Justin Yue is an Investor at Geodesic Capital, a software growth equity firm with ~$725M AUM. What drew Justin to his current firm was twofold: the fund’s focus on enterprise investing and the team’s value proposition of helping startups with expansion into the Japanese market. Prior to Geodesic, he spent two years in Bank of America’s Technology Investment Banking group, working on IPO and M&A transactions for software and semiconductor businesses. Justin’s foray into the technology industry began with his internship in Corporate Development at SAP in 2018, when he worked on building out market landscapes for AI/ML, data analytics and experience management startups.
Justin was born and raised in Fremont, California and now lives in the Castro District in SF. When he is not busy crunching models in Excel and putting together slide decks, Justin stays active through swimming and soccer and hosts dinner parties for friends at his apartment.
EVCA: Describe a defining moment in your career and how it shaped where you are today.
Justin: A pivotal moment in my career was when I shifted my mindset from striving for perfection to embracing learning. I initially thought that a good investor is someone who knows everything about a particular business or a given industry. However, I quickly realized that this is not possible and that embodying this way of thinking places an unreasonable expectation on myself. Instead, working in investing has pushed me to gather as much information as I can and to revisit my mental framework for decision making. Continually reevaluating this framework requires being flexible, which is why it is challenging; however, I hope that doing so will help me become a more thoughtful investor.
EVCA: What is an emerging technology trend that will have a significant impact on the world in the next decade?
Justin: Cybersecurity is a space that has existed for decades, but is an area that continues to evolve given the proliferation of new enterprise attack vectors. One emerging attack vector that is being compromised—which impacts consumers and enterprises globally—is Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We at Geodesic had the opportunity to invest in a company called Traceable, which is providing a solution to identify APIs within organizations and secure these points of connection. To give a sense of the magnitude of this problem, corporations such as T-Mobile experienced API breaches that compromised millions of customers’ data. As modern enterprises look to protect their corporate assets, there will be an increased need for new cybersecurity solutions to address emerging use cases, be it protecting APIs and beyond.