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Update
Talks about Energy Transition, Climatetech and Renewable Energy
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Tsung Xu
Founder
Sunnyvale, California
Overview
Tsung Xu is currently exploring startup ideas, writing, and podcasting, with previous roles as a Venture Partner at Collaborative Fund and Climate Capital. He has a diverse background that includes leadership positions at companies like Uber and experience as a co-founder and CEO in the organic food industry.
Work Experience
Tinkering / building subscale VTOLs
2024 - Current
[v0.2 prototype in 90 days] Designed, built and flew a 3D printed VTOL capable of 130 miles range and 3 hours of endurance: • Almost zero prior CAD, AM or aerodynamic modeling experience. • Predicted vs. actual endurance match ±10 %. • Iterated through 3 crashes and propulsion architectures, countless airframe, avionics + efficiency enhancements. • Clear path to ~4.5 hours endurance and ~200 miles of range by refining propulsive and prop efficiency, lowering form and interference drag. • All built in public — flight test videos have achieved ~350k organic impressions: https://x.com/tsungxu/highlights [v0.1 prototype: start to full transition flights in 100 days] • Built, flew, and iterated my first-ever VTOL (and UAV), starting with zero aerospace background. • Iteratively improved foam airframe rigidity to withstand torsional and rotor-induced loads. • Designed, printed, and tested structural mounts with no prior additive manufacturing experience. • Discovered vertical CG offset (~20% of fuselage height) causing transition inefficiencies, solved in the v0.2 build above. [v0 depth vision obstacle-avoidance avionics stack] • Demonstrated proof-of-concept obstacle avoidance via bounding-box detection. • Integrated OAK-D stereo camera, Jetson Nano, and MAVLink with an OpenCV pipeline. • Open-sourced Python implementation and documented walkthrough: https://github.com/tsungxu/copter-multi-roi-depth
Building and writing
2020 - 2024
Built edtech product beta (React/Next.js, Firestore, Python, Lambdas, etc) and go-to-market. Pivoted to writing about more compelling hard tech. My blog was read by 30k+ people and my tweet threads viewed by 100k+ when I actively posted in 2022. Also had a long covid related hiatus.
Venture Partner
2022 - 2023
Approached by GPs at Climate Capital Bio for role.
Climate Capital is an investment firm that supports companies that directly or indirectly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
Venture Partner
2022 - 2023
Approached by GP for role.
Collaborative Fund is an investment fund that provides funding to companies based on creativity and collaborative consumption.
Special Projects and Research Lead
2017 - 2019
Led product experiments and helped drive strategy across multiple product teams. Ran international field work with exec team from Eats and another company.
Uber develops, markets, and operates a ride-sharing mobile application that allows consumers to submit a trip request.
Raised $30,212,450,000.00 from PayPal.
User Experience Researcher
2016 - 2017
Led research for a new product initiative in a venture-backed (now public) Aussie fintech.
Startup Consultant
2012 - 2016
Consulted for tech startups and agencies on growth, UX, product and business models.
Co-founder and CEO
2008 - 2011
Started in college. Built profitable farm-to-table organic food offering to thousands of customers per month. Led team of five. Responsible for product mix, online/offline design and development, marketing, procurement, business development, merchandising and finance. MVP was a spreadsheet-based grocery delivery service for friends that I started in college.
Co-founder and COO
2009 - 2010
Co-founded DTC grocery business with online ordering. Within 8 months of launch, grew revenues to $500K annual run rate from 1K customers. Led eight person operational team. Company acquired in 2014.