Joseph Kao has been named Partner at Millennium Technology Value Partners. Kao, a longstanding member of the Millennium team, has played an important role and/or led Millennium’s successful investments in Jumio, Spotify (NYSE: SPOT), NetSpend (NASDAQ: NTSP), Green Dot (NYSE: GDOT), Pagaya (NASDAQ: PGY), LegalZoom (NASDAQ: LZ), Populi (sold to Definitive Healthcare; NASDAQ: DH), ID Analytics (sold to LifeLock; NYSE: LOCK) and many others. Earlier in his career, Joe spent time at Credit Suisse in their Technology Mergers and Acquisitions group. He holds degrees from The Wharton School and Stanford University.
“Joe is superbly skilled at the full range of investments and transaction formats our franchise focuses on,” said Sam Schwerin, Managing Partner at Millennium. “From company founding and seed stage all the way through later stage, secondary, recaps and restructurings, debt and equity, going public, post-public monetizations, and even going private, Joe’s leadership skills are excellent and companies and boards across technology sectors seek and respect his advice.”
Schwerin also noted that Millennium expects 2024 and beyond to be a time that will be beneficial for Millennium’s overall franchise directions: deep tech and technology growth equity. “While the large cap public technology markets roared back to life in 2023,” he noted, many other public technology companies still face challenges and private technology companies and venture funds are still seeing a dearth of IPO opportunities, down rounds, and a sluggish strategic M&A market. Numerous startups are still having trouble finding funding for the first time in a long time as investors reassess assumptions.
“If you look at the ups and downs of overall market cycles and venture capital cycles over the last 25 years, these moments are historically the kinds of periods when our franchise has been able to rise to the occasion to help some of the companies that have gone on to become among the greatest names in technology from their generation—companies like Facebook (META), Twitter, Alibaba, and many others,” said Schwerin.
For more information about Millennium, visit www.MTVLP.com.
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