Ken Liu

Ken Liu is a labor-union research professional and pension-fund fiduciary based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies from Yale University (1994) and a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Cultural Anthropology, also from Yale (2003). He began his union career in 2003 as a researcher for Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and its parent international, UNITE HERE.

In 2010 he was promoted to Research Director at Culinary Workers Union Local 226 — the powerful ~60,000-member Las Vegas hospitality union — and around the same time was appointed a trustee of the Culinary & Bartenders 401(k) Plan and the Southern Nevada Culinary & Bartenders Pension Trust. He has since risen to Deputy Research Director at UNITE HERE. As Research Director he is a public-facing voice for the union: for example, on May 3, 2023 he read member testimonies at a Las Vegas City Council meeting and helped announce a pending strike by back-of-house workers at Valley Hospital during a contract dispute.

His investment-relevant role is as a union (labor-side) trustee of the pension fund. Multiemployer plans like this one are governed by a board split between union and employer trustees under the Taft-Hartley framework; trustees have fiduciary responsibility for the plan's assets, hiring and overseeing outside investment managers rather than picking individual startups. The Southern Nevada Culinary and Bartenders Pension Plan was established in 1971 to cover workers under collective bargaining agreements between Southern Nevada hotel/restaurant employers and Culinary Local 226 and Bartenders Local 165.

Effective January 1, 2024, the Southern Nevada fund merged with four other West Coast UNITE HERE pension funds (Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle) to form the Western UNITE HERE and Employers Pension Fund, consolidating administration and, per the fund, broadening investment opportunities. Ken Liu appears among the union-side trustees of this successor fund.

• Institutional, fiduciary-driven — not thesis-driven angel investing. As a union trustee, Liu's "investing" is oversight of a multiemployer pension portfolio managed for plan beneficiaries; assets are "managed by the board of trustees" through professional managers.
• Objective is retirement security, not venture returns. The fund exists to pay defined-benefit pensions to Culinary/Bartenders members, so capital allocation is governed by ERISA fiduciary duties (prudence, diversification), not startup-scale risk appetite.
• Diversified, long-horizon allocation. As an institutional limited partner (the plan is profiled as an LP on PitchBook/Foundersuite), exposure spans public and private markets via external fund managers rather than direct seed checks.
• No verifiable personal angel thesis, check size, or sector focus. No public source shows Ken Liu writing personal seed-stage checks or maintaining a startup portfolio; claims to that effect are not supported.