Ep. 152 - From Google Analytics to FPV: Investing in Founders with a 100-Year Lens, with Wesley Chan

Grant Evans (0:05)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast, live from FinTech Meetup Europe here in Lisbon. And this afternoon, we are joined by Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner at FPV Ventures. Wesley, thank you for joining us this afternoon on the show.

Wesley Chan (0:18)

Great, well, thank you for having me.

Grant Evans (0:19)

We want to dive into a few topics, obviously amazing experience and background in the wonderful world of business leadership particularly.

When you launched Google Analytics, the demand was so big that it slowed Google itself down. What happened that day? Can you dive into the nuance?

Wesley Chan (0:34)

Yeah, I think it actually almost crashed all of Google.

We had launched Google Analytics and we had predicted the market size to be a certain number. I think we said it would be like $100 million worth of market demand. And it turned out to be like 10 to 20 times that much. We did give away the product for free, but it was one of those things where we were like, oh, I guess a lot more people want this. And because there were so much demand, people just started signing up as quickly as possible. And it was real time so that we could track all of your, that it would help you track and get real time stats and everything. And so the processing was quite intense.

And so we started getting word that there's one data center that failed over with too much demand, and another one started failing over. And I'm like, oh crap, there's a cascading effect. And literally, the entire company starts rushing into our office, where we were running our operations, and watching the launch, and we're like, our stuff just crashed, our stuff just crashed. And I'm like, oh crap. I'm like, this is where I crawl under the desk and go like, ooh, we screwed this one up. And I was pretty sure I was going to get fired that day.

Grant Evans (1:37)

A good proof play, Max, get out in front of everyone. From Google.

Wesley Chan (1:39)

And in fact, there were so many angry people, I was starting to pack up my stuff in the boxes going, well, I'm not going to survive the day here.

Well, I was Sergey's chief of staff at that time, and I still remember Sergey walked in the office and go, Wesley, what the F did you do? I was like, well, I guess we crashed a company. And he goes, well, that's not good. And so everybody starts discussing and a bunch of people were like, we got to get rid of Wes. Like he should have planned this better and everything else. And we literally had the company planning the whole thing together. But what wound up happening was it was just such unprecedented demand. We didn't have an invite only system. We didn't slow the launch. It was too late for us to shut stuff down because people kept installing stuff. Like some big websites started using us. And the problem is you couldn't predict and they weren't like phasing the usage one small section of their website at a time. They put the whole website on there and then we were just sitting there going, like to Sergei's credit, he called it Google's biggest success disaster. He's like, well, if that many people use it, we should keep it going and to his credit, like we did.

But most people don't know if you're in computer science, there's a computer algorithm that people teach now called Bigtable, which is a data structure that allows you to do sort of like non-relational management of large amounts of data. It was invented to save the Google Analytics crash that we wound up doing. It's taught in every computer science division today. Every student learns what Bigtable is because it's like a completely revolutionary new data structure that got invented by Jeff Dean and by Sanjay and sort of the genius crew at Google. And they sort of sat there going, we've been working on an idea for this. You're the poster child and you read the paper that talked about how Bigtable works and that they share in every computer science class. Google and the Lakes is the poster child for that. So it was really funny to sort of have an entire new computer science groundbreaking algorithm invented for something that we wound up crashing.

Grant Evans (3:28)

I like the stories about how these products get created.

Wesley Chan (3:31)

Yeah, but I survived the day. I still keep boxes packed under my desk in case they crash again.

Grant Evans (3:35)

The rest is history, right? You've been a founder inside a big company and an investor on the outside. What operator instinct do you still use in every deal that you get involved in?