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Shawn Kung
Seasoned Investor and Experienced Tech Executive
Shawn Kung is an accomplished angel investor and advisor, currently affiliated with ParadeDB. He has over 20 years of experience in enterprise product management, particularly in SaaS applications, data, and infrastructure platforms. His notable career includes leadership roles at Aster Data Systems, which was acquired for $300 million in 2011, and Tenable Security, which went public with a valuation of $3 billion in 2018.13
Education and Background
- Princeton University: Bachelor’s Degree
- Stanford University: Master’s Degree in Management Science and Engineering
- Harvard Business School: Certificate (Honors)
- Beijing Normal University: Study Abroad
Shawn is also an adjunct instructor at Stanford University, teaching a course on software startup formation (BUS 248), where he shares his extensive operational experiences with early-stage founders.1
Contributions and Interests
In addition to his advisory role at ParadeDB, Shawn is a co-founder of GIT1K and has built a substantial network through his community initiatives such as the Founders Club on Slack and Clubhouse, which supports early-stage entrepreneurs.13 His investment interests include seed-stage startups, where he collaborates with other prominent investors like Liz Wessel from First Round Capital.23
Shawn's professional philosophy emphasizes the importance of making strategic choices about what not to pursue in product and customer development, reflecting his deep understanding of startup dynamics.1
Highlights
From an investor perspective, this is great news. Tech corporates need to cut costs to raise profits, a blessing in disguise for the best people to shoot their shot at founding a startup. Also opens up the talent pool for the best startups to hire and bulk up.
Incredible time to be an enterprise software founder!
“Ten years ago, we found just 15 (38%) unicorns building B2B software and services comprising just $55 billion in total value. Workday, ServiceNow, Splunk and Palantir were the most valuable enterprise unicorns at the time.
Today, there are 416 enterprise unicorns — making up around 78% of the list — worth $1.2 trillion and driving 80% of aggregate value (versus 20% in 2013).”
#saas #b2b #enterprise #software #genai #ai #unicorn #startup #founder
