Getting into competitive venture deals is difficult enough when you aren’t a huge name-brand VC, and doing it from another country is even more challenging. Our guest today, Yatong Li is Managing Director at Sixty Degree Capital, a cross-sector firm that invests in software, digital infrastructure, healthcare, and biotech companies across multiple stages as early as Series A and as late as pre-IPO. Yatong talks to us about how he gets into competitive deals and what his view of the market looks like in 2023.
We also have Anthony Mouchantaf joining us for another news rundown covering the biggest news in tech this week.
About Yatong Li:
Yatong Li is the Managing Director of Sixty Degree Capital. He joined in 2017 as an Analyst in the Toronto office and advanced to Managing Director in 2022.
Born in China, Yatong moved to Canada and completed the Master of Finance program at the Schulich School of Business, York University. He graduated from Nanjing Agricultural University with a B.Sc.
Before joining Sixty Degree Capital, Yatong worked at China Securities (SH: 601066) and as an investment banking analyst at China Galaxy Securities (HK: 06881), a state-owned securities firm in Beijing with a market value of $6.3 billion.
In this episode we discuss:
(00:59) News roundup with Anthony Mouchantaf
(16:10) How Yatong got his start in becoming an investor
(17:37) Early investments
(19:01) Sixty Degree Capital’s origin story
(21:54) How Yatong nurtures relationships in Silicon Valley
(23:02) The diligence process at Sixty Degree
(24:35) Building relationships with corporate partners
(25:55) Why he focuses on infrastructure investments
(28:17) Their investment decision process
(29:47) How Yatong’s investing thesis has evolved
(32:30) Sixty Degree’s process of investing
(34:26) How Sixty Degree co-invests
(36:23) How early-stage investments are assessed
(37:38) What the market looks like right now
(39:27) Thoughts on Stripe and others slashing valuation
(41:04) Sixty Degree’s recent investment in DataGrail
(43:44) Fallout from the SVB collapse
(47:03) Biggest lessons learned as an investor
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