How Investor Jasper Lau Built His Career in VC With a Facebook Message

• Jasper Lau, 26, is the managing partner of 8090 Partners, a growth-stage investment fund. 
• He first met FiscalNote’s Tim Hwang when he was only 15 after sending him a cold Facebook message.
• Here’s how that cold reach out changed the course of Lau’s career and helped him break into venture.

When Jasper Lau, a high-school student at the time, first reached out to the startup founder Tim Hwang, he had no idea that one message would eventually change the course of his career. 

Now, the 27-year-old cofounder and managing director of 8090 Partners is no stranger to investing in hot startups, including the 30-year-old Hwang’s data-management startup FiscalNote, which went public in a $1.3 billion offering via a merger with a special-purpose-acquisition company on the New York Stock Exchange this August. 

In many respects, Lau is a rising star in investing, keeping a low profile while having backed hot startups like the green-energy company Quaise Energy and the Bill Gates-backed AI-supercomputing startup Luminous Computing. 

But before he ran investments for his billionaire-backed family office and worked in venture capital, Lau hustled to forge relationships that would serve him throughout his investing career. His story shows how with the right balance of risk-taking, loyalty, and hustle, any dedicated entrepreneur can succeed in venture capital. 

A fortuitous Facebook message

In 2011, Lau was in high school trying to make it into a top college as the son of immigrants. Starting in middle school, he attended private school at a high cost to his family. “My parents scraped together all they had to get me to go there and I was aware that I was the poorest kid there,” Lau said. “I felt this need to break out of my socio-economic situation.”

Lau started looking for any way he could earn extra income, including DJing his friends’ parties in high school and watching investor-guide videos on YouTube for advice. One day, he began his research by searching “Asian American Entrepreneur,” and came across a video of Tim Hwang, who was then a student at Princeton, giving a speech about starting businesses and how he approaches being an entrepreneur.

Hwang immediately impressed Lau. “I realized this guy is going to be a billionaire one day,” he said. After commenting on the video and not hearing a response, he got up the courage to reach out to Hwang via Facebook Messenger. “I told him, ‘I saw your video and I really admire your work, would love to connect.'”

The two started talking, and Hwang invited Lau to come work with his nonprofit organization National Youth Association, which helped young people lobby for progressive change in Washington. He quickly signed on as a senior vice president for events and programs, and the two hosted a panel with policy leaders while he was still in high school.

A start in venture

Lau later went off to college, where he pursued tech and startup investing, and the two lost touch for a few years. In 2017, Lau took an unpaid internship at Lumia Capital, a VC fund out of San Francisco, to help the firm source new deals. He quickly moved up from an intern to an investor after sourcing “nearly 50 deals a week,” he said. That same year, Lau had introduced the partners at Lumia to his old friend Hwang, and Lau ended up writing a $22 million check for FiscalNote’s Series D round.  That one check returned an increase of three times in value to Lau, sparking a lucrative ongoing partnership. 

After 2018, Lau left for other venture firms, including starting his own family office and fund, 8090 Partners, in 2020, with $200 million in assets from several billionaire families under management.  But every year, he continued to back FiscalNote and Hwang whenever the team needed capital, whether for general operations or to help with acquisitions in smaller follow-on rounds. Hwang even invited Lau to join the board of FiscalNote.

“When our team faced challenges, Jasper was one of my first phone calls, and he almost always had a solution,” Hwang told Insider. 

An IPO ending

When FiscalNote reached an IPO via SPAC last month, Hwang invited Lau and his parents to attend the ceremony for all the work they had done together. The event was deeply moving for his parents, Lau said.

“I could see them crying, so excited, even though I wasn’t the big man of the show it was so important to bring them there,” he told Insider.  “I made this connection at 15, and now Hwang is the youngest Asian-American CEO of a public company today.”

Lau credits his success in venture to Hwang, and advises any young people who want to break into venture to prioritize their key relationships as early as they can. “Relationships are the bedrock of business, but in venture it’s a closed-door type of industry, so you have to have the right relationships to get your foot in the door,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Tim, I wouldn’t have been able to build — he’s one of the spiders in the center of this web of relationships.”