What Makes Inexperienced Founders Attractive to VCs_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 so far 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 them. Then halfway through my PhD program, I quit and went to work for Sun. I was at Sun for just under nine years and 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.

So I have to tell a story. I think this was in 2021. I funded a company to do multicloud ops. I knew that was going to be important. That part may be a little bit of foresight to know that GPUs were generally not going to be available, so no one's going to be using a single cloud anymore. We were very lucky to intercept that market when it was really needed. I was questioning myself a little bit when I first met the founder. In the Zoom days, you don't get to see the person face to face, you can hide a little bit. This is actually very advantageous for people in whatever age group they're in, because that's just not the thing you focus on. You really focus on what they do instead of who they are. Now as the time returns, I'm doing probably a good 60 plus percent of my meetings face to face, so you're able to look somebody in the eye and build a little bit of that friendship in advance of trying to partner with them to do a company. This founder had a very interesting story. He didn't tell me how old he was, but he said he was quite young. He was very intrigued with onboarding applications under the cloud at a very young age. He knew one of his neighbors was with a company called BitTorrent, so he volunteered to wash his car. He lived two doors down and did it for free, day after day, until the guy gave him an internship. That's when he got in trouble because they found out he was under 16 years old. But he was so good, he liked it so much he quit school and joined the company full time. The company got bought by Twitch. Somewhere in that journey, he became the head of DevOps at Twitch. Twitch got bought by Amazon, so then he rolled into Amazon. He was giving speeches in Vegas at Amazon's conference and had to be escorted out because he was an underage kid. When I funded him to do a company, he was 19 years old. I think now we're in an era where children are learning about technology very, very early on in age. The discovery of their special talent is very easy to spot than it used to be. They can do amazing things like start writing code at a super early age. You can see these summer camps teaching kids before they can read, they're coding. I think we're looking at a new generation of intelligent workforce that's going to be in a very early stage. Why did I like his name is Johnny Dallas. Why do I like Johnny so much? Because Johnny has no box. He never went into any box, so there's no box that can constrain him. When I talk to him, it's like the world is completely freed up. All the things that I'm constrained from, I used to think that thinking out of the box was nothing compared to him, because he really was never in the box. I learned a lot in my time spending one-on-one with him to learn how to free myself from the box itself, to be more daring, to try harder. This world has remarkable people that are the biggest risk takers. Elon is the biggest risk taker. If he had made $200 billion, he will borrow another $100 to bet $300 on his next thing. Most of the world is on the side looking and saying, is the guy mad? But I admire that level of risk-taking to the T. That's how you build new things, shoot a rocket into the sky, and build a satellite network that we didn't think was possible by civilians. That part is extraordinarily intriguing, which is why I encourage teams to always add young people. Obviously, I love them to finish school, otherwise we'll be out of business. Nobody's going to be studying at university. To me, nothing still beats education. He promised me, by the way, when I found him, I said at some point in your life you must go to college and get your degree, whether part-time or whatever. With his skills, he'll be able to blast through it in no time, but he still should do it. I think diversify education, because I think university is a place to teach people how to learn. It's not a place to teach people about knowledge. What I learned in university was really the skill to learn, which is a lifelong skill.