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Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments in multi-billion dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and more recently Canva.
Chan comes from an unconventional background – he grew up in an immigrant family and only got average grades in high school. But he got a job washing test tubes in a laboratory at Caltech and impressed the laboratory director Ellen Rothenberg Enough to get her help getting into MIT.
From there, his serendipitous journey continued: He majored in computer science because it seemed like a good career path, but arrived in Silicon Valley right after the dot-com bust, when the only company hiring was a search startup called Google. After nearly a decade working there on vital products like Google Analytics, Chan was ready to do his own thing, but co-founder Sergey Brin convinced him to join the company’s startup arm, then called Google Ventures (now GV), and from there he had He has had a long entrepreneurial career, having set up his own company, FPV, with his partner Pegah Ebrahimi, a few years ago.
The point of all of this is that there is an incredible amount of luck and timing in any success story, and Chan is the first to admit it, telling the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, “Luck matters a lot, but the best founders who know how to push luck in their favor, have… Really strong sense of the importance of timing.
He points to what Brin told him about the founding of Google, which they started at a certain moment when other search engines were trying to keep users on their sites as long as possible to show them ads. Google’s innovation was generating results almost instantly, then giving users no particular incentive to stay, but merely sending them on their way. (It’s changed a bit since then.) But Breen said timing is everything — if they had started six months earlier or six months later, the business conditions would have been different and the competition wouldn’t have given them such an easy opening. .
So what does Chan look for when he tries to choose the next unicorn? He says there is almost no commonality in the companies he funds except for founders who remind him of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, with a strong conviction that they are solving an urgent and timely problem with a truly unique vision. That, and focus on building a great product first, rather than trying to buy customers or buy growth.
“There are a lot of challenges for early-stage founders. They raise money and then spend it all in 18 months. They buy the growth, but there’s no reason for people to stick with it, or get involved in the product, or tell other people. Then you burn all your money, and Oh, I need to collect another round.
Focusing on the product is also vital if you want to attract Chan’s attention. He says he doesn’t find founders at conferences or events, but only talks to people who are introduced to him through word of mouth from other founders in his network.
“There’s only two of us in the company, right? We can’t take every cold email or every pitch or every person that shows up at the door. So the best founders come to us through our other founders, right? They’re building something that we or Our founders notice it. You have to meet this guy. Like the products. Incredible. We use it in our board meetings. I have it on my iPhone, right? Or we meet them through our network, where one of our founders actually says , “I’ll put some money in this guy; “I’ll invest in it. It’s amazing.”
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