Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making early investments in multi-billion dollar unicorn companies, including Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and most recently Canva.
Chan comes from an unconventional background. He grew up in an immigrant family and had middling grades in high school. However, he got a job cleaning test tubes in a California Institute of Technology lab and was able to impress lab manager Ellen Rosenberg and get him admitted to MIT.
From there, his unexpected journey continued. He majored in computer science because it seemed like a good career path, but landed in Silicon Valley shortly after the dot-com bust. At the time, the only company hiring was a search startup called Google. After nearly a decade there working on key products like Google Analytics, Chan was ready to do his own thing, but co-founder Sergey Brin persuaded him to join then-Google Ventures (now He was persuaded to join the company's emerging venture division, which was then called GV. There, he has had a long career in the venture industry and a few years ago spun off his own company, FPV, with his partner Pega Ebrahimi.
The key to all of this is that any success story involves an incredible amount of luck and timing, and Chan was the first to admit that, telling the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 audience: “Luck is very important, but the best founders who know how to do it are acutely aware of why timing is important in order to turn luck in their favor.”
He recalls a story Brin told about Google's founding at a particular time when other search engines were trying to keep users on their sites as long as possible to serve ads. Google's innovation was to deliver almost immediate results, sending users on their way without giving them any special incentive to stick around. (Things have changed a bit since then.) But Brin said timing is everything. If they had started six months earlier or six months later, the business situation would have been different and the competition would not have given them such an easy opening.
So what does Chan look for when choosing the next unicorn? He says most of the companies he funds, with the exception of founders who remind him of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They say they have nothing in common and a strong belief that they are solving urgent and timely problems with truly unique insights. That and focusing on building great products first, rather than buying customers or buying growth.
“There are a lot of challenges for founders in the early stages, they raise money and then spend it all in 18 months and buy growth. There's no reason to tell them that. And then you spend all your money and you're like, “Oh, I have to raise another round.''
It's also important to focus on your product if you want to get Chan's attention. He said he doesn't find founders at conferences or events, and only speaks to founders who are introduced to him by word of mouth from other founders in his network.
“There's only two of us at the company, right? We can't respond to every cold email or every pitch or every person who shows up at the door. So the best founders are They come to us through the founders, right? They build something that we notice or the founders notice. We have to meet this guy, as well as the product. , it's great. We use it at our company. It's on my iPhone, right? Or I met them through our network and one of the founders said, I’m putting some money into this guy,” I said, seriously. he's great ”