A Christmas Story; 3 Founders: Founding, Funding, Building Together
Everybody needs a little help at their start(s). These three helped each other.
Every Christmas holiday is a time of celebration and reflection. Going into the holiday season I was thinking about the richness and color of the the collective stories of the creation of the companies I have funded over 28 years as a VC investor.. but also how I had never in years past taken the time to collect them.
Looking back, I often wish I had done even a brief video with the creators to document the crazy and interesting stories of so many of their starts before those tales got lost in the shifting sands of time.
So this year, I decided to do something about it and document a small part of the intertwined stories of the founder CEOs of Zoom and Treasure Data and Wish.com at the intersection of their starts.
The plan: bring some Santa 🎅🏻 hats and ask Kevin Wolf to document a fun and free ranging conversation as a Christmas present 🎁 for each of them.
The year 2019 brought fabulous next steps for these founders. Zoom’s Eric Yuan launched the most highly valued and also the best performing tech IPO of the year and Treasure Data’s Hiro Yoshikawa completed a banner year that included the closing of a merger into Softbank’s ARM Corporaton. Wish’s Peter Szulczewski drove a banner year including a new funding at an $11B valuation (Peter had to cancel last minute as his two largest revenue days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, were happening the week of our session. So we will be planning a followup 😊 with different hats 🎅🏻 )
Among the beautiful facets of these stories is that all of these companies were “babies” together, all getting started in roughly the same timeframe, and each of them relied upon each other in their earliest years in some way.
Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom and Peter Szulczewski, CEO of Wish, were seed backers of Hiro Yoshikawa’s Treasure Data. I was lucky to be the common link as a backer in the original seed in Wish and Zoom and FoundingChair of Treasure Data. Zoom CEO Eric and Wish CEO Peter probably would have felt guilty not writing checks since I wrote checks for them first!
Hiro’s Treasure Data was the Hadoop and data science infrastructure powering Wish, and also used by Zoom. Danny Zhang, Wish’s co-founder CTO wrote both a seed check into Treasure Data, and also the very first front end connecting to our platform in Python, which was used by many of our early customers!
Wish and Treasure Data both built distributed organizations with key people infrastructure overseas by running their organizations on Zoom.
There’s an old saying in venture capital that one should never take “Startup on Startup Risk” for obvious reasons. If you’re betting your future on other startups where the oddsmakers might say there’s over a 90% chance of any given startup failing… well, one can do the math multiplying out a string of single digit probabilities of success..
I this case, these amazing founders managed to depend on each other and beat the odds, and create over $30 Billion of market value in the process.
Note to Eric and Hiro: as I mentioned, this video is a little Christmas 🎄 gift 🎁 for 2019. I hope someday when we are all super old that your grandchildren will play this for their kids to see 😊.
🎁 Merry Christmas! 🎁
