Benjamin Ling is ranked #5 on the Forbes 2024 Midas Seed List and brings deep operator experience from senior roles at Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Badoo, including Director of Platform at Facebook and COO at Badoo. He founded Bling Capital as a solo general partner in 2018 and has scaled it into a multi-fund platform while maintaining his reputation as an active angel investor with early positions in companies like Airtable and Lyft and over 10 unicorns.

• Focus on specific investment criteria regarding urgent market needs. He explicitly highlights looking for companies solving hair on fire problems with solutions that offer a ten-fold improvement over existing options.
• Critical eye for product design and user experience among tech giants. He frequently critiques Apple for introducing distracting animations and inefficient workflows in iOS updates, and compares Google’s Gemini unfavorably to ChatGPT for being less direct and structured.
• Strong opposition to aggressive antitrust regulation. He uses the blocked Adobe and Figma merger as a primary example of regulators destroying shareholder value and preventing successful business exits.
• Emphasis on professional integrity and reputation in deal-making. He strictly warns against investors who verbally commit to a financing round and then back out at the last minute, viewing it as a bridge-burning action.
• Preference for meritocratic hiring practices over structured diversity initiatives. He expresses the view that talent is universal and does not require specific mandates to find excellence across different backgrounds.
• Frustration with government inefficiency and fiscal waste. He often contrasts the governance of California and San Francisco with more orderly international examples like Singapore, specifically citing issues with public safety and budget mismanagement.