Patrick Chung

While studying for his JD-MBA degree at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, Patrick served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his A.B. degree at Harvard College in Environmental Science and, as a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University, Patrick earned a Master of Science degree. He is a member of both the New York bar and the Massachusetts bar, was an elected director of the Harvard Alumni Association, and is a member of the Committee to Visit Harvard College. Additionally, at the University of Toronto, Patrick also holds the position of Associate of the Creative Destruction Lab.

Background

After joining McKinsey, Chung deferred his original acceptance to Harvard’s JD-MBA program in order to launch a startup with a group of friends.
After selling the company, he enrolled in the JD-MBA program. Upon completing that degree, he worked in venture capital.

Location

Patrick Chung works out of Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Remarkable Investments

After Patrick Chung invested in Kensho, the company was acquired by S&P Global, making it the largest AI deal in history. Chung met its founder, Daniel Nadler, at Harvard, where Nadler was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics. Nadler was on track to a career as an academic economist at the Federal Reserve. To make his job easier, he built a new analytical tool that would allow any user to perform sophisticated analyses without having to write a single line of code. Chung and Nadler helped make Kensho an attractive alternative to the Fed by seeding the company and helping to recruit its earliest employees from Harvard and MIT.

Xfund’s founding investors—NEA, Accel, and Breyer Capital—co-invested alongside him. One of the company’s most important early customers and investors was Marty Chavez, Goldman Sachs’s CFO, who is a Harvard Overseer and a central champion of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences — which helped to create Xfund.

Xfund backs people it calls “liberal arts founders” and Chung says that it is hard to imagine anyone fitting this description better than Nadler. While Xfund was being built, Nadler’s first collection of poems, “Lacunae: 100 Imagined Ancient Love Poems,” was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. Nadler told The New York Times that “poetry teaches you how to build a better search engine because it teaches you how to reflect on the needed balance between expectation, utility and serendipity…. Those are the things I am working at, as a poet and as a human.”

Xfund has been enjoying the legacy of its longstanding relationship with Kensho in a variety of ways. Its portfolio company, Synapse, was founded by one of Kensho’s earliest engineers. Xfund has been evaluating another company founded by a different Kensho employee as well. Chung says that he hopes this will be one of many powerful Xfund flywheels.

In addition to Kensho, Patrick Chung was one of the first investors in Segment (acquired by Twilio), Plaid (almost acquired by Visa), Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn), Loopt (acquired by Green Dot), GoodGuide (acquired by Underwriters Laboratories), Ravel Law (acquired by Lexis-Nexis), Xfire (acquired by Viacom), and Xoom (NASDAQ: XOOM).

Latest News

In September 2020, Xfund announced its newest investment vehicle, Xfund 3—a collaboration with some of the world’s top universities in a partnership that has spanned nearly 10 years. The team has already begun making investments from the new fund.