Alumni Spotlight: Adam Choe
Adam Choe (MDI '16) is co-founder and managing partner of Tundra Ventures, a Twin Cities tech-focused venture capital firm. Last month he was the featured speaker at our Beer and Business event at Twin Ignition Startup Garage in Minneapolis, where he received an overwhelming welcome from the TLI students and alumni in attendance.
He's been a tireless booster of TLI and the MDI program, and he was kind enough to talk to us about his background, how he got his start in the VC business and what he sees as the big issues for tech startups these days.
Q: Hi Adam! Can you tell us a little bit about your background, what kind of kid you were?
A: I grew up in a classic first generation Korean-American family. My folks came over in 1980. My brother and I just grew up with traditional ideas of what we do as a career when we got through undergrad and into the workforce. I honestly thought I'd be a doctor or work in a corporate job. When I first got out of school, I went straight into the corporate world, working for places like Nestle Healthcare and St. Jude Medical.
I got my entrepreneurial itch more from my father, who had his own HVAC business for a handful of years back when we were younger, to save up enough money to put a down payment on a house and save up to put the kids through college and things like that. So not necessarily a background in venture-backed startups, but just the whole small business type of entrepreneur.
Q: You did your undergrad work at the U?
A: No, at UW Madison, I did a double major in biology and conservation biology.. I like to say I’m 50% badger, 50% gopher. I did my master's and research fellowships at the U of M.
Q: What were you hoping to do in corporate America at the time with the biology degree?
A: At that time I was thinking of pre-med into med school, but after graduation enjoyed just working for a living instead of working for an education. So what I thought would be a one year, just make some money and then reassess, turned into just never looking back. So that wasn't my original intent.
Q: Was it difficult for you then, diving into the corporate world out of college?
A: After about six years, I realized that it just really wasn't for me; it wasn’t something I fit in well with. I often got bored after learning to do something, which led to frustration. And so took that as an opportunity to go back to the University of Minnesota in, I believe that was 2015. I did a TLI program there, the Medical Device Innovation program.
I got to know some of the professors who were teaching and built relationships with many of them. One of the professors in that program also was the director of the Medical Device Center Innovation Fellows program. He had someone drop out at the last minute, he knew that I was interested in the program, and I threw my name in the ring to join in the last hour possible for that incoming cohort. So that was from 2016 to 2017, I believe.
Then I had a chance to work for a startup accelerator in town called Generator. Through that process, I worked in early-stage startups as a coach. I worked through early-stage startups as a researcher, and I worked through early-stage startups as a founder of a healthcare startup that spun out of the University of Minnesota at the end of 2017.
Trial by fire wasn't something that I planned on doing. I never anticipated being in venture capital in my late thirties here. It just worked out serendipitously, I learned always to be open to new opportunities and to say yes, even when I wasn't quite in my comfort zone. That kind of hypercharged my ability to get to where I am today.
Q: What made you turn to TLI as opposed to another program? What was it that lured you in?
A: I was excited about the fact that it wasn't a full-time program where I had to go to school during the day. I could continue working. I also appreciated that I could get it compressed into one year.
Most importantly, I wasn't necessarily looking for a straight business major, and I wasn't necessarily looking for a straight engineering master's either. The MDI program offered a good hybrid that would allow me to have both feet on both sides of the line and keep it more flexible in terms of what I could do afterward. And so I think that's kind of why it was appealing. MBA programs can sometimes feel like a dime a dozen, but this one was a little bit unique and I've always been someone that's willing to try something new. And I think I was part of the second cohort, so it was still pretty new in the program's existence.
Q: What was it that stands out in your memory about that program? What kind of set that apart for you or what was surprising?
A: I liked the size of the program. There were fewer than 20 of us in the cohort. So even today, I'm still close with a handful of the people who went through my year. I also liked the fact that the professors, for the most part, weren't strictly just academics. They had relevant, real-world experience, not dated by 20, or 30 years. And so, for those two reasons, I think just the amount of network growth and the amount of relevant experience that was transferred in a short amount of time was appealing.
Q: Where did you go after graduating from TLI in 2016?
A: I quit the corporate role to go full-time with the medical device center innovation fellowship. So then in parallel to that, I was working as an associate/program director for Generator. And then after my fellowship ended, I became the managing director of the Generator Minnesota office.
Q: What was the thinking behind Tundra Ventures?
There are three reasons why it made sense to start a venture fund. One, the partners that approached me to join them were phenomenal people, and I enjoyed working with them. We'd worked prior together in a different manner at a different organization. Two, I felt like my knowledge of what I had learned from being a bootstrap founder and recently being an accelerator managing director was relevant now – not 10 or 20 years from now.
I knew that the knowledge I had accrued was most beneficial immediately, not after I spent another 20 years holding onto it, trying to start another company, and then trying to pass it on. We all know that starting a business in 1980 vastly differed from 1990 to 2000 to 2010.
And so I felt like there was a huge disconnect between people writing checks and giving advice and their ability to have advice that hasn't expired yet. If there were any time to do it, it would be now. And I truly felt passionate about finding companies that need investment not just to grow, but also to survive.
And so understanding that we can target companies that have a phenomenal opportunity and then give them the capital to figure out where they need to go next to hit their next milestones and grow. So that's kind of how I got to Tundra Ventures.
Q: What do you think investors could be doing better in this space?
A: Broadly speaking, founders generally feel like investors don't necessarily have the proper empathy toward them, especially if they're investors that don't have a similar background of having had to start a company on their own. Maybe they had a different corporate or career upbringing than the entrepreneur does. So I'd say that disconnect and empathy.
I think often, VCs are hard to get connected with. It's kind of a black hole if you reach out, whether or not you'll get an answerback. And so, for many entrepreneurs, it's a little bit of a mystery industry. How do you break in? How do you stand out? How do you succeed in raising money? And so I have all of those wounds from being a founder.
I try my best to be empathetic and remind myself every day what I hate about the process and try to do the opposite of that process.
No industry is perfect. VC is a very hard space because everybody is asking you for money, and you have to be good with your time as an investor. But at the same time, that deal that I might pass on might be the one that turns into the next unicorn company. And so you have to find kind of the balance of how do you make sure you look under every stone, but also make sure that you don't burn yourself out because that's a never ending game.
Q: What would you say to someone thinking about the MDI program? What do you think it would bring to the table for them?
If you're uncertain about your career trajectory or if you're often feeling unfulfilled in your career currently, it's a great place to reassess which path you want to take.
When I joined, I was in the more clinical quality regulatory side of medical device companies. Looking back, I ultimately went to the other side of the color wheel. I went furthest upstream. A lot of the stuff I was working on during my corporate days was furthest downstream, so products that were already approved in the marketplace. Then I went to the complete other side of it, which was the idea stage. I might never have known that the world existed in the way it did had I not had a chance to go into a program where they ask you to think differently than what you might do in a traditional corporate environment. I can't speak for every program, but that's what I got out of that MDI program when I was there.