Joyce Chung

Joyce Chung is a Managing Director at Garage Technology Ventures, the Silicon Valley seed-stage firm co-founded by Guy Kawasaki (originally branded "Garage.com"). She joined the firm around 2007 and brings a combined ~20 years of experience — more than a decade in operating roles at technology companies and roughly another decade as an early-stage venture investor. She holds an S.B. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Her operating career began at Cambridge Technology Group/Partners, followed by roles at Sony Corporation and Adobe Systems. She moved into venture capital as a Director at Adobe Ventures, where her portfolio included Vignette (Nasdaq: VIGN), DigitalThink, Digimarc (Nasdaq: DMRC), and Virage. She then became a founding partner (founding Managing Director) of Cardinal Venture Capital, a ~$125M early-stage fund she helped run from roughly 2000 to 2007, where she led investments in Chipcon (acquired by Texas Instruments), Mobilygen, Valista, Zilliant, and Live Capital.

Beyond investing, Chung has been active in the entrepreneurship and women-in-tech communities — involved with the Stanford Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, serving on the board of the Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) as Chair of its Northern California chapter, and sitting on the Executive Council of Astia, an organization supporting women-led high-growth ventures.

In 2023 she pivoted her focus toward philanthropy, co-founding and serving as President of the Makahakama Foundation, a Bay Area family foundation that uses grantmaking and investing to restore and protect nature, support underserved entrepreneurs, and strengthen community resilience.

• Stage: Concentrates on seed and early-stage rounds — the point where a company is turning a differentiated technology into a business.
• Check size: Typically writes ~$500K–$3.0M checks, with a $500K sweet spot for initial seed positions.
• Sectors: Technology-forward and deep-tech themes — IoT, ClimateTech/CleanTech, and SaaS — reflecting Garage's roots backing unique-technology founders.
• What makes her say yes: In Garage's framing, the firm backs "extraordinary entrepreneurs with unique technologies that will define the next era of innovation" — i.e., a proprietary/defensible technology paired with a founder capable of building a category. Her own repeated framing is looking for "the next big thing."
• Approach: Garage is a hands-on, partner-driven seed investor that works closely with founders to "transform their vision into reality," rather than a passive check-writer.