LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 199

Kunal Tandon — El Cap

February 21, 2024

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Kunal Tandon was running a family business importing paper and metal before cold calling his way into venture capital. Previously at Collaborative Fund, Kunal is now investing out of El Cap Fund II with his partner and former NFL player Stewart Bradley.

Full transcript

Today I'm with Kunal Tandon. Kunal is a founding partner at El Cap, where he is investing in early stage B2B tech with his partner Stew Bradley. Prior to El Cap, Kunal was at Collaborative Fund in New York. Kunal, I don't know if you learned it well at Collaborative Fund, but from our interactions, I really appreciate your very unique, sort of, fresh approach to the venture job.

Yeah, many thanks for having me. I think the unique approach, I think Collaborative Fund definitely played a role, but I think it was that I kind of that I arrived to tech later in my career. I think I had this totally different set of experiences and took a really nontraditional path into this industry. And I think like with the benefit of being a little bit older too, got to develop a different perspective.

I spent almost the first nine years of my career working in a small family business in the import export industry brokering paper and metal transactions across Asia and Latin America, and it couldn't be further from being a technical job. It was phone and email and spreadsheets and printing out PDFs and editing them manually and scanning them back in and sending them and dealing with factories that often didn't have computers. But I think also, like, I grew up as a nerdy kid who loved the internet. And I think for the first time in my life, like in my early twenties, I learned that you could work in tech as a career. That was just nothing that was on my radar before.