Starport Capital

Starport Capital

Donald Yang founded Starport Capital Management in Palo Alto in 2011, leveraging dual master’s degrees from USC and Stanford and engineering experience at HP, Oracle, and TSMC. The firm grew out of Yang’s observation that accredited investors with Silicon Valley operating backgrounds wanted a disciplined framework to access late-stage private-company shares — a market he viewed as both structurally opaque and rich with information asymmetry. Starport operates as a secondary-market specialist, acquiring positions in high-growth private technology companies from early employees, angel investors, and existing shareholders. The firm applies an internal five-star framework — measuring Gravity, Momentum, Heat, Trajectory, and Shield — to filter opportunities; this acts as both a sourcing-edge signal to its tech-operator client base and a systematic deal-selection engine. The strategy spans venture-stage and growth companies, with the Starport Growth Fund concentrating on pre-IPO secondary shares and the newer Starport Alpha Fund blending private secondary positions with newly public high-growth stocks. The client roster is concentrated in Silicon Valley, supplemented by a professional network that the firm describes as global in reach. Since inception, the firm reports eight successful exits from twelve active portfolio positions, though individual company names or specific exit events remain undisclosed. No staff count or AUM figure is published. The firm’s website and Yang’s biography point to continued fund launches, including the Alpha Fund, which expanded the mandate beyond a pure secondary focus. Starport’s structural differentiator lies in its client-as-signal model. Instead of institutional LP capital, the firm primarily pools commitments from tech insiders whose own entrepreneurial and engineering networks generate proprietary sourcing. This makes Starport resemble a curated secondary syndicate built on operator due diligence — a model that resists scaling but can, when consistently executed, produce high-quality entry pricing in opaque late-stage rounds.