David Yuan

David Yuan, who often goes by Dave Yuan professionally, is the Founder and Partner of Tidemark, a growth equity firm he launched in 2021 after leaving Technology Crossover Ventures. Tidemark describes itself as a firm built to help companies “win and scale,” with a model that combines capital, ideas, and an operator community.

Before founding Tidemark, Yuan spent about 15 years as a General Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, from 2005 to 2020, and then served as a Senior Advisor to TCV in 2021. Tidemark’s bio says that during his TCV years he helped 25 companies scale and win, with 15 companies going public and 10 acquired. Forbes also named him to the Midas List in 2012 and 2013.

Earlier in his career, Yuan was an investor at Chase Capital Partners / JPMorgan Partners, an early executive at 1stUp, and a strategy consultant at Bain & Company. He received an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

At Tidemark, Yuan currently serves as a board director at AgVend, Karbon, and Nexl, and as a board observer at Kajabi and Onfly. He previously served on the board of Toast from 2019 to 2025 and has held board or observer roles across companies including SiteMinder, LegalZoom, Wealthsimple, ExactTarget, AppNexus, Merkle, Sitecore, and CCC Intelligent Solutions.

• Tidemark invests $20-150M in growth-stage companies and says it backs “the next generation of category leaders.”
• Yuan’s Tidemark launch essay says the firm seeks “category leaders at the confluence and collision of ideas and domains.”
• Tidemark’s vertical SaaS work focuses on companies that become the core workflow or “control point” in an industry, then expand into adjacent products, payments, data, and ecosystem workflows.
• Yuan has repeatedly emphasized long relationship-building before investing. Forbes quoted him saying: “Growth equity investing is all about long engagements.”
• Tidemark’s vertical SaaS thesis favors companies that digitize and automate routine work for mainstream businesses, letting owners focus on higher-value work.
• The firm is especially interested in bootstrapped or capital-efficient companies where founders “don’t need our money but want our help.”
• In AI-era vertical software, Yuan has argued that durable moats still matter, especially control points with workflow gravity, data gravity, and account ownership gravity.