I Wish I Knew this When I Was a Young Entrepreneur_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 Haist and FKS Tha to actually have me speak today. I think the last time I actually spoke at a Haist event was maybe 22 years ago, which 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 so I have extremely fond memories and it's been a long time and so far to be back. So I was born in Hong Kong and I graduated from University of San Francisco with a computer science degree. And then I went to UC Davis for my graduate studies and then I got my master's degree from them. And then halfway through my PhD program I quit and I went to work for Sun. I was at Sun for about 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 and reached $58 billion in market cap and eventually got to just under $2 billion in revenue and sold to Oracle for just under $9 billion during the financial crisis. And then I've done other companies and been very active in investing in early stage companies for the past decade plus. And so about five years ago I started a firm with two other partners focusing on seed stage investment in infrastructure technology. So 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 era. So very thankful to be here. I wish I knew this when I was a young entrepreneur.

There's no doubt, I think one of the things that I think when I was... it was the first time that I became a CEO and I think BEA was one of those experiences that you became a CEO in a hurry. And welcome to tech, nothing you can plan ahead because things happen, you know, because of timing and momentum. I wish I had a much better understanding of how important the governance part of the company needed to be. Which is one of the things that I spent a lot of time advising companies, especially when the first time really the company has a board of directors is when they price their round, right? So when they get to an A, and sometimes mostly they get to an A, then you price the new investment. That's when you congregate the board. So you will have like board seats and board assignment from the investors. I used to think that's just for rubber stamping. It turned out it's not the case. So boards are not for good times, boards are for bad times. So when you have bad times, this is when your external board member with experience, they rely on the experience and step in to help you with the problem. I think the mistake that I made was I had a terrific board, but my board was not young. So my head other committee was really probably one of those ultimate quintessential gentlemen, you know, in Silicon Valley. But he was not a young guy, was in his 70s. The problem is people in that kind of age when they are on the board, how much risk can they take, right? Their risk propensity is going to drop dramatically. So the company may still be in a big risk-taking era, but if your board member don't match with that, now if something happened that they have to now take charge of a portion of it, then now you become, you're in trouble. Now they will take the most conservative stance and take the longest trying to resolve a problem which at the end may be the same result, but then that process could really harm the company in the process. So I didn't really appreciate that enough because I thought, you know, I'm in charge, I do the whole thing, who cares, you know, you go to the board meeting, you tell them a little bit, you know, you have some good food, you leave, right? Turns out that is not the case. But I think we still have this issue in the valley in general. We don't pick the best possible. We improved some for the public companies, but I think we still have to do a lot more. Look at the diversity in the boardroom, right? It's still terrible. Look at how many Asians are on the board, how many women are on the board, right? It improved a little bit for a while, that was a critical thing to do. Now the market, how people don't talk about it anymore, we're back in the other game, right? So those are things that I think we have to do the right thing. So if I had knew, I would have done that very differently and I think the results may have turned out to be very different, right? Yeah, thank you.

But he's a very good friend. I think he was very kind. I'm completely confident that, you know, like as grown in size, they have like better CEO than the job that I did. I certainly had a very good time, you know. And I think coaching CEOs is a very tricky business because first you have to put yourself always in their shoes. Which is why there are very few CEO coaches in our business in tech. There are very few good CEO coaches, you know. They were good ones but they died, you know, they passed away. I think the reason why this is not done is because we are too quickly to make judgment of what we would do, right? It's hard to be a CEO coach if you haven't done the job before. You've done the job, you immediately put yourself in the context with little knowledge. We are in a very, very strange culture. Our culture is quick to make judgment, right? I'm sure that all of you work in tech, you have ran into so many people, they're so fast in making judgment on every little thing at work because we're encouraged to make fast decisions. So fast to the point where you lose the ability to have sympathy, you lose the ability to be able to think, like put yourself in someone else's shoes. So I think what I've done, what I'm trying to do, I'm still working on this, is always try to put myself in someone else's shoes. And the other thing is never act like I'm their boss. Never, never ever tell them what to do. I don't ever do that. So when I coach all of the CEOs that is on my portfolio, and I still coach a bunch of CEOs where I don't use the word coach, I'm their friend. So I invite them over, we just have a chat, because their job is super lonely. I tell you, especially running a public company. I have about four or five public company CEOs that come to me very often. They're so lonely. I mean, you know, our compliance requirement is so tough and you know what the shareholders are asking them to do are so unreasonable. And they constantly are being trying to thread between this line doing the right thing and never have to think about themselves. Who does? So we have a lot of those things that's going on. So what my role has always trying to be is to try to think in their context what to do and try to give them opinion about options how they would think. I would never give them an answer. So I think the more I do this, I think the more it seem to be working actually, allowing them to think and deriving the right answers. You know, there is one very famous CEO that recently have you seen that, you know, like he's in trouble and I spent a lot of time with him. And through that journey it's clear, you know, like he was misunderstood. So my job is to point that out to him and say, well, perhaps some of these things in the public world they don't understand you, right? Even though you're doing all the right things, you may have to come out and communicate clearly what your intention was. And the more you can communicate, the more the people will understand and allow you to ride through the tough time. So I think some of those things, I really, I think I use a lot of it. And I will say I'm not the CEO of CEOs, maybe I'm friends of a lot of CEOs and a lot of them have done much better than I do and I'm so proud of it, you know. And in my opinion, we're able to get them a little further, that to me is satisfaction and it's directly reflected in the performance of the companies and the way that they carry themselves. I can't be more proud. You know, my own portfolio company, actually I have one CEO that when we invested in them in 2020, they were, they have nine people doing, actually a company originally based in Hong Kong. They're doing barely like, you know, 10, 12 million revenue. Now they're over 100 million revenue, 300 people, moved the entire company to a different country and were able to just prosper in a way where they become so successful. It's like that's satisfaction to me. By the way, that's also the switching in the context. I have to kind of like reprogram my head to think it's okay that I don't have to be hands-on doing it. It's okay that someone else that actually do it. I'm just a participant in the process and their success I can enjoy just as much. It took me a while to get there but it's great fun, you know. I like, so in many ways I feel I have, I wish I have like 50 fingers, you know, so there's not enough fingers to dabble into enough things. You know, I'm worried about scalability of this program but you know, perhaps I have to set up a system. I always just have 10 CEOs I spend most of the time with. Time management is my biggest challenge these days.