The 2025 Sohn Hong Kong Conference is coming up on May 30 at the Asia Society, and we're featuring a series of speakers at this year's conference. Jay Kahn, founder and managing partner at Tiger grandcub Flight Deck Capital, has spoken at Sohn San Francisco a few times and at Sohn Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of course, he's been familiar with the Sohn conferences for over a decade, as his partner at Tiger cub Light Street Capital, Glen Kacher, participated every year and ardently supported the organization.
Related: See our coverage of the 2025 Sohn New York Conference here.
"I think it's a great organization, obviously supporting a really important cause, and it's a great opportunity to pull folks together and interact and network," Kahn said. "And also exchange ideas and, in the process, generate funds for a great charity."
Kahn founded Flight Deck and started investing there in May 2021. Before founding Flight Deck, he was a partner at Light Street Capital. In fact, Kahn was the first partner outside of founder Glen Kacher, and Light Street was the first Tiger cub on the West Coast focused on technology, media and telecommunications.
The entrepreneurial West
Kahn grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz., which he thinks has been an emerging leader in the technology industry over the last 20 years. Describing the area as "ground zero for replicating Taiwan" in the U.S., Kahn called attention to the construction of TSMC plants in the north.
"I think the West, just in general, is very entrepreneurial and encourages innovation," he added. "……I always gravitated towards the next new thing in technology, I think, growing up there."
Starting at an early age
Kahn has been investing in technology since he was 11 years old, when he bought his first stock. He was running his own portfolio by the time he was 15. Kahn's interest in investing was piqued at a young age from watching his father, who is an avid investor and a doctor.
"He used to come home at night, and he didn't want to talk about what he was doing to people's hearts in the operating room," he explained. "He wanted to talk about the medical devices, the biopharmaceuticals, etc., that he was seeing emerge in the ER and the OR and how he was investing around those. And so he taught me very much from an early age to identify big product cycles and product trends and focus on companies that are solving real and big problems. And ultimately, if they're delighting the consumer, delighting the enterprise, they'll make a lot of money over time."
One of the earliest stocks Kahn bought was Apple, in the 1990s.
"We were fortunate to have an Apple II GS at home when I was in grade school," Kahn said. "Suddenly they started popping up at school too, and students and faculty were captivated by what it could do. I was very young at that point in time but recognized the magic of the product."
Joining Light Street Capital
"I've had the bug for a long time," he said. "… I started my professional career investing in this sector in 2006, when I was at Elevation Partners, which was a late-stage growth equity fund. And while I was there, Elevation made investments in companies like Facebook and Yelp, some of the early internet winners."
After Elevation, he returned to business school at Wharton between 2008 and 2010 and then was introduced to Kacher when he was starting Light Street in San Francisco in 2010. Kahn ran internet, media and consumer strategies globally.
"We were really early to China," he said. "We set up an office in Beijing in 2011, and then I pushed us into Japan and South Korea, Southeast Asia and eventually Latin America. I invested both on the public and private side. There on the private side, I led growth investments into companies like Uber, Spotify, Pinterest, Slack, Toast, Unity [and] SmartHR in Japan."
Founding Flight Deck Capital
That turned out to be a successful endeavor for Kahn, who decided to break off and start his own firm after about 10 years — with the desire to do things a bit differently. Flight Deck is hyper-focused on internet, software, and fintech and invests in Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, and the U.S.
"I think one of the things that's pretty differentiated about us versus other Tiger funds is about half of our exposure is overseas, and this exposure is concentrated in Japan and Latin America, along with China," Kahn added. "And about 20% or 25% is in Japan. 15% is in Latin America, and 20 to 25% is in China [and] Hong Kong."
He focuses on finding high-growth technology companies that will compound at multiples of the market over a long time, both on the public and private sides.
"It's not an accident that so we've done eight privates roughly since launch, and it's not an accident that about half of those are in the roads-less-traveled regions we're focused on in Japan and Latin America," Kahn said.
Key differentiators for Flight Deck Capital
According to Kahn, Flight Deck Capital has some key differentiators from other firms. As mentioned, they're hyper-focused on China, Japan, Korea and Latin America, where they see that trends in internet, software and fintech are in their early days of penetration. About half of Flight Deck's portfolio is invested overseas.
Kahn predicts massive growth in overseas markets for e-commerce. According to him, e-commerce as a percent of retail stands at just 11% in Latin America. In China, it's more than 40% penetrated, while e-commerce penetration is in the high-30% range in the U.S.
"We could see a tripling of e-commerce penetration alone in Japan over the next decade as they start to move through the same trends that we saw here in the United States and China over the last 15, 20 years," Kahn explained. I see it similarly in Latin America. In Latin America, e-commerce as a percent of retail is very low. It's also kind of 10%, 11% but for different reasons as to why it's so low in Japan."
Why Latin America has been slow to ramp
He explained that Latin America has been slow in ramping up the distribution infrastructure needed for e-commerce, and its local postal system was "a mess." However, Kahn said they've largely worked through those issues. Another problem in Latin America has been the lack of a way to pay for things on the internet about 15 years ago.
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