Career Spotlight
Brian Laung Aoaeh ’01 is on the hunt for people with innovative solutions.
Learning is a big part of what Brian Laung Aoaeh does. An early-stage venture capitalist, Aoaeh is a partner at KEC Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund that invests in technology startups. To succeed as a venture capitalist, he said, you have to be comfortable with the unknown.
“I spend about half of my time trying to find startup founders who are solving problems I believe will transform their markets in a big way if they succeed,” Aoaeh said. “It is my job to discover them before others do, and to do the work that leads to an investment by KEC Ventures before other early-stage investors and the media discover them, too.”
KEC Ventures’ investment portfolio includes companies like Tinybop, which develops educational apps to help curious kids around the world dive deep into big ideas; JustFab, which offers users a personalized shopping experience with style advice and outfit recommendations from fashion consultants; and Reonomy, which provides software that fuses disparate sets of data and empowers users to perform contextual financial analytics in the $13 trillion U.S. commercial real estate market.
Startup founders tend to need help building their companies, Aoaeh said, so the team at KEC Ventures helps them think through everything from bringing on new hires to building partnerships with larger companies to finding the all-important initial set of customers.
When asked if what he does is akin to what viewers see Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran doing on the popular reality television show “Shark Tank,” Aoaeh laughed.
“That’s one depiction of what we do,” he said, although he admits that his “shark tank” is much more likely to be a New York City coffee shop than a fancy made-for-TV boardroom.
In his spare time, Aoaeh volunteers by helping startups in Africa. He has mentored entrepreneurs-in-training at Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology in Ghana and used to be a columnist for the technology-focused Tekedia, where he wrote about issues relevant to African technology and software entrepreneurs. He also provides pro bono advice to startup founders entering competitions for funding. He helped two founders win pitch competitions—the 2014 “She Leads Africa” and the 2015 “Demo Africa”—after initially meeting each of them for coffee in New York City.
