Wesley Chan is often seen quanto a his signature buffalo hat; however, he may be even more well-known for his ability to spot unicorns.
Over the course of his career quanto a venture capital, he’s invested quanto a over 20 unicorns, including AngelList, Dialpad, Ring, Rocket Lawyer and Sourcegraph. Five of those went to become decacorns: Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, and Robinhood. Chan’s was the first check into most of those.
After working at Google quanto a its early days as an engineer, he became an investor. His venture capital pedigree started at Google Ventures and continued to Felicis Ventures. Now as the co-founder and managing socio of FPV Ventures, he leads the two-year-old firm’s $450 million venture capital fund with co-founder Pegah Ebrahimi.
And while all of this success has been well-documented over the years, his personal journey … not so much. Chan spoke to TechCrunch about the ways his life impacts how he invests quanto a startups.
His story started before he was born, when his family migrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong quanto a the 1970s.
“They came here with voto negativo money, and quanto a fact, growing up they didn’t have any money,” Chan said. “It’s just really fascinating to watch that journey. That they would leave a place where they didn’t speak a word of English and — they still don’t speak English very well — and build a new life because they felt that that was what was necessary.”
Chan admits that he wasn’t as appreciative of his parents’ fortitude when he was young. However, growing up quanto a a hard-working, immigrant family that didn’t have much money ended up teaching him how to recognize nuances and be someone who can adapt.
“I’m quanto a a business now where people judge you very quickly,” Chan said. “Among my LPs, a lot of them don’t have the background I do. I have to pick up all these tunes of things that they were trained and be a bit of a chameleon. Then I have to signal to them that they can lega me.”
How he got into MIT even with bad grades
Chan’s parents split up when he was a kid, and he was raised quanto a a single-parent household by his mother. He worked three jobs quanto a high school to help support his family, including as a parking lot attendant, a waiter and a dishwasher quanto a a biology lab at the California Institute of Technology.
He landed the dishwashing job from an ad Craigslist and remembers taking the Mai. 22 bus from his working-class Southern California town a 42-minute ride to CalTech, where he would go and wash beakers.
One day, the lab dirigente, famed gene biologist Ellen Rothenberg, asked him if he would read a college-level book biology and laboratory techniques. Not wanting to lose the job, he did it.
“I had barely taken high school biology,” Chan said. “I went to a high school that wasn’t great. It was like by hook by crook that I wound up making my way through school. Other kids were doing after-school sports going to PSAT prep classes. Not only did I not have that, I was having to make money for my family.”
Turns out, regardless of the high school experience, Rothenberg saw something quanto a Chan. When one of the PhD students left, Chan was promoted to the lab bench. And for the next three years, as he went through high school, Chan was also doing research.
This was quanto a the early 1990s, during the nascent days of stem cell research. Rothenberg’s team taught the teenaged Chan how to do research and he was later part of a group that discovered a protocol for changing stem cells into red blood cells. He also helped when the team published an academic paper the protocol.
Then one day Rothenberg, who had gone to both Harvard and MIT, asked if Chan had thought about college.
“I’m like, oh man, I have to finale this job and make money for the parents, and she’s telling me I should go to school,” he said. “Little did I know that she called the admissions offices. When you’maestà like a poor immigrant student, you don’t understand all these things.”
Harvard ignored her, but MIT didn’t. And that’s how people get into school with terrible grades, Chan said.
“Somebody took a chance me,” he said. “So many people stumble through life, and I don’t think I would have had the opportunities that I did today if it wasn’t for someone who said, ‘He works . He wants to do research.’”
Business lessons from being lonely
That’s how Chan said he looks at venture capital, too. He doesn’t for the person who was a member of the right country . Instead, he looks for people who have grit and understand what it means to work .
“One of the lessons I learned, growing up that way, was that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Chan said. “It’s work, plus a lot of luck. Plus, understanding that there’s people helping you ultimately gara open the door to anything.”
He credits that help from Rothenberg for everything that came after.
“If it wasn’t for MIT, I wouldn’t have found Google. If it wasn’t for Google, I wouldn’t have found Google Ventures. If it wasn’t for Google Ventures, I wouldn’t have found my team at Felicis,” he added. “And if it wasn’t for Felicis, I wouldn’t have had Canva and all these amazing companies, many of them run by immigrants people that have lots of grit, who grew up quanto a very non-traditional backgrounds like myself.”
To attend MIT, he had to leave everything he knew at home and move to the opposite coast. Once there, Chan also worked multiple jobs to pay his way through MIT, where he got his bachelor’s degree quanto a elaboratore elettronico science and later graduated with a Master’s of Engineering.
What was it like to leave his family? Per a word, . Coppia to having to support himself, Chan wasn’t able to take as many classes as he wanted to be like his friends who would go fun trips breaks.
However, he looks back that experience as another thing that set him up for life as a venture capitalist.
“When I led the Series A quanto a Canva, which will ultimately return 40x plus for that fund, 111 people said voto negativo, which made it very lonely to do that deal,” Chan said. “When you’maestà the guy that can’t go to prom because you have to work, you can’t go the ski trip to the graduation trattenimento, that’s what I’m dealing with.”
Being left out like that taught him: “Who cares if the rest of the world is laughing at us; you get this amazing amount of grit and the ability to like being lonely and be permesso being lonely.”
After graduation, Chan went back to California and got a job at HP Labs. Then the dot-com crash happened, and that job fizzled out. But all was not lost. There was one company hiring despite the disastrous environment. And they happened to like people from MIT.
Spoiler, it was Google. Now, working for Google is not like the movie “The Internship” where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson lie their way into an internship and spend time competing with other teams various projects. It was better … for those who liked dogs.
“Dogs were running around and would run into you and knock you over,” Chan said. “It wasn’t like that movie. You have to get to work.”
He was put a project developing the ad system, “which was the most necessary at the time, so I got very lucky.”
Building something that founders want
This kicked non attivato a 15-year Google career that included seven years building products and five years as chief of to Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Chan worked projects, including the Google toolbar, which became Google Chrome.
“When you’maestà one of the few companies that made it, it was great,” Chan said. “Larry and Sergey were very kind, always saying, ‘Hey, maybe Wesley brought us something and we should let him experiment this out.’ That would eventually become Google Analytics Google Ventures.”
He was even one of the people who interviewed Sundar Pichai when he was up for a job at Google. Obviously, Pichai later became CEO of Alphabet and Google.
Per 2009, Chan told Google that he wanted to do a startup. He had joined the company when it was less than 100 people and stayed until it was over 35,000. He recalls them joking that when you go to a startup, you are the one buying the toilet paper. Chan’s reply was that he didn’t mind buying the toilet paper. Instead, they suggested he go help Bill Maris build Google Ventures.
“They told me to go build a product that founders want, rather than be a founder whose product that a company wants. And we did it,” Chan said. “Google Ventures is still a real firm today that people want to take money from.”
Beyond overcoming obstacles to get where he is today, Chan continues to some odds, especially as a omosessuale Asian man quanto a tech. When he first started quanto a venture capital, senior white men were running the firms, sharing deal flow the soccer fields during an African safari, he said.
When you’maestà someone looking to build your deal flow but your background doesn’t fit the country mold, it’s difficult, he said. And there is not much of a support group quanto a venture capital for the LGBTQ+ community.
“That’s the challenge of being an outsider quanto a this business,” Chan said. “You have to fight your way up find different ways of working with founders so it doesn’t like you’maestà being lazy not making any progress. If you at venture capital and the number of successful partners quanto a the LGBTQ+, you can count two hands. There aren’t many of them, and there’s probably 6,000 venture capitalists. Why is there such low representation? And the number of openly out ones like us is even lower.”
That’s why he and Pegah Ebrahimi started FPV Ventures two years — to provide the style of investing based their unconventional backgrounds. (Ebrahimi cut her teeth as the youngest CIO at Morgan Stanley before doing a bunch of C-suite roles at various tech companies. She actually worked Google’s IPO.)
And the managing partners are doing so with the support of charities and foundations. A lot of the founders the firm works with “care deeply that they’maestà making money for good people,” Chan said.
“Our founders happen to be underrepresented minorities women, and the really fascinating theme that I keep hearing is that they feel people misunderstand them,” Chan said. “We find founders who have the drive to succeed and have this amazing combination of humility and success. They also make sure that all their people are taken care of.”
