford, gradually led him away from the traditional academic track and toward building companies at the frontier of technology.

That shift would define the next decade of his career. Steven first co-founded Kumu to commercialize advanced communications research out of Stanford, then went on to co-found Oculii, an AI software and radar perception company for autonomous systems. After years of building through technical and market challenges, Oculii was acquired by Ambarella in a $400 million transaction, a milestone that underscored his ability to translate deep technical innovation into real-world outcomes. Along the way, he also spent time at Kleiner Perkins, gaining an investor’s perspective that complemented his experience as a founder and operator and gave him a rare vantage point across research, company building, and venture.

In this conversation, Steven reflects on the experiences that shaped him, from growing up in the Midwest as the child of an engineering professor to navigating the highs and lows of building companies from scratch. He speaks candidly about belief, resilience, and the long arc of building something meaningful, and about why, after everything, he has returned once again to the startup world to build.

Sam: Steven, where did you grow up? Where were you born?

Steven: I grew up in Ohio, but I was actually born in Tennessee. My dad was a grad student at the time, so I was born while he was doing his PhD at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. When he got his first faculty job, we moved to Ohio. I think I was about a year and a half or two years old.

All I really remember is Ohio. I grew up there from about age two through eighteen, very much a Midwest kid. A lot of my friends growing up were also children of professors, so we had this really nice little community of great people.

What’s funny is that even though we all grew up in a town called Beavercreek, Ohio, many of my childhood friends have since moved to the Bay Area as well. Our parents were professors at the same school, and over the past few years, a lot of those families ended up out here. So Ohio is where I’m from, but many of my friends are actually nearby these days.

Sam: Take me back to the start. How did your early career begin?

Stephen: I went to the University of Michigan, where I earned a BS in electrical engineering and computer science. It was a real turning point for me.

Growing up, school came easily. I didn’t have to work very hard and assumed things would continue that way. Michigan was where that mindset changed. It’s a great public school, but nothing is handed to you. The opportunities are there if you go after them, and that environment pushed me to become much more intentional about how I worked.

I’d always planned to go to grad school. My dad was a professor, and I originally thought I’d follow a similar path. After graduating, though, I took a short detour. A lot of my friends were recruiting for consulting and banking, and I decided to try it as well.

This was 2009, right after the financial crisis, so it was a tough cycle, but I ended up joining McKinsey. That experience was transformative. I learned how to communicate clearly, work with senior executives, and operate in small, fast-moving teams across different industries.

After about six months, the work started to feel repetitive, and I realized I missed building things. That’s when I decided to return to my original plan and go back to school for a PhD.

Sam: You earned your PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford. How did that work turn into the idea for Kumu?

Steven: My experience at Stanford was where things really came together. I realized pretty quickly that my strength wasn’t just technical depth. It was communication. I wasn’t always the smartest person in the room, but I was good at translating complex ideas into something people could understand.

My advisor, Sachin, was a first-time professor, and I was his first student. I had my own research, but I also became a co-author on many papers because I could help turn technical work into clear writing and strong presentations. That became my niche.

Sachin later became CTO at Intel and now runs the infrastructure group at OpenAI. As a young Stanford professor, there’s an unspoken expectation that you start a company as part of building a tenure case. At some point, he came to me and said we should start a company together. That company became Kumu.

He initially suggested I drop out and do the company full time. I talked to my parents, and they were very clear that I needed to finish the PhD. When I went back and told Sachin, he said, okay, then I’ll graduate you and we’ll start the company. I had enough publications from my first three years. He put me in front of the committee, I defended, and I graduated in three years. I was 23.

Sam: What was Kumu like in the early days?

Steven: Kumu felt like an extension of my PhD. We were commercializing the research I had been doing with Sachin, so it didn’t feel like a break from academia, just the same work in a different form.

At first, I still thought I might return to academia. I spent about a year writing papers and going to conferences alongside building the company. Over time, though, it became clear that my communication and storytelling skills had more leverage inside a startup than in research. That’s when I committed fully.

We initially focused on telecom, working on spectral efficiency for large service providers. Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, and AT&T were investors and partners across multiple rounds. It was a long, grinding journey. By the mid-2010s, I had spent nearly a decade on Kumu if you include the PhD years.

Around 2015 or 2016, momentum began to slow. Telecom is a difficult market. It’s conservative, capital intensive, and not very acquisitive. Around the time I left, Kumu pivoted toward defense, which is where the company ultimately found its path. 

For me, it felt like the right moment to move on. That transition eventually led to Kleiner and then Oculii.

Sam: After Kumu, you went on to co-found Oculii, which was later acquired by Ambarella for $400M. Tell me more about that phase in your life

Steven: Oculii is a company I founded with my father, based on his research. We were developing next-generation radar and sensor fusion perception systems for autonomous systems, especially automotive. The goal was to use software and signal processing to dramatically improve the resolution, range, and accuracy of existing sensors, allowing vehicles to perceive the physical world in much greater detail.

That period of building Oculii was intense and honestly very formative. Oculii came out of a pretty messy overlap between a lot of things in my life. I was still deeply involved with Kumu, I was helping my father commercialize his research, and at the same time I had joined Kleiner as a VC. I thought I could juggle all of it, and for a while I did, but it eventually forced some very hard decisions.

The early Oculii phase was brutal. We had a near-acquisition fall apart after signing an LOI, which taught me a painful lesson about leverage and negotiation. Once you sign an LOI without everything locked down, your leverage is gone. That dragged on for over a year, drained the company, and put us in a position where we were close to running out of cash. That was probably the lowest point. I felt a lot of responsibility for the team and for my dad, and it forced me to step back in and do whatever was necessary to keep the company alive.

During that time, I was effectively doing two jobs. I was full time at Kleiner during the day and helping run Oculii at night and early in the morning. There were stretches where I was working almost nonstop for a year and a half. That period taught me what it really means to operate without leverage. When you have no money and no margin for error, you cannot delegate. You just have to execute.

Eventually, the work paid off. Spending time closely with a Tier 1 automotive partner gave us a much clearer understanding of what OEMs actually needed. We redesigned the product, shrank the form factor, and refined the story around our AI Software Platform. When we went back out to raise capital, it finally resonated. We closed a Series A at the end of 2017, and that was a real turning point. In 2021, we sold Oculii to Ambarella in a great outcome for everyone.

Looking back, that phase was exhausting, humbling, and incredibly educational. It reinforced that relationships matter enormously, that belief compounds over time, and that early momentum is everything. The Ambarella acquisition was the outcome people see, but the real story of that chapter was about surviving the hard years, learning how to lead under pressure, and committing fully when it mattered most.

Sam: I saw that you’re working on a new startup, can you share anything about your new company? 

Steven: It’s still early so I can’t disclose too much yet - but broadly we’re building next generation AI infrastructure, specifically around inference for agentic reasoning at scale. As AI Agents become more autonomous and their workflows become deeper and more stateful, the way we manage context, memory, and compute start to matter more than the models themselves, and most existing infrastructure wasn’t designed for that world. Across Stanford, Kumu, Oculii, and later at Ambarella, a big part of my work was making high performance AI systems work reliably and efficiently in highly constrained environments, and my time at Kleiner gave me a broader view into how those AI applications actually get to scale across various verticals. This company is a much more ambitious continuation of all of those arcs. It’s a problem I’m deeply excited about and it feels good to be back in the startup world building again.

Sam: What lesson would you give people who look to you as a role model?

Steven: It sounds cheesy, but it’s something I tell my son all the time because I had to learn it myself. If you believe you can do something or you believe you can’t, either way you’re usually right.

Belief shapes action. If you believe in something, you put in the work, even when progress is slow or unclear. That momentum compounds over time and eventually leads somewhere positive. On the flip side, if you don’t believe something is possible, you won’t take the steps that give it a chance to happen.

What I’ve learned over my career is that success often comes years after the initial belief. But if you can hold onto that belief long enough and act consistently in line with it, at some point the outcome becomes almost inevitable.

Sam: What were you like as a kid?

Steven: It’s funny, because I have a five-year-old now, and he’s wild. High energy, all over the place, doesn’t always listen, but really kind-hearted. My parents see him and say, he’s just like you.

I don’t remember myself that way. What I remember is loving video games. According to my parents, though, I was enthusiastic and constantly doing different things.

As a kid, I didn’t even know entrepreneurship was an option. I always thought I’d be a professor. I imagined a comfortable life teaching classes, doing research, publishing papers, and spending time with family. I was genuinely excited about that path.

Growing up in Ohio helped with that. It was a very innocent environment from an ambition standpoint. There wasn’t pressure to chase big outcomes, and in some ways that gave me space to grow without expectations.

Sam: What’s the most Asian thing you do?

Steven: I have a money tree. I’ve had it for about ten or eleven years. When I got it, it was tiny, but I’ve always taken care of it. I water it, trim it, change the soil, and every Chinese New Year we hang decorations on it.

Now it’s a big tree, and I love that it’s grown alongside my career. Symbolically, it feels like it represents our family’s growth and stability over time.