Hyphen Capital was founded and led by Dave Lu. Dave is a Silicon Valley veteran and started his career in tech at Yahoo! in the late 90s. He sat around the corner from Jerry Yang, an entrepreneurial inspiration for many Asian Americans including himself. He went on to work at other iconic technology companies including Apple, eBay and Cisco before starting his first company Fanpop in 2005. After growing the company to 40 million unique users, he went on to start his second company Pared. Pared is a labor marketplace for the restaurant industry and has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg and The Washington Post.
Dave is a proud Taiwanese American and has always been passionate about Asian American issues. Most recently, he led
the effort to take a stand against the rise in Asian hate crimes by publishing
an open letter in the Wall Street Journal and rallying thousands of leaders to sign in support including President George Bush, Andre Iguodala, and CEOs of Google, LinkedIn, Foot Locker and hundreds of others. Dave sensed a lack of community for founders of East and Southeast Asian descent and started Asian American Founders Circle in 2011. Inspired by his fellow founders, he wanted to do more for the next generation and pay it forward by investing in them. Thus
Hyphen Capital was born.