The Numbers First
Before he ever wrote a term sheet, Jason Kong qualified for the USAMO twice - the national math olympiad that filters to the top 500 high school students in the country. He scored perfectly on both the AMC 8 and AMC 10. His high school civics team won the We the People competition nationally. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Penn's Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology with degrees from both Wharton and Penn Engineering. The pattern wasn't precocity for its own sake. It was a methodology - a way of building conviction from evidence before anyone else has priced in the opportunity.
That methodology has followed him through Morgan Stanley's tech banking desk in Menlo Park, through Institutional Venture Partners where he backed a string of now-iconic companies, and now into Base10 Partners, where he holds the General Partner title and spends his days hunting for the SaaS companies serving the industries that feed, move, and protect the world.
The IVP Years: Where the Conviction Was Built
Kong joined Institutional Venture Partners in 2017. IVP is the kind of firm where the portfolio is a sentence - not a list. Attentive. Brex. Datadog. Discord. Figma. Harness. Niantic. Podium. Slack. UiPath. Kong worked across all of them, sharpening his pattern recognition on what separates a category leader from a well-funded also-ran.
In 2021, Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 list for Venture Capital. That same year, he held Board Observer seats at Monte Carlo and Cribl - two infrastructure companies with the kind of sticky enterprise economics that make an analyst's eyes light up. He'd also accumulated a mental library of what Series B actually looks like when it's going right: fast enterprise sales cycles, demonstrable ROI, and a defensible position against incumbents.
The company's high capital efficiency - being cash-flow positive in December 2024 - stood out in a sector where many players struggle with unit economics.
Jason Kong on Mendel's $35M Series B, 2025From IVP to the Real Economy
After IVP, Kong spent time at SurgoCap Partners, where his portfolio included Snyk, Abnormal Security, Figma, Superhuman, and Prisma. By 2023, he had a specific hypothesis about where the next wave of durable software value would be created - not in the well-trodden consumer and enterprise tech categories that every Sandhill Road firm is fighting over, but in the massive traditional industries that automation had barely touched.
He joined Base10 Partners as General Partner. The firm's thesis is specific: back founders who are bringing automation to the "real economy" - logistics, food service, healthcare, retail, construction, transportation. Sectors where the incumbents are bloated with legacy software, the customers are sticky by necessity, and the switching costs are real. Base10 calls this solving problems for "the 99%" - the broad population that never benefited from the last wave of tech-focused SaaS.
How Kong Evaluates a Series B Bet
Cash-flow positive metrics signal real product-market fit, not just funding-fueled growth. Kong looks for companies that earn their way to growth before asking for more capital.
Sub-3-month sales cycles for large enterprise clients prove the product sells itself. Long cycles after Series A often signal a GTM problem that more capital won't solve.
Positioning near core record-keeping systems creates defensibility. Displacing legacy solutions like SAP Concur means winning the system of record, not just a point tool.
The Portfolio in Practice
Two deals tell the story clearly.
In March 2024, Base10 led a $50 million Series B for Todyl, a cybersecurity platform targeting the small and medium business market. Kong joined the board. His framing of the investment was precise: Todyl had positioned itself as a credible alternative to incumbents in a segment - SMB cybersecurity - that the market had largely written off as too fragmented to defend. He compared its trajectory to Palo Alto Networks, but for a customer base that CrowdStrike had never prioritized.
Todyl has demonstrated that it is becoming a meaningful and serious alternative to some of the incumbents in the space. The company's growth and vision has reminded us of Palo Alto Networks, but for an SMB segment that's been largely ignored by the cybersecurity market up until this point.
Jason Kong on Todyl's $50M Series B, 2024A year later, in March 2025, Kong led Base10's $35 million Series B for Mendel, a Mexico City-based enterprise spend and travel management platform targeting Latin American companies. The pitch: Mendel was taking the category that Ramp and Brex built for US tech companies and bringing it to the large enterprises of Latin America that were still running on SAP Concur. Its competitive edge wasn't features - it was execution. Mendel closed 3,000+ employee enterprises in under three months. It turned cash-flow positive in December 2024.
Kong put it plainly in TechCrunch: "Mendel's ability to replace legacy solutions like SAP Concur and win large enterprise customers at a fast sales velocity (sub-3 months for 3,000+ employee enterprises) demonstrated clear product-market fit."
The Portfolio He Built at IVP
Before Base10, Kong's fingerprints were on some of the most consequential bets of the late 2010s and early 2020s at IVP:
Highlighted: companies that shaped a decade of enterprise tech
The Firm Behind the GP Title
Base10 Partners is not a typical growth equity fund. It was founded with a specific civic intention: donate 50% of all carried interest profits to fund scholarships for students at HBCUs and underfunded colleges. That commitment isn't marketing. It's structural. Kong has been vocal about it because the mission shapes which founders the firm attracts and which problems it's willing to back.
The firm's Advancement Initiative, seeded by this model, targets scholarships for students from underrepresented communities - the same broad population that the firm's portfolio companies are building products for. The idea is that the investment strategy and the social mission reinforce each other: funding founders who build for the 99% generates returns that fund the next generation of founders from the 99%.
The Advancement Initiative
Base10 donates 50% of all carried interest profits to fund scholarships at HBCUs and underfunded colleges. It's one of the largest such commitments in venture capital - a structural feature of the fund, not a charitable add-on.
How Kong Thinks About Series B
In a conversation on the "Run the Numbers" podcast, Kong described the Series B market as bifurcated in a way that most investors gloss over. Some companies are racing ahead. Others have stalled. The difference isn't always visible from the outside - both sets of companies have revenue, both have customers, both can show a growth chart. The question is whether the growth is pulling itself forward or being pushed by spending.
His framework has hedge fund DNA in it - not the speculative kind, but the kind that obsesses over unit economics and cash conversion before any narrative is built. He looks for companies that earn their way to the next milestone rather than ones that model their way there. And he has a specific view on ERP adjacency: the companies that position themselves next to core operational systems become harder to displace over time, regardless of the competitive noise above the waterline.
Series B, in his framing, is where the market bifurcates sharply - and where the investors who've been paying attention gain the most edge over those who've been watching the pitch decks.
"He brings hedge fund investing experience into venture capital - a rare combination in a business that often rewards storytelling over spreadsheet discipline."
The Career Timeline
Education
Jerome Fisher Program in M&T, University of Pennsylvania — The most selective dual-degree program at Penn, combining Penn Engineering and Wharton. Kong graduated Summa Cum Laude with an M.S. and B.A.S. in Computer Science plus a B.S. in Economics (concentrations: finance, entrepreneurship, operations). Acceptance rate under 10%.
What Makes Him Different
Most venture investors come from one place: operator, banker, or founder. Kong came through tech investment banking (Morgan Stanley), late-stage VC (IVP), and hedge fund-adjacent investing (SurgoCap) before landing at Base10. That sequence matters. It means he's seen the same company through three different analytical lenses - the financing lens, the growth lens, and the value lens. He knows what a well-structured deal looks like. He knows what growth looks like when it's being manufactured versus when it's being earned. And he's seen enough outcomes to understand the difference between a market that's large and a market that's winnable.
His academic record isn't a footnote. USAMO qualification, AMC perfect scores, We the People national championship - these aren't prestige signals. They're evidence of a working process for solving problems in unfamiliar territory with limited information. That's precisely what Series B investing demands, especially in the unglamorous verticals that Base10 focuses on.