Christine Kim

Leaping into the unknown

I grew up in the Bay Area but entered the tech world somewhat unexpectedly. I took my first computer science class when I was most of the way through my undergraduate degree at Dartmouth. I’d always thought of computer science as a formulaic skill but was surprised by how creative it was. I was captivated by the thrill you get in finding new ways to solve problems and decided to go deeper. I reconfigured my major to study it. After graduation, I became a software engineer, and then, a product lead at Uber. Five years later, I joined Greylock. With each transition, from student to engineer to operator to investor, I was leaping into the unknown.

For a long time, there was a sense that tech investing was something you did towards the twilight of your career. Firms like Greylock changed that. They realized that younger investors brought fresh points of view and often had a better grasp of how the world is changing. As an investor with a technical background who is from the same generation as many founders, I can relate to them on a deeper level and help them look toward our shared future.

A culture of velocity

Uber’s culture was one of grit and hunger. Our team was encouraged to move at a light speed and ship early and often. We would start iterating on a product immediately after it went live. When our team decided to go after food delivery, we turned around Uber Eats in a matter of weeks, by launching it in the existing ride hailing app. People forget this but we weren’t the first in our market — we just moved the fastest.

That experience has stayed with me. Today, I try to identify founders who have that same hunger, grit, and velocity.

Vertical software 2.0

I am fully dedicated to vertical software and marketplaces. There are still too many industries where the bulk of the workflows has yet to be digitized. Whether it’s manufacturing, healthcare, education, real estate, supply chain, restaurants, legal, insurance, energy and utilities, there’s a huge opportunity to build tools that simplify outdated processes and increase labor productivity. These verticals can also benefit from technologies like embedded payments and new services and marketplaces. And the overall opportunity in vertical software is only going to grow with the rapid adoption of AI.