Wesley Chan He is often seen wearing his trademark buffalo hat; However, he may be even better known for his ability to spot unicorns.
Throughout 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 control for most of them.
After working at Google initially as an engineer, he became an investor. His venture capital pedigree began in Google Companies and continued Felicis Ventures. Now, as co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, he leads the two-year-old company’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 affects how he invests in startups.
His story began before he was born, when his family immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong in the 1970s.
“They came here with no money, and in fact, growing up they had no money,” Chan said. “It’s 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 was what was necessary.”
Chan admits that he didn’t appreciate his parents’ strength as much when he was young. However, growing up in a family of hard-working immigrants who didn’t have much money ended up teaching him to recognize nuances and be someone he can adapt to.
“I’m in a business now where people judge you very quickly,” Chan said. “Among my LPs, many of them don’t have the experience that I have. I have to learn all those melodies from the things they were trained on and be a bit of a chameleon. “So I have to let them know that they can trust me.”
How he got to MIT even with bad grades
Chan’s parents separated when he was a child and his mother raised him in a single-parent home. He worked three jobs in high school to help support his family, including as a parking lot attendant, a waiter and a dishwasher in a biology lab at the California Institute of Technology.
He got the dishwasher job thanks to an ad on Craigslist and remembers taking the No. 22 bus from his working-class Southern California town on the 42-minute ride to CalTech, where he was going to wash glasses.
One day, the director of the laboratory, the famous genetic biologist Ellen Rothenberg, asked him if he would read a college-level book on biology and laboratory techniques. Not wanting to lose her job, she did it herself.
“I had barely studied biology in high school,” Chan said. “I went to a high school that wasn’t very good. It was by hook or by crook that I ended up making my way through school. Other children played sports after school or attended PSAT prep classes. Not only did I not have that, but I had to earn 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, while in high school, Chan was also doing 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 later was part of a group that discovered a protocol for transforming stem cells into red blood cells. He also helped when the team published an academic paper on the protocol.
Then one day Rothenberg, who had studied at both Harvard and MIT, asked if Chan had thought about college.
“I thought, oh man, I have to finish this job and make money for my parents, and she tells me I should go to school,” he said. “I didn’t know 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. “A lot of 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, ‘Work hard.’ “He wants to investigate.”
Business lessons from loneliness
That’s how Chan said he views venture capital, too. He doesn’t look for the person who was a member of the right country club. Instead, he looks for people who have grit and understand what it means to work hard.
“One of the lessons I learned growing up that way was that you have a lot to gain and nothing to lose,” Chan said. “It’s hard work, plus a lot of luck. Also, understanding that there are people who ultimately help you open the door to anything.”
He attributes everything that followed to Rothenberg’s help.
“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,” 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 or people with a lot of courage, who grew up in very non-traditional environments like me.”
To attend MIT he had to leave everything he knew at home and move to the opposite coast. While there, Chan also worked various 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 leaving your family? In a word, tough. Because he had to support himself, Chan couldn’t take as many classes as he wanted or be like his friends who took fun trips during breaks.
However, he remembers that experience as another thing that prepared him for his life as a venture capitalist.
“When I led the Series A on Canva, which will ultimately return more than 40 times that fund, 111 people said no, which made it very lonely to close that deal,” Chan said. “When you’re the guy who can’t go to prom because he has to work, or you can’t go to the ski trip or the prom, that’s what I’m dealing with.”
Being left out like that taught him: “Who cares if the rest of the world laughs at us; “You get this incredible amount of courage and the ability to like being alone and be okay with being alone.”
After graduating, Chan returned to California and got a job at HP Labs. Then the dot-com crash happened and that job fell through. But not all is lost. There was a company hiring despite the disastrous environment. And it turned out that they liked the people at MIT.
Spoiler, it was Google. Now, working for Google isn’t like the movie “The Internship,” where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson work their way into an internship and spend time competing with other teams on various projects. It was better… for those who liked dogs.
“The dogs would run around and run over you and knock you down,” Chan said. “It wasn’t like that movie. You have to get to work.”
He was assigned a project to develop the advertising system, “which was the most needed at that time, so I was very lucky.”
Build something the founders want
This began a 15-year career at Google that included seven years of product development 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 fantastic,” Chan said. “Larry and Sergey were very nice and always said, ‘Hey, maybe Wesley brought us something and we should let him experience this.’ Over time it would become Google Analytics or Google Ventures.”
He was even one of the people who interviewed Sundar Pichai when he applied for a position at Google. Obviously, Pichai later became CEO of Alphabet and Google.
In 2009, Chan told Google that he wanted to create a startup. She joined the company when it had less than 100 people and stayed until it surpassed 35,000. She remembers they joked that when you go to a startup, you’re the one who buys the toilet paper. Chan’s response was that she didn’t mind buying toilet paper. Instead, they suggested that she help Bill Maris build Google Ventures.
“I was told to go build a product that founders want, rather than being a founder whose product a company wants. And we did it,” Chan said. “Google Ventures today is still a real company that people want to make money from.”
Beyond overcoming obstacles to get to where he is today, Chan continues to face some difficulties, especially as a gay Asian man in tech. When he started in venture capital, high-level white men ran the companies, sharing deal flow on soccer fields or during an African safari, he said.
When you’re someone looking to build your deal flow network but your experience doesn’t fit the country club mold, it’s tough, he said. And there isn’t much of a 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 seem like you’re being lazy or not making any progress. If you look at the venture capital and the number of successful partners in the LGBTQ+ community, we can count on both hands. There aren’t many and there are probably 6,000 venture capitalists. Why is there such low representation? And the number of people who openly declare themselves 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 backgrounds. (Ebrahimi started out as Morgan Stanley’s youngest CIO before holding several senior management roles at several technology companies. In fact, he worked on Google’s IPO.)
And the managing partners do so 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.
“Our founders are underrepresented minorities or women, and the really fascinating thing 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 amazing combination of humility and success. “They also make sure all their people are taken care of.”