Wesley Chan He is often seen in his signature buffalo hat. However, he may be even better known for his ability to spot unicorns.
During his venture capital career, he has invested in over 20 unicorns, including AngelList, Dialpad, Ring, Rocket Lawyer and Sourcegraph. Five of them became decacorns: Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, Plaid and Robinhood. Chan’s was the first check on most of them.
After working at Google in its early days as an engineer, he became an investor. The venture capital lineage started at Google Ventures and continued at Felicis Ventures. Now co-founder and managing partner 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 that success has been well documented over the years, his personal journey… not so much. Chan spoke to TechCrunch about the ways his life influences the way he invests in startups.
His story began before he was born, when his family immigrated to the US from Hong Kong in the 1970s.
“They came here with no money, and actually, growing up they had no money,” Chan said. “It’s really exciting to watch this 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 was necessary.”
Chan admits that he didn’t appreciate his parents’ strength when he was young. However, growing up in 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 in a business now where people are very quick to judge you,” Chan said. “Among my LPs, a lot of them don’t have the background that I have. I got to pick up all these tunes of things they were trained in and become a bit of a chameleon. Then I have to give them a signal that they can trust me.”
How he got into MIT even with bad grades
Chan’s parents divorced when he was a child and he was raised in a single-parent home by his mother. He worked three jobs in high school to support his family, including as a parking lot attendant, waiter, and dishwasher in a biology lab at the California Institute of Technology.
He got the job washing dishes from an ad on Craigslist and remembers taking the No. 22 bus from his working-class town in Southern California for a 42-minute ride to CalTech, where he went and washed glasses.
One day, the laboratory director, a famous genetic biologist Helen Rothenberg, asked him if he would read a college-level book on biology and laboratory techniques. Not wanting to lose the job, he did.
“I had just taken high school biology,” Chan said. “I went to a high school that wasn’t great. It was like by hook or by crook that I ended up getting through school. Other kids played sports after school or took PSAT prep classes. Not only did I not have that, but I had to make money for my family.”
It turns out that, regardless of the high school experience, Rothenberg saw something in 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 also did research.
This was in the early 1990s, during the fledgling days of stem cell research. Rothenberg’s team taught the teenage Chan how to do research, and he was later part of a team that discovered a protocol for turning stem cells into red blood cells. It also helped when the team published an academic paper on the protocol.
Then one day Rothenberg, who had gone to both Harvard and MIT, asked if Chan had thought about college.
“Well, oh man, I have to finish this job and make money for the parents, and he tells me I have to go to school,” he said. “I didn’t know he called admissions offices. When you’re like a poor immigrant student, you don’t understand all that.”
Harvard ignored her, but MIT did not. And so people enter school with terrible grades, Chan said.
“Someone took a chance on me,” he said. “So many people stumble through life and I don’t think I would have had the opportunities I did today if it wasn’t for someone saying, ‘She works hard. He wants to do research.”
Business lessons from loneliness
So Chan said he’s also looking at venture capital. He’s not looking for the man who was a member of the right country club. Instead, he looks for people who have a hard drive and understand what it means to work hard.
“One of the lessons I learned growing up like this was that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Chan said. “It’s hard work, plus a lot of luck. Plus, understanding that there are people who help you eventually open the door to anything.”
He credits this help from Rothenberg for everything that followed.
“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 Canva and all these amazing companies, many of which are run by immigrants or people who have great taste, who grew up in very non-traditional backgrounds like I did.”
To attend MIT, he had to leave everything he knew at home and move to the opposite coast. When he got there, Chan also worked multiple jobs to pay his way through MIT, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and later graduated with a master’s degree in engineering.
What was it like to leave his family? In a word, tough. Due to having to support himself, Chan couldn’t take as many classes as he wanted or be like his friends who would go on fun trips during breaks.
However, he looks back on that experience as another thing that led him to life as a venture capitalist.
“When I led the Series A in Canva, which will eventually return 40x plus for this fund, 111 people said no, which made me very lonely to do this deal,” Chan said. “When you’re the guy who can’t go to prom because you have to work, or you can’t go skiing or prom, that’s what I’m all about.”
Being left out like this taught him, “Who cares if the rest of the world laughs at us? you get this amazing cut and ability to like being alone and be okay with being alone.”
After graduation, Chan returned to California and took a job at HP Labs. Then the dot-com crash happened and that job ended. But all was not lost. There was one company that hired despite the disastrous environment. And they happened to like people from MIT.
Spoiler, it was Google. Now, working for Google isn’t like the movie “The Internship,” where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson hit the road for internships and spend time competing against other teams on various projects. It was better… for dog lovers.
“Dogs were running around and running at you and hitting you,” Chan said. “It wasn’t like that movie. You have to get a job.”
They put him on a project to develop the ad system, “which was the most necessary at the time, so I was very lucky.”
Building something the founders want
That began a 15-year career at Google that included seven years building products and five years as chief of staff to Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Chan worked on projects including the Google Toolbar, which became Google Chrome.
“When you’re one of the few companies that made it, it was great,” Chan said. “Larry and Sergey were very nice, always saying, ‘Hey, maybe Wesley brought us something and we should let him try it out.’ That would eventually become Google Analytics or Google Ventures.”
He was even one of the people who interviewed Sundar Pichai when he was up for a job at Google. Apparently, Pichai later became the CEO of Alphabet and Google.
In 2009, Chan told Google that he wanted to start a startup. He had joined the company when it was less than 100 people and stayed until it exceeded 35,000. He remembers them joking that when you go to a startup, you’re the one buying the toilet paper. Chan’s response was that he didn’t mind buying the toilet paper. Instead, they suggested he go help Bill Maris set up Google Ventures.
“I was told to go build a product that founders want, instead of being a founder whose product a company wants. And we did,” Chan said. “Google Ventures is still a real company today that people want to get money from.”
Beyond overcoming obstacles to get to where he is today, Chan continues to face some odds, especially as a gay Asian man in tech. When he first started in venture capital, senior white men ran the companies, sharing the flow of deals on soccer fields or during an African safari, he said.
When you’re someone who wants to build your deal streaming network, but your background doesn’t fit the country club mold, it’s tough, he said. And there isn’t a large support group in venture capital for the LGBTQ+ community.
“That’s the challenge of being an outsider in this business,” Chan said. “You have to fight your way up or find different ways to work with founders so it doesn’t look like you’re being lazy or not making any progress. If you look at venture capital and the number of successful LGBTQ+ partners, you can count on two hands. There aren’t many of them, and there are probably 6,000 venture capitalists. Why is there such a low representation? And the number of people out there like us is even smaller.”
That’s why he and Pegah Ebrahimi started FPV Ventures two years ago — to provide the investment style based on 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 on Google’s IPO.)
And managing partners do it with the support of charities and foundations. Many of the company’s founders work with “care deeply that they’re making money for good people,” Chan said.
“Our founders happen to be underrepresented minorities or women, and the really fascinating thing I hear all the time is that they feel like 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 to take care of all their people.”
