Unicorn-rich VC Wesley Chan credits his success to a Craigslist job washing lab beakers

Wesley Chan is often seen in his distinctive buffalo hat; however, he is even more famous for his ability to spot unicorns.

During his career in venture capital, he has invested in more than 20 unicorns, including AngelList, Dialpad, Ring, Rocket Lawyer, and Sourcegraph. Five of them went on to become decacorns: Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, Plaid, and Robinhood. Chan was the first to vet most of them.

After working as an engineer at Google in its early days, he became an investor. His venture capital pedigree began at Google Ventures and continued to Felicis Ventures. Now as co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, he leads the two-year-old firm’s $450 million venture capital fund with co-founder Pegah Ebrahimi.

And while all of his success has been well-documented over the years, his personal journey… not so much. Chan spoke to TechCrunch about how his life influences his investments in startups.

His story began before he was even born, when his family immigrated to the US from Hong Kong in the 1970s.

“They came here with no money and, really, they didn’t have any money growing up,” Chan said. “It’s really interesting to see that journey. They would leave a place where they didn’t speak a word of English and — they still don’t speak English very well — and make a new life because they felt that was what was necessary.”

Chan admits he didn’t appreciate his parents’ tenacity when he was younger. However, growing up in a hard-working, immigrant family that didn’t have much money taught him to recognize nuance and be adaptable.

“I’m in a business now where people judge you very quickly,” Chan said. “A lot of my LPs don’t have the same background as me. I have to learn the nuances of what they were trained on and become a bit of a chameleon. Then I have to give them the signal that they can trust me.”

How did he get into M.I.T. despite his poor grades?

Chan’s parents separated when he was a child, and his mother raised him alone. To help support his family, he worked three jobs in high school, including parking lot attendant, waiter, and dishwasher in a biology lab at the California Institute of Technology.

He found a job washing dishes through an ad on Craigslist and remembers taking the No. 22 bus from his working-class Southern California town to make the 42-minute trip to Caltech, where he washed beakers.

One day, the lab manager, renowned gene biologist Ellen Rothenberg, asked him if he would like to read a college-level book on biology and lab techniques. Not wanting to lose his job, he did.

“I barely took high school biology,” Chan said. “I went to a high school that wasn’t very good. It was like I somehow managed to fit in at school. The other kids were playing after-school sports or going to PSAT prep classes. Not only did I not have any of that, but I also had to make money for my family.”

It turned out that despite his 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 he was in high school, Chan was also doing research.

This was in the early 1990s, the nascent days of stem cell research. Rothenberg’s team taught the teenage Chan how to do research, and he later became part of the group that discovered a protocol to turn 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 Chan if he had thought about college.

“I was like, oh man, I have to get this job done and make money for the parents, and she’s telling me I should go to school,” he said. “I didn’t know she called the admissions office. When you’re like a poor immigrant student, you don’t understand all this stuff.”

Harvard ignored him, but MIT did not. And that’s how people get into school with bad grades, Chan said.

“Somebody took a chance on me,” he said. “A lot of people stumble through life, and I don’t think I would have had the opportunities I have today if there wasn’t someone who said, ‘He works hard. He wants to do research.'”

Business lessons from loneliness

Chan said he views venture capital the same way. He doesn’t look for someone who has been a member of the right country club. Instead, he looks for people who have guts and who understand what it means to work hard.

“One of the lessons I learned growing up like that was that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Chan said. “It takes hard work, and a lot of luck. Also, understanding that there are people who are going to help you open the door to anything that you want to do eventually.”

He credits Rothenberg’s help for everything that happened next.

“If it wasn’t for MIT, I wouldn’t have found Google. If it wasn’t for Google, I wouldn’t have found Google Ventures. If it wasn’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 Canva and all these amazing companies, many of which are run by immigrants or people with a lot of guts who grew up in very non-traditional backgrounds, like me.”

Enrolling at MIT required him to leave everything he knew at home and move to the opposite coast. Once there, Chan worked several jobs to pay for his studies at MIT, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and later a master’s degree in engineering.

What was it like leaving his family? In a word, very tough. Because he had to support himself, Chan was unable to take as many classes as he wanted or be like his friends who went out for fun on holidays.

However, he sees that experience as one more thing that prepared him for a life as a venture capitalist.

“When I led the Series A at Canva, which would eventually produce more than a 40x return for that fund, 111 people declined, which made it very lonely to do that deal,” Chan said. “When you’re the person who can’t go to prom because you have to work, or you can’t go to a ski trip or a graduation party, that’s what I deal with.”

Being abandoned in this way taught him this: “What difference does it make if the rest of the world is laughing at us; you get an amazing amount of patience and the ability to like solitude and be comfortable with solitude.”

After graduation, Chan moved back to California and took a job at HP Labs. Then the dot-com crash hit and he lost that job. But all was not lost. Despite the disastrous environment, one company hired him. And he liked the people at MIT.

Spoiler, it was Google. Now, working for Google is not like the movie “The Internship,” where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson lie to get internships and spend time competing with other teams on various projects. It was better… for people who liked dogs.

“The dogs were running around and they would bump into you and knock you down,” Chan said. “It wasn’t like that movie. You had to go to work.”

He was put on the project of developing an advertising system, “which was the most needed at the time, so I was very lucky.”

Building something the founders want

Thus began a 15-year Google career, which included seven years building products and five years as chief of staff to Sergey Brin, who founded Google with Larry Page. Chan worked on a number of projects, including the Google Toolbar, which later became Google Chrome.

“When you’re one of the few companies that has made it, it’s pretty cool,” Chan said. “Larry and Sergey were very kind, always saying, ‘Hey, maybe Wesley has come up with something for us and we should let him try it.’ It eventually became Google Analytics or Google Ventures.”

He was also one of the people who interviewed Sundar Pichai when he was selected for a job at Google. Obviously, Pichai later became the CEO of Alphabet and Google.

In 2009, Chan told Google he wanted to start a startup. He joined the company when it had less than 100 people and stayed until it grew to over 35,000. He remembers they used to joke that when you go to a startup, you’re the one buying toilet paper. Chan’s response was that he didn’t mind buying toilet paper. Instead, they suggested he help Bill Maris build Google Ventures.

“They told me to build the product the founders wanted, rather than be the founder whose product the company wanted. And we did that,” Chan said. “Google Ventures is still a real firm people want to take money from.”

Aside from overcoming obstacles to get to where he is today, Chan has faced some hardships, especially as a gay Asian man in tech. He said when he first started in venture capital, senior white men were running the firms, sharing deal flow on football fields or during African safaris.

“When you’re someone who wants to build your deal flow network, but your background doesn’t fit the country club mold, it’s difficult,” he said. “And there’s no specific 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 go your own way or find different ways to work with founders so it doesn’t look like you’re lazy or not making any progress. If you look at the number of successful partners in venture capital and LGBTQ+, you can count them on two hands. There aren’t that many of them, and there are probably 6,000 venture capitalists. Why is there so little representation? And the number of people who are openly out like us is even less.”

That’s why he and Pegah Ebrahimi started FPV Ventures two years ago — to provide an investing style based on their unconventional backgrounds. (Ebrahimi got her start as the youngest CIO at Morgan Stanley, before holding C-suite roles at a variety of tech companies. She actually worked on Google’s IPO.)

And the managing partners are doing this in collaboration with charities and foundations. Chan said many of the founders working with the firm “care deeply that they are making money for good people.”

“Our founders are minorities or women, and the thing I hear all the time is that they feel misunderstood,” Chan said. “We find founders who have a passion for success and a wonderful combination of humility and success. They also make sure that all their people are taken care of.”