Wesley Chan is often seen in his signature buffalo hat; however, he may be even better known for his ability to spot unicorns.
Over the course of his venture capital career, he has invested in more than 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 to check most of them.
After working at Google as an engineer, he became an investor. His venture capital pedigree began in Google ventures and continued to Felicis Ventures. Now co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, he leads the company’s two-year-old $450 million venture capital fund with co-founder Pegah Ebrahimi.
And while all of this success has been well-documented over the years, her personal journey… not so much. Chan spoke with TechCrunch about how his life affects the way he invests in startups.
His story began before he was born, when his family migrated from Hong Kong to the US in the 1970s.
“They came here with no money, and in fact, growing up they had no money at all,” Chan said. “It’s really fascinating to watch this journey. That they 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 what was needed.”
Chan admits he didn’t appreciate his parents’ courage as much when he was young. However, growing up in a hard-working, immigrant family without much money ended up teaching him to recognize nuances and be someone who adapts.
“I’m in a business where people judge you very quickly,” Chan said. “Among my LPs, many of them don’t have the training I have. I have to take all these songs that they’ve been trained on and be a little chameleon-like. So I have to signal to them that they can trust me.”
How he got into MIT even with bad grades
Chan’s parents separated when he was a child and he was raised by his mother in a single-parent household. He worked three jobs in high school to help 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 dishwashing job through a Craigslist ad and remembers taking the No. 22 bus from his blue-collar Southern California town for the 42-minute ride to CalTech, where he was going to wash glasses.
One day, the laboratory manager, a famous genetic biologist Ellen Rothenberg, asked him if he could read a college-level textbook on biology and laboratory techniques. Not wanting to lose his job, he did so.
“I had barely taken biology in high school,” Chan said. “I went to a high school that wasn’t great. It was by hook or by crook that I ended up being able to study. Other kids played sports after school or attended PSAT prep classes. In addition to not having that, I needed to earn money for my family.”
It turns out that regardless of high school experience, Rothenberg saw something in Chan. When one of the doctoral students left, Chan was promoted to the lab bench. And for the next three years, while in high school, Chan also did research.
This was in the early 1990s, during the early days of stem cell research. Rothenberg’s team taught the teenage Chan how to do research, and he was later part of a group that discovered a protocol for turning stem cells into red blood cells. He also helped when the team published an academic paper on the protocol.
Then one day, Rothenberg, who studied at Harvard and MIT, asked if Chan had thought about going to college.
“I thought, man, I have to finish this job and make money for my 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’re like a poor immigrant student, you don’t understand all these things.”
Harvard ignored it, but MIT did not. And that’s how people come to school with terrible grades, Chan said.
“Someone took a chance on me,” he said. “So many people stumble in life, and I don’t think I would have had the opportunities I had today if it weren’t for someone who said, ‘He works hard. He wants to do research.’”
Business Lessons on Loneliness
That’s how Chan said he also looks at venture capital. He doesn’t look for the person who was a member of the right country club. Instead, he looks for people who have courage and understand what it means to work hard.
“One of the lessons I learned, growing up like that, was that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Chan said. “It’s a lot of work, as well as a lot of luck. Also, understanding that there are people helping you open the door to anything.”
He credits Rothenberg’s help for everything that came after.
“If it weren’t for MIT, I wouldn’t have found Google. If it weren’t for Google, I wouldn’t have found Google Ventures. If it weren’t for Google Ventures, I wouldn’t have found my team at Felicis,” she added. “And if it weren’t for Felicis, I wouldn’t have Canva and all these incredible companies, many of them run by immigrants or people with a lot of courage, who grew up in non-traditional environments like me.”
To attend MIT, he had to leave everything he knew at home and move to the opposite coast. Once there, Chan also worked several jobs to pay for his studies at MIT, where he majored in computer science and later graduated with a master’s degree in engineering.
What was it like leaving your family? In a word, difficult. Because she had to support herself, Chan was unable to attend as many classes as she wanted or be like her friends who went on fun trips during breaks.
However, he looks back on this experience as something else that prepared him for life as a venture capitalist.
“When I led the Series A on Canva, which will ultimately return over 40x to this fund, 111 people said no, which made it very lonely doing 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 the prom, that’s what I’m dealing with.”
Being left out like this taught him, “Who cares if the rest of the world is laughing at us; You have an incredible amount of courage and the ability to enjoy being alone and be okay with being alone.”
After graduation, Chan returned to California and got a job at HP Labs. Then the dot-com crash happened and that work failed. But not all was lost. There was a company hiring despite the disastrous environment. And it turned out they liked people from MIT.
Spoiler, it was Google. Now, working for Google isn’t like the movie “The Internship” where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson get an internship and spend their time competing with other teams on various projects. It was better… for those who liked dogs.
“The dogs would run and run at you and knock you down,” Chan said. “It wasn’t like that movie. You have to get to work.
He was placed on an ad system development project, “which was what was most needed at the time, so I was very lucky.”
Building something founders want
That began a 15-year career at Google, which included seven years building products and five years as chief of staff for 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 got that, it was great,” Chan said. “Larry and Sergey were very kind, always saying, ‘Hey, maybe Wesley brought us something and we should let him try it.’ This would eventually become Google Analytics or Google Ventures.”
He was even one of the people who interviewed Sundar Pichai when he applied for a job at Google. Of course, Pichai later became CEO of Alphabet and Google.
In 2009, Chan told Google he wanted to launch a startup. He joined the company when it had fewer than 100 people and stayed until it reached more than 35,000. He remembers them joking that when you start a startup, you’re the one who buys the toilet paper. Chan’s response was that he didn’t mind buying toilet paper. Instead, they suggested he help Bill Maris build Google Ventures.
“They told me to build a product that the founders want, rather than being the founder whose product the company wants. And we did it,” said Chan. “Google Ventures is still a real company today that people want to make money from.”
In addition to overcoming obstacles to get to where he is today, Chan continues to face some difficulties, especially as a gay Asian man in technology. When he started in venture capital, senior white men ran the companies, sharing the deal flow on soccer fields or during an African safari, he said.
When you’re looking to build your deal flow network but your background doesn’t fit the country club mold, it’s difficult, 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 partners in the LGBTQ+ segment, you can count on both hands. There aren’t many of them and there are probably 6,000 venture capitalists. Why is there such low representation? And the number of people openly like us is even smaller.”
That’s why he and Pegah Ebrahimi founded FPV Ventures two years ago – to provide an investment style based on their unconventional experiences. (Ebrahimi started out as the youngest CIO at Morgan Stanley before holding several director roles at several technology companies. In fact, she worked on Google’s IPO.)
And the managing partners are doing this with the support of charities and foundations. Many of the founders the company works with “care deeply about making money for good people,” Chan said.
“It turns out that our founders are underrepresented minorities or women, and the really fascinating theme that I keep hearing is that they feel like people misunderstand them,” Chan said. “We find founders who have the drive to succeed and have this incredible combination of humility and success. They also ensure that all their staff are taken care of.”
