Conrad Shang stands out for having worked as a founder, operator, VC, and LP, and for leading UTIMCO’s $4 billion venture portfolio before starting Ensemble VC, giving him a rare institutional allocator background most venture investors don’t have. He’s also known for openly separating being a good investor from being a good fund manager, arguing it’s sometimes better to make zero deals for a year than to overpay, and for pairing that judgment with hands-on product management experience at Yammer through its $1 billion acquisition by Microsoft, plus internal software he built at Ensemble to focus more time on strong opportunities—work that has contributed to a #27 ranking on the Kauffman Fund Returner Index and investments in seven unicorns, three of which went public.
About their Fund
Ensemble VC is unusually software-native, with about half its team made up of data scientists and engineers who spent five years building Unity, a platform that ranks startup teams using hundreds of signals and is now also used by outside firms like Draper Associates, Boost, Overmatch, and Wilson Sonsini; the fund invests based on what teams know rather than who they know, puts over 50% of its management fee into this data platform, and reaches out proactively to a small number of high-conviction founders each year, offering a 360 review of leadership teams as companies grow. Based in Texas rather than Silicon Valley, the founding team combines classic venture backgrounds from Kauffman Fellows, Bain Capital Ventures, Norwest, and Correlation Ventures with data science experience from IBM Watson, and it uses talent-flow analysis to spot emerging categories early, as seen in investments like Blueprint, Loti, Saronic, CHAOS, and Manifest, while also aiming to identify people who could become founders and encourage them to start companies.
















.jpeg)







.jpeg)











































































.png)
























































































































.jpeg)









.jpeg)




















































































