Youbi’s Li Gong is an exception to the rule

(This story is the first in Capital.com’s new weekly feature Women on Crypto. Stories will profile the relatively few women leading companies in the male-dominated cryptocurrency sector. This week’s story is about Li Gong, a partner with venture capital firm Youbi Capital.)

Meet Li Gong: An exception to the rule about women in crypto.

Gong is a partner with venture capital firm Youbi Capital. She is among the relatively few women who play an active role in the company’s investments and leadership. Most other companies’ central decisions are usually taken exclusively by men.

DOT to USD

The face of Youbi

“I’m the face of Youbi,” she told Capital.com. “I’m the one who will find deals and do the usual resources for the firm. Basically, I work as a scout.

“I’m the one who goes out and looks for good projects. I usually want to be the first person a project [developer] spoke with in our company. And I also participate in the investment decision-making process.

But I would say that my main role is more relationship-driven in our company.”

Li Gong, Partner, Youbi Capital (Photo courtesy of Li Gong)

Gong has been working with crypto since 2017, when she “fell down this rabbit hole” through her friendship with two classmates from Fudan University in Shanghai, including CEO Chen Li.

Gong, Chen Li and the other classmate studied chemistry in college in China, and she also earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Michigan and worked in the automotive industry.

The other classmate started a successful bitcoin mining business in China.

ICO boom

When an initial coin offering boom occurred in 2017, the other classmate asked Gong and Chen Li to help him periodically.

“We worked as a small investment group,” she said.

When Gong’s family moved to San Francisco Bay from Detroit in 2018, she joined Youbi full-time. Gong, who has less technical expertise than Chen Li, said she entered the crypto industry at a “perfect time” because most projects were “just based on paper and ideas” and very little technical due diligence could be done.

Comfortable learning curve

“So my learning curve [was] very comfortable at first, and after four years, right now in the industry, you actually have more material to read and study when you start looking at a project,” she said. “[You’re] not limited to the technical side.

“You have a lot of things to look at on the business side in terms of, say, revenue models or even revenue projections, which didn’t exist back in 2017,” she said.

Youbi has focused its investments on the infrastructure side of the crypto sector.

The company has invested heavily in tier-one, or public, blockchain projects and their cryptocurrencies, such as polka dot (DOT), avalanche (AVAX) and FLOW, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the Yield Guild Games, a game to – Earn crypto gaming guild that supports the YGG coin.

She said Youbi is most proud of DeBank, which provides investors with a dashboard that tracks decentralized finance (DeFi) portfolios.

YGG to USD

The company is looking for missing pieces

“Recently we’ve been more concerned with social buying sectors,” she said. “We are trying to find the missing pieces in the industry. For example, the last deal we closed is a decentralized one [identification] and key management solution.

Fortunately, she said, Youbi has “just bet on the right sectors.” Youbi also tries to differentiate itself from other VC firms by being among a few pioneers who want to introduce the best Chinese crypto projects to the West. Although the core team is based in the US, it has a “very close connection to the Chinese crypto community.”

According to Gong and other women interviewed by Capital.com, women face a glass ceiling when it comes to advancing in the male-dominated crypto industry.

Crypto’s glass ceiling

“I think it’s kind of a legacy of the tech industry … and has something to do with the very early stage of our industry,” she said. “In the very beginning, you’d see a lot of one-man teams—just one man and their project. And most of the time, it would be a programmer.

“Definitely there are far fewer female programmers in the tech industry. So I think that’s pretty normal [that] you see very few female founders in our industry.

But in the four years I’ve been in the industry, I’ve started to see more women joining the industry, because as the industry matures, so do these projects, so [a company will] became a much larger, larger organization. So it will have different job opportunities and career opportunities.

It will provide the diversity we need.

“The second reason [for fewer women leaders in crypto] is, I believe, somehow based on our genes. I think most women are more risk-averse. So they are a bit reluctant [to get involved] at an early stage of a new industry.”

Gong acknowledged that she is risk-averse, but said she did not feel she was taking a big risk by joining Youbi because of her connections to Chen Li and their classmate. Because she was only allowed to work part-time and her company had to relocate to the Bay Area, the career move happened very naturally and was a “comfortable choice.”

“Good initiative”

Youbi’s small management team actually has more women than men. But she rarely meets women who are founders of other companies. And managers she meets often have a stereotypical view of her.

“They just assume you’re in a business development role,” she said.

Gong already sees “many good initiatives internally from the industry” when it comes to attracting and recruiting more women.

“For example, on the NFT side, which is the hottest topic right now, there [are] art collections and projects focused exclusively on the women’s side,” she said. “So it’s actually really exciting to see that people are actually realizing the importance of women in this industry.

Women-focused DAOs

“And we have some organizations like DAOs [digital autonomous organizations, decentralized collectives that act like companies] study DAOs and social networking events exclusively aimed at women to help them expand their networks and become educated on the Web3 side. It’s actually very good.”

But she would like to see an “external push” to implement environmental and social governance (ESG) principles – “like the traditional world does.”

Gong also serves as a part-time global investment advisor with HashKey Capital, the operator of one of the largest crypto funds in China, which concentrates on digital banking and financial technology (fintech) companies.

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