YouSaid · the spoken record
Wesley Chan
- lines on the record
- 27
- first
- 2016-06-29
- most recent
- 2016-06-29
- sittings or episodes
- 1
- sources
- podcast
Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“The most recent public investment was Canva. We did this several months ago. It took a while to sort of figure out how to structure a deal that was great for both sides, but we said yes simply because Cliff and Melanie had built something so amazing for the world. We saw this in going to the forums that we saw how excited people were when they went to the forums. And we saw how many minutes and how many hours and how many days people were spending on it once they started download the software that was just clear to us that we had to be involved somehow despite the fact that they were in Sydney and in Australia and so far away. So we said yes to them and it's been the absolute delight working for them over the last several months.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the biggest difficulty is how to spend your time efficiently. I think that that's something that is a challenge for me every day that I wake up every morning and go, how can I better figure out how to be most leveraged in my time? Because time is the one thing you can't scale. It's the one thing you can't ask for it back after you've spent it. So I think that being the most efficient with your time and making sure that you're the highest impact every minute that you have is a thing that keeps me excited every day and also keeps me awake at night.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I read one newsletter every day, and it's by Bob Lefst. And he sends out this really amazing email newsletter that just has really interesting insights in music and politics. It's a very, very interesting take on the world. And some of the takes are very contrarian.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think what I'm most excited about finding things that are just very highly impactful for people 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 send emojis to people. I don't understand those markets. They're kind of cute, but they're fleeting. And I enjoy spending time on things, on businesses and on products that are durable that will last a century or more that, you know, you sort of buy and you put in your house and it becomes a centerpiece that you keep for 10 years on your house. Those are the things that excite me. So that's where I want to spend my time.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it was an absolute delight, it's a privilege, and one of those rare experiences that you'll never sort of ever, and I always sort of deeply appreciate. And the thing I remember most about Larry, even when I was building Google Analytics or building Google Voice, he would just look at me and it's like, why are you spending your time on this? And he would never say that to be mean-spirited, but it was just a very honest question to say, are you working on the thing that's most important for the world? Is this worth your time? You only have so much years on this planet that you're spending. Is this really the thing that you want to be working on? And that would always sort of get me thinking, you know, am I building something big enough? Am I building something that has enough of an impact on the world and does what I'm doing really matter? And that's sort of what's important my thinking in terms of why I like to change things every three years is once it's successful is it's really where I wouldn't be spending my time or should I be spending my time on finding something that could be another big success and be highly impactful on the world and you know Larry was very very deeply integral in that philosophy that I've sort of had in terms of”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Palisis. And so I think the contrarian view is something that's very important to sort of embrace. And I think Michael Lusa does a great job sort of talking about that through his examples in the biggest short.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a big short by Michael Lewis. The reason why I love that book is that Michael chronicles the entire sort of mortgage crash and he sort of follows these three investors that sort of bet against mortgages and bet big and made out like bandits during that sort of 2008 crisis. They did it even though everybody thought they were crazy, that they were stupid because everybody else in the world was betting on mortgages. And that contrarian view is something that I respect and that's what we do well at Felicis. We love finding things that everybody else is running away from and betting big on them and sort of saying, hey, you know, we think that this is an amazing sort of area that we should really, really spend time and invest in and sort of write large checks into. And that's done very well for us, right? With Fitbit, when I 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 returners for the fund.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because most of the devices still follow that sort of paradigm that like, oh, you're not smart enough to put this stuff in your house, you have to go hire an electrician to do it for you. But, you know, there's a couple sort of like stars in the smart home where people have figured this out. And one is the doorbell. The doorbell is sort of the dumbest device that makes a noise. It's a stupid button that rings some chime in your house and sort of tells you somebody's at the door. There's so much more that can be done. And the probably most successful company in the space right now is a company called Ring.com, which is started by this founder named Jamie Siminoff. I actually have known him for”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think a lot of the early IoT devices were not even programmable by you, right? You had to go to a dealer to sort of get them put in. So, you know, the first generation of home devices, and I look at this when I was building my home, you know, I want to put in smart light switches. Most of the smart light switch companies that allowed you to sort of put the switches and required you to hire a dealer at $250 an hour to go and install this for you. And if you want to make any changes, you still have to get the dealer to come back. It's horrible. You know, there are companies like Control 4 or Crestron or AMX where they have these sort of quote-unquote smart home interfaces. But they require you to put this ugly control panel into your house, this LCD screen that already looks like it's three generations old and looked like it was designed before the iPhone came out. And you can't put that in yourself. You have to go hire an expensive integrator and sort of put those things in. And that was how most smart home devices were done. You would hire an AD guy or you'd hire a lighting expert and you put them in. So I'm still looking for a company today that's figured out how to do that where it puts it in the hand of the consumer.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No way we could exhaust 10x to market ever in 100 years, and we exhausted it in three days. And I think that that's what I look for. Look for people that are sort of saying when we invest, I look for founders that understand I'm not building this for what is the traditional group of people that are only doing this. I'm doing it for the world. I want to open up this market and I want to get it in the hands of anyone that's sort of thinking about building an amazing product that the entire world can use. And therefore, your market's not no longer 100,000 people. It's 100 million people or it's a billion people. And that gets really, really exciting. And that's what Cliff and Melanie and Clanban 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, even the past year has been nothing short of phenomenal. And it follows that same pattern that Google Analytics sort of followed in terms of us opening it up for the world.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And Larry sort of goes off and he's kind of upset about this, and Sergei's fuming, and they come back a couple hours later and said, we thought about this. And Wesley, you're on to something. We've already quarantined all your servers. You can't affect the rest of Google. All the engineers sort of came in and sort of fixed Google Analytics affecting Google and slowing down Google. But this is an indication of you building this massive potential feature success. We want to dedicate most of Google's engineering resources to making sure you can get back online and figuring out how to scale this to a million times your capacity versus what you, a 10x, what you think the market was. And so Eric tells the story and calls it one of Google's biggest success disasters ever. And I think in having a success disaster, which I don't know the compliment or not, you sort of understand that when you're building something for a small market or for a small group of people, you limit yourself to what is potentially something that could be world-changing. I think Google Unlooks with an example. You built it. We built it and we thought”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Servers so quickly. And the mistake there in terms of doing this was that we didn't anticipate that the market size would be so huge because everybody else was building up for such a small group of people that were using analytics and we had built it for the world. So we had literally crashed Google and we had slowed Google down and sort of broken Google by launching Google Analytics. And everybody was very mad at me. I thought I was going to get fired that day and sort of started packing up my things and putting in a box just in case they were going to walk me out the door.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sort of reserving it, and we launched it that day, and it was, you know, we're sort of watching the numbers. And the first day, a lot of people used it. We're like, oh my goodness, all these people are using it. That's wonderful. On the second day, that number went up by 5x. And we're like, oh my goodness, 5x the number of people on day one had signed up. And by day three, we were sort of sitting there biting our fingernails because we had Larry and Sergei walk in the office and go, oh my goodness, Wesley, all Google's slowing down. What the hell have you done? I'm like, what are you talking about? And they sort of look at the, we pull up the server pages and they're like, your service is spilling over to the rest of Google's other services. You're slowing down. You've exhausted the entire capacity of all the servers that you've reserved and that you've set aside for using a Google Analytics. You're crashing Google literally. I was like, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, what do we do? What do we do? And so we start all running around chickens with our heads cut off going like, oh my gosh, we've not preserved them server space. How do we do this? We check our numbers. No, we reserve exactly the number of servers for what we thought was 10x in the market. There's no way we should have run out of.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much bigger your business could ever be than Adobe or for any of these other companies that are building tools only for a niche group of people who, again, spend their whole lives doing this, but again is a very, very small number compared to the entire world. And I think that that was something that was a core insight that I had on Google Analytics. There's this very famous story that Eric Schmidt has told before. When we launched Google Analytics, I planned for enough capacity on Google Analytics for what I thought was 10x what the market was. I was like, well, never run out of capacity. It's going to be amazing. We're going to launch to a bunch of different people across the world who want to use analytics. I had written the numbers down with one of the finance guys at Google and sort of said, well, okay, this is the number of people using Analytics today. What if we increase it by 10x? We're never going to run out of server space or capacity. So I had built, I had commissioned and had all these machines sort of reserved for launching Google Analytics.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, of course it makes it challenging, right? Like everybody thought about building analytics for IT people or for sort of skilled analysts. And we built Google Analytics for anybody that wanted to build a website so that they could see what was happening and make great decisions if they were deciding to buy advertising. And I think that's the same thing that Clef and Melanie sort of have with Canva, right? Which is, you know, I don't think we should just build a powerful design tool for designers. We want to build it for anyone that wants to go build design because design is something that everybody does, not just the privileged few. So I think that's a very powerful statement. And by the way, it also increases your market by an order of 100 X or more, right? Adobe building Photoshop are probably hundreds of thousands of people who are skilled or want to make design their profession. And that's great. They're a multi-billion dollar company for doing that. But imagine if you can sort of build that functionality into something that a billion people or Morgan used. And therefore your market starts increasing to factors of 100. And imagine”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, wonderful. Yes, I remember Melanie was so excited. I remember talking to Melanie and Cliff about who were the two founders. And they just had this vision going, today in the world of design, with Photoshop, with Adobe InDesign, with Adobe Illustrator, only the people who've spent years or months learning how to use the software can really understand how to use it. And we want to build something that you can start using this within the first hour and making gorgeous designs, beautiful business cards, greeting cards. You can make a website easily. And we want to put that in the hands of everybody versus only the privileged few who took two years of the classes learned to use this. And that just sort of said, oh my goodness, this is the same exact pattern that we did on Google Analytics. We moved something that only people with specific skills that spent years learning how to use.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was at MIT, when I was at HP Labs to really understand how to use those tools. But like your normal everyday person can't figure out how to use a water jet. You really literally hurt yourself, right? And so I think that that was what analytics was like, that only the most trained and skilled people could understand how to sort of generate the reports and sort of use the data. And with Google Analytics, we said, let's democratize that. It's so easy to install, so easy to use that any marketing person, any person that wants the information, that wants to use it, any advertiser of Google could really figure out how to use that easily and learn it within an hour or less. And I think that's something that is a very, very interesting sort of element that we've seen time and time again. If you build something that everyone can use versus only the most skilled people can use, you get a very, very powerful outcome. And that happened with Google Analytics. And I think that the same thing is happening also in the world design. One of the biggest investments, in fact, the largest check that Felicis has ever written was”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the key takeaway there on Google Analytics is that you want to, there's a certain thing that I call the democratization of technology. You see this pattern where you build these tools that only experts can use. Sort of these people that are trained for 10 years or five years that get very good at their craft and these very, very complicated tools. Most people cannot understand how to use. And analytics back when I started looking at it was exactly that way. There would be these very complicated packages. There was a company called Omniture that was building a really sort of powerful analytics tool, but the keyword was very, very powerful. It was like, it was like you walking to a machine shop and looking at all these sort of amazing tools like a CNC machine or a water jet looking at that. It's like, holy cow, I can do so many amazing things with this, but how the hell do I use this? I remember when I started first saw my machine shop, I sort of said, oh my goodness, I'm very intimidated. Then it took me almost six months to go through that training.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Device that you have in your house if you build a high end home, they advertise it in the home real estate listings that they have a nest thermostat in it. That's crazy. And I think that that's the type of thing that we look for when we invest in smart home devices. It has to be a consumer device that's built really, really well. It's easy to install and just is a delight to use. And I think that that's a very, very rare thing because sometimes people focus on devices that have a lot of features but isn't delightful. And I think that delightful thing is such a core element of sort of learning to invest in wanting to invest in sort of the best products that do very, very well.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that was a smart device that would know when you were home, that would be easy to set up, that would just be gorgeous, that would be smart enough to know when you're away so that you don't have to go and program it with these sort of, spend two hours reading the manual and learning how to program your thermostat. That was just something that just resonated with us and go, you know, boy, if he did this for a dumb music device back then when people were buying CD players and minidisk players and sort of did this for the world of Apple and sort of turned what was a dumb music player into one of the most worldest connected devices. If that same vision applied to thermostats in the house, like, boy, there could be something really interesting there. And this vision was more than just thermostat at that point. It was very, very clear that he was building a connected ecosystem in things that he wanted to sort of add to the house and make it a very, very smart connected system, like, you know, the smoke detector, for example, which is the second product that Ness came out with. So I think the key lesson there is that you really have to build devices, do one really well, build it in such a way that it's easy install that people love. Today, Nest is sort of the”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was a great company. I didn't lead the deal at Google Ventures. One of my partners did, but I was there intimately. When we first met Tony Fidel at the TED conference, where he sort of said, hey, I'm working on something really, really secretive. And Tony's the father of the iPod, he's a legend in Silicon Valley. He went, Steve stole him and sort of, Steve Jobs stole him an apple, and he sort of just revolutionized and created that whole music business for Apple. And so when he had left Apple recently and he whispered to us, he was working on something new and wanted to show it to us. We got super excited. And I think that that was sort of the genesis about how Nest came into Google Ventures. We saw something from a product visionary where he said, I want to go change the world of thermostats. And we kind of sat there and we were like, wait, thermostat's like, that's a weird thing to work on. And it didn't quite click with us when he started first said it, but when he saw the demo, we saw how easy it was, how beautiful it was, his sort of vision of making it.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, my takeaway, spending my time at Google, was really just doing something different every three years, right? If you look at my history at Google, I always moved on to something completely different every three years. And it was very, very uncomfortable to be able to do something like that. I spent three and a half years on Google Analytics. When I started, no one cared about it. People were doubting why they even wanted analytics at Google. I remember one of the very, very senior sort of engineering VPs who was very powerful at that time at Google, sort of come up to me and say, Wesley, we're a search company. We're not an enterprise company. Why are you spending time building enterprise software? This is just completely like out of our core competency. I can't believe you're watching.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I respected that Google starting companies sort of gave me that call, and so I just wound up making a move. It's been a fantastic year and a half working with him. So, you know, the one takeaway from it is that it's always good to sort of wander the world, and it's always good to sort of try different things. It's always good to sort of be uncomfortable, Kniden sort of gave me a very uncomfortable offer because I wasn't ready to sort of do VC again and sort of said, hey, we'll make this work, we'll do it together. There's so much I can learn from you, and there's so much, and honestly, there's so much I learned from him and so much I've learned from the CEOs that we've had the privilege of investing in that it's been a fantastic journey and one that I hope to continue for a very long time.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sankett, who founded Felisis, and he said, Wesley, you know, you've spent a great time at Google, you've spent a lot of time really learning how to build great products. Some of your products have become Bill Meller businesses that you started, you know, why don't you come join me again and sort of help sort of bring your vision of smart home, of smart internet, of smart devices, products that people build to felices and come and help the companies that we've invested in, come find great new companies, and do it here at Felesis with me. And I sort of said that was really fantastic offer. I'm sort of really still favoring my next thing. And Iden just being who he is, being one of the most persistent and successful salespeople ever in the history of Google, you know, sort of said, Wesley, I'm never going to take no for an answer. I think that's to his credit and to the companies that he's in his credit. I was getting calls from all of his CEOs going, Leslie, like, you know, I would love to have you in my company. You're not investing now, but if you were providing you, you're involved in my company, it means so much of the world to me. And all these mutual friends.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ball of the house together and see if we can get it working and sort of built this living laboratory, sort of like the MIT media lab or something else where you could test all these new things together and it was plug and play and we had wired networking wireless network coverage everywhere and we sort of wanted to sort of put things in there that would just break things. And it was great, just learning how different pieces work together, learning how to sort of break things, learning how to really integrate things together and sort of work with a team of people to understand how this house sort of built. And throughout building this house, I met great people, people building the next generation of thermostats, building the next generation of smoke detectors, and it was really fantastic to sort of have people tell you about the products that they were building, tell you about the vision that they had to change the world of home security or to change the world of building safe internet for kids and so forth. In that journey, I stumble upon a really good friend of mine who I've known for 15 plus years who works very early on at Google.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On behalf of Google, no one knew what venture was at Google and no one really understood why even Google would have a venture fund. And today they've done over 300 investments and it's grown to be a $500 million year fund. So it was fun watching sort of that start from almost nothing to what it is today. But after 12 years at Google, you get a little restless. It's a great company. It's a great brand. It's great to sort of be there very early on. But you get a little restless. So I wound up sort of saying, you know, it's time for me to figure the next chapter in my life. And I sort of took a year off. I sort of wandered the world. I built a smart home because that was what I always wanted to do. I love building things with my hands. So I sat down with a great architect and a great contractor and sort of said, let's go build something physical. Let's go see if we can get it all working together. Let's go import the most interesting sort of Wi-Fi video cameras, video conferencing, televisions, smoke detectors, thermostats, things that most people would sort of put a dumb device in there that never talked to anything else and wanted to put”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a really fantastic almost 13 year run at Google. I started out there as a product manager helping sort of write the early ad system. It sort of went through my life building great products there. I stumbled upon this example of sort of people not really understanding how to measure their ads and wound up starting and founding Google Analytics or brought in a great company called Urgent Software. Same thing happened in terms of the voice area. Skype was sort of making a big inroad at that point and Larry said, maybe you should think about what people should do on the phone and real-time communications. So I wound up and found a company called Grand Central and bought them in and helped them build Google Voice and started that. And then when I was ready to sort of leave Google, Larry sort of came along and said, hey, we're starting a venture fund and it would be great to sort of have you involved somewhere. So I was sort of one of the very early partners at Google Ventures and sort of helped build out Google Ventures and sort of spent five years investing.”
2016-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source