Tiger Global Management

Most venture capitalists are ambush predators—patient, selective, waiting for the right moment. Tiger Global hunts like a locust swarm: speed, volume, and overwhelming force across every available market.

Chase Coleman III founded Tiger Global in 2001 as a 'Tiger Cub' spun out from Julian Robertson's legendary hedge fund. The insight that defined Tiger's trajectory came when Coleman realized the best growth companies were private. Rather than choose between public and private markets, Tiger built infrastructure to hunt in both—a strategy that resembles salmon migrating between freshwater and ocean, extracting value from each environment.

The numbers reveal the strategy's ambition. Tiger backed 315 startups in 2021 alone—essentially one every day. The portfolio spans 789 companies across 30+ countries. Major wins include JD.com (China's answer to Amazon), Flipkart (sold to Walmart for $16 billion), Spotify, ByteDance, Stripe, and OpenAI. The firm pioneered aggressive growth investing in India, backing nearly half of the country's fintech unicorns.

This r-selection approach—many offspring, rapid deployment, accepting high mortality—generated spectacular returns when capital was cheap and growth abundant. But 2022 exposed the strategy's vulnerability. Tiger's hedge fund dropped 52%; the long-only fund fell 62%. Two-thirds of lifetime gains evaporated in months. The swarm that feasted during abundance faced starvation when conditions shifted.

The 2024 recovery (24% returns) suggests Tiger's adaptive capacity, but the boom-bust pattern is now structural. The firm's source-sink dynamics depend on cheap capital flowing from public markets (source) to private companies (sink). When that flow reverses—as it did in 2022—the entire model strains. Like locusts, Tiger Global thrives in abundance and suffers in scarcity, with no evolutionary pressure toward moderation.