Will Tiger Global pivot to potatoes?

Tiger Global’s most recent 13F filing reveals that it has sold its shares in Robinhood, Zoom, and DocuSign, and has taken a $12.8M position in Lamb Weston, which makes frozen potato products. The hedge fund has lost $17B and erased almost two-thirds of its lifetime gains this year.

Why should we care?
Tiger Global’s money in Lamb Weston is relatively small—a puny fraction of the hedge fund’s portfolio—but the investment seems like an effort to counter volatility and inflation affecting its returns. Though Tiger Global won’t pivot to purely potato-related endeavors anytime soon, depending on how the investment shakes out, we might see VCs move away from exclusively funding bluechip projects in favor of more diversified portfolios. To prevent more freefall losses like it’s experienced this year, Tiger and others could transform themselves over time into more generalist funding enterprises, eyeing frozen foods producers with the same eagerness they do cloud-computing platforms or Web3 initiatives. Such a departure could actually lead to more rational markets: allocating capital where it’s demanded, including in less sexy companies like Lamb Weston, bringing fundraising down in the tech sector, leading to smarter and more selective investments in the tech space. With the right cross-pollination, generalist investment could also accelerate tech-driven modernization in space—including frozen food—spawning unexpected but potentially productive innovations.