The Ledger
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Wesley Chan: More Than 75% of the Crypto Industry Is Scammy
“I was one of the first to like boohoo crypto. You know, some of it's unwell, but like I said, like, I can't be involved in a bunch of stuff where like, I think more than three quarters of it is scammy.”
Wesley Chan Refuses to Invest Without a 100-Year Company Vision
“If the founder comes to me and doesn't have a hundred year plan, I don't want to, I don't care. I don't want to be involved. We don't just do wedges, right?”
Wesley Chan Ignores TAM and Market Size When Making Investments
“I don't do it. I don't actually, you know, look at the say, is the market big enough? I just say, does the founder have a unique insight on a market that hasn't been created yet or that, you know, they're about to expand into.”
Wesley Chan: Market Downturns Are Treacherous Times to Actually Invest Capital
“No, it's the best time to have a fund. It's not the best time to be investing, right? There's a lot of treacherous deals out there.”
Wesley Chan Avoids Taking Pitches in Domains Where He Has Expertise
“So I try not to take any pitches in the areas I know too much about because I have a natural bias to pass on it and say, say no. And I'd rather, you know, have one of my colleagues or partners who don't know enough about it, take the pitch and then like be rea…”
Democratizing expert software increases a company's total addressable market by 100x
“And by the way, it also increases your market by an order of a hundred extra more, right? You know, we're You know, Adobe's building Photoshop for probably hundreds of thousands of people who want to, who are skilled or want to make design their profession, an…”
Wesley Chan: Founders Hate Corporate VC Due to Divergent Interests
“Corporate venture capital has been an utter distaste and a success and founders hate it because, you know, the interest of the company that's investing in the interest of the founders diverge.”
Wesley Chan: Unfavorable markets defeat great founders unless they adapt
“A market will beat out a great founder, but the best founders understand how to adapt to the market and find the bigger piece, right?”
Wesley Chan: Outlier returns come from market-creating companies
“My outlier returns the companies that I've had the privilege of working with Are ones that create new markets.”
Wesley Chan Claims a 30% Hit Rate on Early-Stage Unicorn Investments
“My hit rates around, around 30%. Right. So, you know, one in every, you know, three or four companies I've hit, you know, are a billion dollar plus, and I've been an early investor.”
Wesley Chan Led Canva's Series A Without 20% Ownership or Board Seat
“I did not have 20% ownership of Canva when I led the Series A. I did not have a board seat. In fact, so many people said no to them because they said, we're not giving you a board seat. Or they said, we're not giving you 20% ownership.”
Wesley Chan: Dogmatic venture capitalists usually get knocked out quickly
“In fact, the VCs that subscribe to hard and fast rules that have dogma are usually the ones that get knocked out very quickly.”
Wesley Chan Passed on Twilio's Seed Round Due to Expert Bias
“And I passed on it because, you know, I looked at it and, you know, talked to my team at Google voice and everybody looked at it. It's like, oh, this is easy to do. Like, you know, once the company gets big enough, they don't need toilet anymore. Boy, I didn't…”
Ring will generate hundreds of millions in revenue in 2016
“He's, you know, going to do, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, if not more this year.”
Fitbit became a massive fund returner despite widespread investor skepticism
“With Fitbit, when I didn't bet on Fitbit, everybody else was looking at connected devices or looking at hardware and going, you can't make money on hardware. And I didn't, You know, sort of wrote a check into it and became one of the biggest, you know, sort of…”
Teenage messaging and emoji apps are silly, fleeting investments without durability
“A lot of folks are investing in something that I find kind of silly. Oh, I'm building apps for teenagers to talk with each other, or I'm building an app for people to sort of like you know, send emojis to people. I don't understand those markets. You know, the…”
FPV Ventures Makes Investment Decisions in Under 12 Hours
“It's Peg and myself and a couple. Folks were five people. We move really fast. You know, we can decide on things in less than 12 hours.”
Wesley Chan Seeks 'Two Gigabyte' Product Breakthroughs Over Incremental Features
“I ask founders and I tell the story, what's your two gigabyte moment? Like, you know, you're telling me something that's incremental and I'm looking for the two gigabyte when everybody else has 25 megabyte moment.”
Wesley Chan: Market sizing fails by conflating features with products
“So that's the fallacy of market sizing, right? Is that people conflate that people conflate the feature part of their things in the market size for that feature for that of the product, right?”
Wesley Chan Caps FPV Ventures' $450M Fund at 20 Core Positions
“I can only do maybe 20 at most core positions in my fund.”
Chan: Evaluate early startups on a founder's ability to evolve products
“My biggest lesson learned on investing is that what you see today is not what, if the founder truly visionary will not be what the company is a year or two years or five or 10 years from then. So you have to really believe that the founder is capable of morphi…”
Identifying Product Visionaries Requires Asking Non-Gameable Questions Ten Different Ways
“You have to ask it 10 different ways. In ways that make sense. And, you know, again, that's one of those things I want to give away the trade secret to how I do it, but like you, you're, you have to ask it 10 different ways and listen carefully. And if the ans…”
Wesley Chan: Sales Leaders and CMOs Often Make the Best Product Managers
“Some of the salespeople, some sales, you know, leaders and CMOs have lots of product expertise. You have to remember, they're close to the customer. They've explained to the customer what the product does. They, you know, in their previous jobs have learned wh…”
FPV Ventures Closed Its $450M Inaugural Fund in Under Two Months
“We were able to close in, you know, less than a couple months. And we were, you know, almost two, if not three X oversubscribed in the commitments that we were able to take room for them. We capped it at four 50, right?”
Larry Page's Rule at Google: Bring Data or My Opinion Wins
“There's this famous saying when I would pitch stuff to Larry, where he goes, Wesley, if you have the data, you're right. If you don't have the data, then I'm right, and you don't want me to be right, because I'm often wrong. So, bring the data.”
Venture capital and tech investing reset on three-year macro cycles
“Venture and technology, investing, things change. It's a lifetime every three years that, you know, the world sort of changes again.”
Force career growth by seeking uncomfortable learning environments every three years
“So I think that that's sort of been the thing that informed my thinking is that every three years, I like to be super uncomfortable and figure out the next phases.”
Nest thermostats became a standard feature in high-end real estate listings
“Today Nest is sort of the de facto device that you have in your house if you build a, you know, high-end home, right? They advertise it in the home real estate listings that they have a Nest thermostat in it.”
Accessible software tools yield vastly more powerful outcomes than expert-only tools
“If you build something that everyone can use versus only the most skilled people can use, you get a very, very powerful outcome.”
Felicis Ventures wrote its largest single investment check ever to Canva
“One of the biggest investments, in fact, the largest check that Felicis has ever written was into a company in Australia called Canva.”
Exceptional founders focus on removing unnecessary features rather than adding them
“It takes a very, very rare, very smart, very, very sophisticated founder to really start thinking about what should I take out rather than what should I put in.”
Wesley Chan Wrote First Checks Into Robinhood, Plaid, Gusto, and Flexport
“And, you know, I was able to write the first check in the, you know, companies like Robinhood or Platt or Gusto or Flexport.”
Over 80% of FPV Ventures' LPs Are Charities and Foundations
“I think like, you know, 80% plus are charities and foundations and, you know, the rest of our friends, kids, college funds, right?”
Guild Education Quietly Raised an Up-Round Despite the Tech Downturn
“Guild was able to raise a great round from investors they knew without being on the market. And they were one of the big success stories of being able to get up rounds, even when everything was falling.”
Google Ventures grew to a $500M annual fund with 300 investments
“And today they've done over 300 investments and it's grown to be a five hundred million dollar a year fund.”
Google Analytics' launch exhausted server capacity and slowed down Google's infrastructure
“So we had literally crashed Google, and we had slowed Google down and sort of broken Google by launching Google Analytics.”
Canva's phenomenal user growth mirrors Google Analytics' mass-market expansion playbook
“And that's what, you know, I think that's what Cliff and Melanie at Clamba have done. It's absolutely amazing. If you look at their user base, if you look at the forums, if you look at their incredible growth, Over the, even the past year has been nothing shor…”