Shawn Tsao

Shawn Tsao is a Chinese-American entrepreneur and investor who grew up in the Los Angeles area and graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011 with a BA in Architecture and a minor in Sustainable Design. During his senior year he co-founded Munch On Me, a daily-deals startup that went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 (S11) batch.

Tsao is best known as a co-founder and the co-founding COO of Caviar, the premium food-delivery company he launched in early 2012 with four UC Berkeley friends. The team signed up San Francisco restaurants for online delivery and expanded to roughly seven major U.S. cities before selling to Jack Dorsey's Square (now Block) in a 2014 all-stock deal that valued the company at more than $100 million. Caviar was later acquired by DoorDash in 2019 for $410 million.

Since the Caviar exit, Tsao has reinvested his proceeds into food and tech startups as an angel and through Beluga Capital, the San Francisco venture firm he co-founded in 2015 (alongside partners Jason Wang and Richard Din). He is also the founding partner of Umai Hospitality Group, a restaurant group with stakes in franchises such as The Halal Guys and Bonchon, plus local brands like Rooster & Rice, and in 2023 he joined Grishin Robotics as a Senior Advisor focused on food and retail trends.

Beyond investing, Tsao serves on the Board of Trustees of the UC Berkeley Foundation, is an advisor and mentor with Gold House (a nonprofit supporting Asian and Pacific Islander entrepreneurs), and joined the investment group of Oakland soccer club The Town FC in September 2023.

• Invests primarily at pre-seed and seed, typically as an angel or early check writer.
• Deep concentration in food tech, restaurants, and consumer/retail — areas where his Caviar operating experience is directly relevant ("invested and advised in several food-tech startups, restaurants, and numerous other companies").
• Leans on operator credibility: he markets himself as a hands-on advisor who has actually built and scaled a delivery/logistics business, not just a passive capital source.
• Beluga Capital invests mainly in U.S.-based startups across consumer and retail categories.