Finding Founders Who Will Change the World with Wesley Chan

**Nick Chirls** (0:07)
Welcome to Origins, the podcast that goes deep into the business of venture capital, where we learn how the people behind the capital, both GPs and LPs, make decisions. I'm Nick Chirls, GP at Asylum Ventures, a newly launched early stage venture firm celebrating the creative act of making startups.

**Beezer Clarkson** (0:25)
And I'm Beezer Clarkson, your LP co-host from Sapphire Partners, where we invest in exceptional early stage venture capital managers ranging the spectrum from emerging to established franchise VCs.
And today, I'm really excited. We get to talk to a true legend in Silicon Valley. He started his career at a lab in MIT, spent time at Microsoft and HP. In 2002, he jumped to Google, where he has a crazy track record. He was the founder of Google Analytics and Google Voice, and in 2009, founded and led the seed investing program of Google Ventures, where he served as a GP. And wait for it. Under his tenure there, they were the first institutional check-in to household company names like, oh, I don't know, Plaid, the HR platform, Gusto, Enterprise Unicorn Lucid, the stock trading platform, Robinhood. And that's just the beginning. In other words, I think he's seen just about everything there is to see in Silicon Valley over the last 20 years. And hopefully, given his perspective, we'll hear both any red flags he's seeing in the market today and good positive signs for what could be coming.

**Nick Chirls** (1:31)
This is probably obvious, but you're talking about Mr. Wesley Chan. He is the co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures. Before spinning out, he was the managing director at Felices Ventures, where again, he backed huge names including Canva, Ring, Culture Amp, Dialpad, and many more.

**Beezer Clarkson** (1:54)
We love all of our podcast guests. We love all of them. Here's the reason why I'm super excited about Wes, though. About a year ago, actually at the Equal Ventures Emerging Manager Summit, he was on a panel and they were talking about motivating forces. I'm not going to do justice to his thesis, I'm just going to tee it up and then we're going to dig into it with him. But he was talking about the importance of proving himself right versus a colloquial, I need to prove everybody else wrong, this is where my great conviction and hustle comes from. He said a bunch of things on the panel and then he and I chatted afterwards, and it has lived in the best possible way rent-free in my head ever since then. I was just dying for him to come on and talk about it because it was this, it's not just the positivity of having to identify what you want to see in the world and how it's going to be true, but it was this trend line of like, oh my God, he's a crazy investor. If this is how he gets there, we all should know more about this.

**Nick Chirls** (2:49)
I actually also saw him on that panel a year ago. My prediction for this conversation is we're going to ask about four questions.
Wesley is just going to take it. So this might be actually the easiest interview we ever do here.

**Beezer Clarkson** (3:10)
Hey, Wesley. Good to see you. Thank you for joining us.

**Nick Chirls** (3:14)
Yes.

**Wesley Chan** (3:14)
It's good to see you guys too. I hope you're doing well.

**Beezer Clarkson** (3:16)
Well, we are now that you're here.

**Nick Chirls** (3:19)
We're psyched for this. Thanks for doing this with us.

**Beezer Clarkson** (3:22)
I thought we'd kick this off with a somewhat of an unusual entry into your intro, but you're an incredibly accomplished venture investor. We're going to get to singing all of those accolades. But I don't think, because I actually don't want to be sure if Nick knows this, that you were previously, along with being the founder of Google Voice, also served as Sergey's Chief of Staff at Google for five years. Yeah.

**Wesley Chan** (3:44)
No, it's very fun. I didn't quite understand how interesting would be in the moment, but it was probably quite life-changing to work with him so closely.

**Beezer Clarkson** (3:54)
So we were wondering if you want to introduce yourself building from that, and I can only guess that experience in the rest of the time at Google shaped a lot of your thinking as a venture capitalist, because that was also where you started investing, and just using that as the jumping point.

**Wesley Chan** (4:07)
I got the very amazing privilege of starting at Google very early. For five of those years, in addition to helping build the ad system, and launch and start and run Google Analytics, and also build up many of Google's other fantastic products, I got to work with Sergey. Sergey is not an easy person to work for, although he's an amazing person to work for. Because the standards were all exceptionally, or if not impossibly high. It was like going through Navy Seal trading boot camp, except you could never ever reach your mission or destination, because it's half the things he said, it's impossible. Every time I would present an idea to him, or work with a lot of different teams at Google to say, we go build this and make this happen, he'd look at it, go, Wesley, you're wasting your time, you're not changing your world. And when you're 21 or 22 and the bar is changing the world, it's not an easy thing to do. And I don't think I quite appreciated what amazing training was at that point, because I'd be in tears half the time, they only spend eight months building a prototype or a project, or working with Google's top engineers to go build something, and then starting to just swat away going like, oh, it's not changing the world, stop wasting your time, I'm canceling it. But it forces you to really, really, really go be thoughtful and have the data and really understand what is going to be the iPhone or a DUT. It's just absolutely incredible to have been through that because it just forces this excellence on you.