Advice for Asian/Immigrant/Young Entrepreneurs_Silicon Valley Asian Business Talk_Alfred_Chuang

Thank you, Roger. Thank you for inviting me. This is my honor and really it's a privilege to be here today. Thanks to Haas and FKS for having me speak today. I think the last time I actually spoke at a Haas event was maybe 22 years ago. Someone just found it. I think I went to a dinner in Catino and I spoke at the dinner. It was very well attended and I have extremely fond memories. It's been a long time and it's wonderful to be back.

I was born in Hong Kong and I graduated from the University of San Francisco with a computer science degree. Then I went to UC Davis for my graduate studies and got my master's degree from there. Halfway through my PhD program, I quit and went to work for Sun Microsystems. I was at Sun for just under nine years and then I founded my own company called BEA Systems. BEA was a very successful venture. We went public in four years and pivoted the company into the web space in the late '90s, reaching $58 billion in market cap and eventually getting to just under $2 billion in revenue. We sold to Oracle for just under $9 billion during the financial crisis.

Then I've done other companies and been very active in investing in early-stage companies for the past decade plus. About five years ago, I started a firm with two other partners focusing on seed-stage investment in infrastructure technology. That's what I've been very focused on in the past few years. I'm having a grand time. This is like 2000 all over again for this AI area, so very thankful to be here.

Challenges and advice for Asian entrepreneurs. I think one of the things that's the hardest by nature for us, right, North Asian, South Asians, is we live in the West in a very loud community. That's quite obvious. You look at our presidential candidates. This country is, the name of the game is to be the loudest in the room. Culture is hard to fight, so that's what this country goes for. The West, not just us, but I think Europe in many ways are like that. It's almost like a comic show going on.

I feel almost in some way responsible to lead. This has been a very interesting week. I think I've been on stage probably eight or nine times this week, starting from Monday. Sometimes I look at myself and say I really don't like getting on stage. It's really not my thing. I dread driving here, I dread walking in this parking lot, I dread this process. In many ways, I wanted to avoid meeting new people. But I feel responsible because unless I tell the story, I feel responsible for the venture firm I'm working for, the colleagues I'm working with, because we need to tell the story.

I feel responsible for being an Asian in the US. The injustice is done to us. I feel responsible that we don't have more Asian leaders. It's improved dramatically. I tell you, when I went to raise money in 1994, now this is 30 years ago, time really flies, almost every venture firm that I walked into, I never saw a founder with an Asian face on it. So I know what's stacked against me. But someone has to do it. If you don't do it, then we're stuck there. So the rest of the world is dependent on us to continue to do this.

I'll tell you an interesting stat. One of the things that we do very often at Race Capital, and probably we do it better than almost everybody, is to be able to find projects inside universities and try to extract them to make them into a company. I've done many of them: Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley in particular, the Sky Lab, the RISE Lab, Stanford, Georgia Tech, a bunch of these places.

And the stat is very scary. In STEM, about half of our graduate students, PhD students, are international. More than half. And this is one of the things that I've been campaigning in Washington. If we stop issuing visas, and also there's political sentiment, if they stop coming, the innovation in this country will stop at some point. That number is trending very, very quickly. If you really go to the UCs and you go to MIT, you could look deeply into this. Look at the number of incoming international students, especially the ones from China. That number is dropping very rapidly.

And another very interesting stat, because I'm looking at so many of these university projects, more than half the people walking in to see me are international students. Now they've decided to stay. They don't want to go back. That's another phenomenon that's happening. So they all now have to turn into the founders. They will be CEOs. One thing, you know what we're in love with? We love this concept of founder-CEO so much. They are priced higher on the stock market. Look at the top companies that are run by the founder-CEO. They have the fastest-growing stock price imaginable. So this country is completely addicted to this process. So we must find a way to improve this art for all of us.

But it's everyone's responsibility. Everybody in this room, everyone in TIE, everybody in Haas, every member, every imaginable thing that has anything to do with us, we have to push this. The more people get onto the podium and are able to talk about this and talk about what they do and encourage other people to say this is possible for us, it just kind of hardens the statistics. So I think it's a responsibility thing. But it's not generally in culturally our nature. We're okay to not be the person who has the loudest voice. I actually don't think that's okay anymore. We don't have a choice. I don't feel I have a choice. Otherwise, I become irresponsible.

And I think there were times I didn't do it. I have to be honest, I was so burned out. BEA had to do so much of it for a while. I actually stopped and then slowly I ramped back and said, you know what, this is crucial. A lot of it has to do with, I think, COVID and all the racism issues that we ran into. It was further encouragement to say, you know what, we all have to do more. And I really believe in that.

I think it's kind of interesting. So how did this whole founder concept get in my head? I think mostly because of Sun. Sun was really a magical place. Sun Microsystems. Yes. I encourage you to do a couple of things. One is, because Sun's been gone for 12 years, maybe longer, people have forgotten how great a company it was. It probably has produced the most number of great CEOs that I know of from a single company. Eric Schmidt, a bunch of others, came out of this company. But there's a reason why that happened. It has a lot to do with the culture of the company. It was a company that, for most of the time I worked there, was a pretty crazy place. For a little company, when I first joined them, they had I think 1,000 people. We had three operating systems, a free hardware platform. We don't even have enough resources to do one. But why did it do that way? Because it has a fundamental cultural element in it that basically allows everybody to do whatever they believe deeply is the right thing to do.

There was a very good interview recently that Sam Altman interviewed Vinod Khosla. I highly encourage you to watch this. It's on YouTube. It's very, very good. And it reminds me of what I was just getting at. And then Vinod, unfortunately, he left and they let him go. But he talked a lot about, like, in the world I'm in, in VC, he said something very interesting. He said 90% of the VCs don't have any value. And when I watched the video, I said, oh my God, this is so Vinod and classic. I said what he really meant is 99%. He didn't mean 90%, but he tried to be nice. He said 90%. And he said 70% of VCs likely harm you in your journey. So I was thinking what he really meant, 99% also. Okay. And he said because they have never operated a company before. So he had this tremendous regard, not just the invention part, but the operating part.

So I have to be honest, I think what drove me had a lot to do with the place I came out of. I saw the founders were a different class of people. They don't think like any other employee that I met. Now, seeing Bill Joy's two Ferraris parked in the parking lot didn't hurt either. You know, I aspired to own one of those in my life also. So I'm thinking, okay, I can get there. Being a VP, it doesn't matter how I climb the ladder, I'm never going to be them. So the only chance I have is to do my own. And once you cross the barrier, now you understand the pain they're in. So now you're fully responsible.

I remember so clearly. So we were finally big enough, I think maybe BEA was two or 300 people. So we have a receptionist. And I remember we gave her stock options. This is the same woman that was a receptionist. I was thinking, wow, we better do a good job because her family, her kids are going to college, completely dependent on us. I hired a guy, our first customer support person. I think one year into the journey of the company, our very first only customer support rep. And I think after he worked there for the first year, he did a very, very good job. He was probably one of the most phenomenal customer success persons. This word wasn't even used back then. He told me a story. He said, you have no idea. He said through a bunch of hardship, he lost his house and his family. His entire family, four of them, were living in a motel for the four months leading into the opportunity at BEA. If we didn't hire him, give him the job, they would have been next homeless.

And by the way, this is how you go into despair in this country. It's sometimes accidental. It's not intentional because they did something wrong. It's just that one thing wrong, then another, you get in financial trouble. And our social system is not there to rescue you. And you can just boom, get right into it. By the fifth year, it was a big year. His two kids graduated from Harvard. And those are, I think, the life-changing things where you kind of like, it gets into your head. Once you become the founder, you feel responsible for not just those people but their family. It's a wonderful feeling to have. It's an enormous burden. I have to be honest, I don't miss it that much. But having thousands and thousands of families that's on your payroll is a tough thing. But that motivation is like no other motivation. You have no choice. You have to be successful. It's not just for you. Other people's lifeline depends on it. So I think it's an enormous thing.

And the other thing is, what choice do you have in life? This is a never-ending chase, the chase to try to make yourself better, try to be more successful. It never ends. Otherwise, I don't see the purpose. By the way, I'm definitely an addict. It's a very difficult thing to stop. In the morning, I have another thing now I'm chasing.

And Roger, there's no doubt. If I'm choosing a founder, for example, sometimes they walk in when I'm funding a pre-seed. They might not even have a deck, let alone a product. So what are you picking, right? So most people, they pick the pedigree. What have they worked at? Have they created something important before? That's mostly how venture firms pick. I don't pick that. I tell you, the first thing I pick is, is this guy tough enough? Is this woman tough enough? Can they go through hardship? Will they survive when they get into trouble? Would they know they're in trouble? Would they come to me early enough that I could provide help? And they're not going to get scared. They're willing to continue to punch it through. That's a very big thing. Toughness is a very crucial part. And that's a value that you build into the system.

Welcome to the club. If you found a company, you can't say, oh, I'm only good to develop a product. Selling is not my thing. There's no such thing. I could care less about cleaning the toilet, like, you know, and fixing the light bulb. It's all a job. It's what a founder does. It's all of it. Sales is hard. And I think it's actually a very good question. Very, very funny. So after five years in the creating, like, I've gone from a super angel into forming a really complete venture firm. I kind of surprised myself. So, you know, everyone has a slightly different operating model. What do you do that's special to help your company? So some, you know, they help them recruit. Some firms they specialize in helping them find a co-founder. Some firms, I don't know what they do. They give them space. We found actually the most helpful thing is actually to help them get lift-up and sales. So we actually hired one, I actually hired one of my ex-VPs of sales. They're very good at zero to the first two, three million of sales to help the company. And then he arms resources. So when we actually fund the company and if they found the want, we throw them at the company and get an email address and go sell. You know, use Rolodex and see how do we get traction and get the thing off the ground. But the founder has to participate because eventually he will help you get a company together, hire the first sales rep, maybe even the first sales manager. He will leave because we have other new companies to do. This model turned out to be working like marvelously. It gives us really an edge and it's really what the company needs.

This is a very hard thing. The first thing you have to determine, right, are you product-led or are you going to be sales-led? This is a very confusing thing in the beginning for most companies. You say, I think I'm sales-led, but in terms of the product, really it's a product. But you want to ignore that because you just happen to have a couple inbound that you say, oh, I was very good in selling this deal. So I'm going to go from now on just do a bunch of cold outreach on LinkedIn and see if I can get to these guys. And now you're getting no word. It's crickets. Now you're scared and say, what do I do? So this is a very tough thing. Once you get enough traction, how do you scale it? And that journey to the first million dollars in annual recurring revenue is, to me, maybe much harder than the journey that I did from 100 to a billion or anything else. That gives you the lift-up to say, I think I have something. Next, you have to watch out for is my barrier entry high enough that I'm not going to have 10 competitors chasing the same customer? How do I make my product distinctive enough? Those things are crucial. And by the way, that's what the founders have to do. One of the founders has to do this. And if yourself don't want to do it, you better go find a co-founder that really, really wants to do it. I tell you, a product-driven person and a technologist that want to sell, all power to you. Those are the most dangerous people. Those are the best salesmen. Those are the people that sell you stuff they don't have and the people still want to keep buying from them. Which is really what we do for a living.