Profile
The VC who earns his intuition one scar at a time
The fund manager who becomes a General Partner before 35 is usually the one who started earlier than everyone else and stayed later than they should have. David Cheng fits that shape. In April 2026, he joined Costanoa Ventures as General Partner after nine years at DCM - an arc that started with a LinkedIn cold-message in 2014 and ended with him becoming one of the firm's youngest-ever Partners. Along the way: three portfolio companies either acquired or valued above $1 billion, a Forbes 30 Under 30 badge at 26, and a Notion document called his "Investor Manual" that founders can read before they even request a meeting.
Before all that, there was a K-BBQ food truck in New York City. Cheng was an early employee there - a detail that says something about the range of environments he moves through comfortably. He graduated from Wharton cum laude with Dean's List honors every semester, then walked straight into venture, an unusual path even for Wharton grads. Most consultants spend years doing strategy before getting anywhere near a cap table. Cheng went directly to DCM's Menlo Park office as an Associate, and four years later he was the youngest VP in the firm's 30-year history.
"Be willing to go down with the entrepreneur if things go south."
- David Cheng, on founder commitment
The promotion wasn't a courtesy title. At 26, Cheng was already running his own deals, sitting on boards, and thinking about categories that the broader market had barely named. In 2020 he wrote a seed check into EvenUp, a startup building AI tools for personal injury law - a vertical so specific that most generalist VCs would have walked out of the pitch. He stayed, joined the board, and watched the company grow to a $2B+ valuation by October 2025 when it raised a $150M Series E led by Bessemer. That's roughly five years from seed to unicorn, with Cheng in the room the entire time.
Brigit followed a similar trajectory. Cheng invested at the seed stage in a financial wellness platform targeting underbanked consumers - another market most Sand Hill Road firms considered too unsexy for the fund. The company hit $100M in annual revenue and was acquired by Upbound Group for up to $460M in early 2025. His board seat at Weekend Health ended when WW International acquired it for $132M in 2023. Three bets, three successful outcomes - each in a category he believed in before the consensus caught up.
In April 2026, Cheng moved to Costanoa Ventures as General Partner. The pull was the firm's BuilderOps model - a dedicated operational support team for portfolio founders that Costanoa created in 2015, a first for the early-stage VC world. "The startup is the customer of VCs," Cheng has said. Costanoa is built on that philosophy. Simultaneously, he co-founded Coreline Ventures with two former DCM colleagues, Osuke Honda and Kenichiro Hara, creating a boutique firm with offices in San Francisco and Tokyo that bridges early-stage investing across US and Japan markets. Running two venture platforms at once is ambitious. For Cheng, it appears to be the point.
His Substack, "Earned Intuition," launched in early 2026 with the tagline: "Scars and signals from a decade of investing in early-stage venture." The newsletter is the thesis made explicit. Cheng's argument, reinforced across his public writing and interviews: the best investors don't start with instinct. They build it from exposure to failure, proximity to founders under pressure, and a willingness to be wrong in public. He documented this early in a Medium piece for Startup Grind, outlining six lessons from his first year in venture. Lesson five: professional grace pays dividends. "Treat entrepreneurs respectfully even when the idea isn't right." Reputation is a long-term asset in a small world, and Cheng plays a long game.
His current investment focus at Costanoa lands in Vertical AI - specifically the kind that enters "weird, analog spaces" that most AI-optimistic investors overlook. EvenUp was a preview of this. The legal industry had not digitized gracefully. EvenUp found the friction point and applied a language model to it. Cheng is looking for more of those gaps: industries where the transformation hasn't yet arrived, where the incumbents are slow, and where the right founding team can own a decade-long position before the market understands what happened. Fintech, cybersecurity, data infrastructure, and healthcare technology all sit within his scope. Bilingual in Chinese and Japanese, he also brings unusual geographic range to US-based deals.
