connor ling
@conconconling
Followers
1K
Following
10K
Statuses
1K
investing in people @neo
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2019
Life update: I’ve moved to SF, declined my offer to @StanfordGSB, and joined @neo as an investor! Before getting into why I’m incredibly bullish on Neo, I want to share my origin story that I’ve largely kept to myself: I grew up in a small town in China, bordering North Korea and Russia. My dad left home at 14 as his family struggled to provide, and my mom used to walk 4 hours a day to school since owning a bike was too much of a luxury. While neither of them went to university, their journey of escaping poverty through hard work inspired me to habitually pursue excellence. A year into high school, I became fascinated with the idea of coming to the U.S. for college and wanted to drop out to carve out this new path. To my surprise, while unsure what it really entailed, my parents supported my decision as they believed I could create my own fate. In the subsequent 2 years, I taught myself the SATs / 10 APs in year 1 and moved to Beijing by myself in year 2 working for 3 nonprofits before coming to Penn – and the rest is history. Life has taken me to places I wouldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, thanks to my 16-year-old self who took a leap of faith and embarked on my own 0-to-1, but even more so to my parents who believed in me early when it wasn’t obvious or easy. I jumped into early-stage investing in 2023, and it quickly became obvious to me that spotting ambitious builders early, truly understanding them on a personal level, and helping them realize their full potential brings me endless energy and joy… and that’s exactly what brought me to @neo. Built on the ethos of investing in people, Neo has 3 deeply interconnected pillars: Neo Scholar, Accelerator, and Seed Fund. Through the Scholar program, Neo invests significant time and resources to help the brightest technical builders in college become tech leaders. Launched in 2017, Neo Scholar has become North America’s most high-signal and rigorously vetted talent community, and a subset of Scholars have founded companies like @cursor_ai, @cognition_labs, and @pika_labs. The 3-year-old Accelerator invests in 20 teams per batch, one batch per year with portco’s like @AnteriorAI, @moment, @Calderaxyz, and @getsapien (@RonNachum introduced me to Neo!). Through the Seed Fund, Neo primarily leads / co-leads (pre)seed rounds into technical teams like @Kalshi, @chaidiscovery, @bluesky, @TrustVanta, @bubble, @cobotco, and @tryramp. As the tech landscape evolves at unprecedented speeds, the only constant in startups is people – @neo is world-class in backing the best people at the earliest stages, and I’m truly excited to amplify this mission in the years to come! With that, I've officially declined the early admission offer I received from the GSB 4 years ago. While the offer has served as a safety net and allowed me to explore freely in the last 4 years, knowing that the best founders always go all in, it’s time for me to do the same at Neo :)
59
5
350
@johncoogan spread rumor that daniel penny is running for governor of greenland and launch a campaign on his behalf charging 4 and 40 on campaign money which comes from daniel penny x greenland collab memecoins
0
0
0
RT @ameyajadhav_: another life update - I’m starting a new position as Investment Intern at @neo! I'll be working on investments/admissio…
0
3
0
0
0
0
deepseek accelerated AGI so much that we are all gonna lose our jobs, my only priority now is to be hot
1
0
1
RT @suzannexie: Know a rising star in VC finance? @neo is looking for its *first* Head of Finance & Ops to shape our finance strategy and l…
0
3
0
1
0
2
@mon__lim the best talent have many options to choose from very hard to find the right cultural / skill / expectation fit you can hire people more easily by lowering your standard in some capacity, but there's no free lunch
5
0
51