Hi! My name is Benjamin Tseng. My clients work with me because of my deep experience in:
- Startup Advisory — I’ve spent 15+ years investing with two cross-border VC firms (DCM and 1955 Capital) in deeptech companies and in leadership / advisory roles at a number of VC-backed startups
- Early Stage Product Management — I’ve taken on product leadership roles at several VC-backed startups including Yik Yak (consumer social), Maximus (telemedicine), Clint Health (health IT), and Stir (creator economy/fintech)
- Market Analysis / Investment Due Diligence — I started my career at Bain doing strategic analysis for Fortune 500 semiconductor and eCommerce clients. I subsequently drove investment due diligence processes at two VC firms where I specialized in deeptech and health tech opportunities.
- AI / ML work — I am a published researcher who’s applied AI/ML methods to electronic medical record data and have also built products powered by NLP and LLMs.
For more about my background, take a look at my CV. For examples of projects I’ve done in the past and am open to taking on, see Types of Client Work below.
If you’re interested in working with me in any of these capacities, please direct inquiries to [mail-at-<thisdomainname.com>].
Types of Client Work
- Expert Technology / Market Analysis
- Conduct market analysis and unit economics assessment as part of a strategic planning or investment due diligence process
- Objectively assess novel technologies and translate findings into business insights through dialogues with technical experts and business / finance stakeholders
- Draw on 15+ years experience as an operator and investor in a wide range of areas including semiconductors, AI/ML, energy, industrials, biotechnology, diagnostics, and healthcare
- Early Stage Product Management & Strategy
- Combine market analysis, unit economics, customer-centered insight generation, and stakeholder input to produce actionable product roadmaps and specifications
- Build product plans that account for operational & regulatory complexity (e.g. past experiences include integration with customer support/ops, integrations with Stripe/Plaid, handling KYC/AML, addressing HIPAA, complying with US telemedicine regulations, sensitivity to consumer privacy, etc)
- Collaborate with engineers, designers, and other stakeholders on
- Rapid prototyping for product discovery
- 0-to-1 new product development and lightweight process creation
- Product improvement pushes to address architecture/strategy issues and expand product reach
- Design and implement metrics systems to enable product teams to understand how their product is being used and how the product is impacting other systems and processes
- Draw on 5+ yrs experience as product leader in multiple VC-backed startups in consumer social, telemedicine, health IT, creator economy, and small business fintech
- Startup Advisory & Strategic Planning
- Work with management to build actionable strategic plans that account for current and expected business activities, future financing needs, likely execution risks, and the need for stakeholder support
- Assist management teams with fundraising strategy from deck creation to cap table & financial modeling to syndicate formation and negotiation
- Plan and execute on market & unit economic analyses that can meaningfully impact company strategy
- Develop initial go-to-market strategies in new market segments and overhaul public web presence to align
- Draw on 15+ years experience on startup executive teams, as a VC investor, and in advisory capacity
- Analytics Setup and Metrics
- Create or overhaul an existing metrics plan to help companies understand their product/business and devise better strategy
- Collaborate with stakeholders to select analytics stacks and implement dashboards to realize a metrics plan
- Execute on bespoke analyses (retention, lifetime value, segmentation, clustering, sentiment analysis, etc.) to answer key strategic and operational questions
- Draw on 5+ yrs experience as product leader in multiple VC-backed startups in consumer social, telemedicine, health IT, creator economy, and small business fintech
- Data Science / Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence
- Leverage ML and deep learning/AI methods to tackle classification and prediction problems, especially those that involve textual data
- Build LLM-powered applications leveraging both publicly available LLMs (i.e. OpenAI’s GPT4) and open source LLMs run on controlled infrastructure (i.e. Llama 2)
- Review literature on particular methods to make a determination / proposal of how it can apply to a set of business problems
- Scrape publicly available datasets / web pages for information to power data products or AI/ML models
- Draw on my experience applying AI/ML methods to data from electronic medical records resulting in poster presentations at academic conferences and publications in leading medical informatics and ophthalmology journals