It’s American Idol, geek style!

Andrew Chung is a general partner at Khosla Ventures, but he very nearly took a different path: After winning a national Chinese singing contest a few years back, he considered chasing a full-time music career. On Wednesday in San Francisco, Chung will get a chance to show off his pipes as one of seven contestants in Silicon Valley Voice, an American Idol takeoff at the fabled Fillmore Auditorium.

Chung, a couple of Googlers and a handful of other techies are the finalists from a field of more than 50 applicants, winnowed down by the members of Coverflow (who include Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang and Raj Kapoor and dot-com badboy Philip “Pud” Kaplan). Silicon Valley Bank is hosting the shenanigans, with the proceeds going to the charity of the winner’s choice.

The names in the audience may actually be more impressive than those onstage, with Kapoor telling me Elon Musk, Luke Nosek,  Brad Garlinghouse,  Loic Le Meur, Peter Pham,  Ted Wang, George Zachary, Greg Tseng and Evan Williams are among the 800+ who’ve rsvp’d. And the judges include David Hornik (August Capital) and Michael Arrington (CrunchFund).

There’s still room on the waiting list, so if you work in tech, email SVB’s Heidi Bianchi at hbianchi@svb.com.

Peter Delevett (69 Posts)

Peter Delevett covers startups and venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News. He's been a journalist in Silicon Valley since the dot-com daze.