ZNGA Zynga Inc

Charles "Chase" Coleman, the hedge-fund manager famed for his early bets on startups including Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc., has suffered big losses this year as the technology boom wanes, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Coleman's Tiger Global hedge fund plunged 22% in the first quarter, making it one of the industry's worst performers this year, the people said. The losses amount to more than a billion dollars on paper for Tiger Global's hedge fund, and potentially more for its larger private-equity and venture-capital operation.

The average stock-focused hedge fund was down around 3% through the end of March, according to researcher HFR Inc.

Tiger Global's three largest stock investments—retailer Amazon.com Inc., video-streamer Netflix Inc. and Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com Inc.—are down big this year. They comprised nearly half of its portfolio at the start of the year.

Tiger Global also maintains stakes in private companies that are at risk in a cooling environment for technology startups, such as Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart and transportation service Uber, said people familiar with the situation. And it has a number of less-liquid, or less easily tradable, positions in China, one person said.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that some investors in Flipkart slashed their valuations of the company as much as 23%. Uber's valuation has held mostly steady so far, according to The Wall Street Journal Startup Stock Tracker.

Until this year, Mr. Coleman had one of the more enviable track records in the hedge-fund world.

A former Williams College lacrosse player and a descendant of New York founder Peter Stuyvesant, Mr. Coleman got a job working for hedge-fund veteran Julian Robertson, who was the father of one of his childhood friends. He later struck a deal with Mr. Robertson for financial backing to start his own firm in 2001 in exchange for a cut of fees earned going forward.

Mr. Coleman earned his own reputation on Wall Street with prescient investments in technology companies such as LinkedIn Corp. Tiger Global's hedge fund gained 7% and 17%, respectively, in 2015 and 2014. Since inception, it has produced an average annualized return of more than 20%, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

Over the past year, however, Tiger Global, with $20 billion under management firmwide, has increasingly been concentrating its hedge-fund portfolio in a handful of names. That strategy has proven painful thus far in 2016.

Tiger Global uses leverage, or borrowed money, to nearly double the roughly $6.5 billion in its hedge fund, the person said.

Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 06, 2016 15:05 ET (19:05 GMT)

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