Mallun Yen is a venture capital investor at Operator Collective who built her career scaling enterprise businesses at Cisco and RPX before co-founding ChIPs, a global nonprofit that grew from seven women heads of IP to over 5,000 members redirecting billions in legal spend toward diverse lawyers. She designed Operator Collective's fund structure to bring 130+ enterprise operators in as limited partners rather than just advisors, creating a community-first investment model that uses the collective's operating experience to help B2B software founders instead of relying on traditional partner-capacity approaches.

• Strong preference for B2B and enterprise software companies that address significant customer pain points. She explicitly encourages early-stage founders building enterprise solutions to reach out and recently celebrated Ramp for hitting major revenue milestones by solving real problems for thousands of customers.
• Investment philosophy centered on the value of operational expertise rather than just financial backing. She promotes the idea that active operators make superior partners because they have current market experience, referencing books like Scaling People that offer tactical guides to company building.
• Advocacy for diversity, equity, and inclusion, particularly regarding women in leadership and wealth creation. She actively discusses expanding access beyond traditional VC networks, sharing content about the growing share of patents filed by women and reframing topics like menopause as a source of professional strength.
• Attention to the transformative impact of AI on software engineering and business infrastructure. Her timeline reflects engagement with industry leaders like Nvidia on AI insights while also maintaining a critical eye on the technology's limitations, such as noting instances where ChatGPT fabricated legal citations.
• Valuation of a collective approach to venture capital where diverse networks intersect to help founders. She frequently credits the multiplier effect that occurs when bringing together executives and operators from different backgrounds to support portfolio companies rather than relying on a single partner's influence.