Ping joined in 2004 and focuses on investing in business software applications, cloud-native technology platforms, and cybersecurity companies. Before Accel, he worked at Juniper Networks as a product line manager and director of corporate development, and started his technology career in Asia with Singapore Telecom and Goldman Sachs Asia's technology practice. He’s from New Jersey and graduated from Harvard and Stanford.
Get to know Ping
What was your first job?
I worked at the local supermarket in high school, at checkout and bagging. It took me all summer to get good enough to work the express lane, which is by far the most stressful job I have ever done. You really need to have grace under pressure - be friendly to lots of angry moms, while checking people out fast, and the supermarket would check daily how accurate you are in counting out change (way harder than it looks!).
Who most inspires you?
Leonardo da Vinci. Always thought it was amazing how one person can be so talented across many disciplines - art, science, engineering, anatomy, etc. His relentless intellectual curiosity enabled him to explore entire fields before others and approach them in a novel way. He really reminds me of our best founders who combine multiple disciplines/experiences in coming up with their distinct groundbreaking ideas. The category-defining companies are really as much art as science.
What is your all-time favorite movie, TV show, OR book?
Moneyball. Although it's not about soccer (my favorite sport!), I love how it used data-driven decision making to challenge conventional wisdom. It wasn't as much saying data has all the answers but how data can we be used to break away from traditional, outdated thinking. How to leverage data is going to be the core of AI. Also, Moneyball took a long time to play out - it wasn't obvious at first, but the team had conviction and stuck with it (and now everyone else is copying them). Kinda sad A's had to leave Oakland!
What is your most used emoji, gif, or meme?
:) I'm old school.
