Wesley Chan, new managing director at Felicis Ventures. Image via @weschan
After recently stepping down from his role at internet search titan Google’s venture capital investment arm Google Ventures, Wesley Chan has made the move to rival Felicis Ventures.
Joining as a managing director, Chan enters his new role at the same time as the Felicis Ventures IV fund rises from US$96m to US$120m.
Chan has quite the history with Google, founding both Google Analytics and Google Voice in the past, before joining Google Ventures, as TechCrunch reports.
At Google Ventures, Chan invested in start-ups including AngelList, UberConference (which became Switch), and Optimizely. Other investments, such as Parse and iPerian, were ultimately bought out by social network Facebook and pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, respectively.
“Wesley will join as the fourth partner on our investment team,” said Aydin Senkut, who worked alongside Chan at Google and founded Felicis Ventures back in 2006.
“This is an exciting way to begin the new year, which I have no doubt will surpass last year in terms of the amazing achievements of our portfolio companies.
“In 2014, we were fortunate enough to celebrate two new US$1bn+ companies (Credit Karma and Adyen) and seven US$100m+ exits (Twitch at US$970m, Brightroll at US$640m, Dropcam at US$555m, RelateIQ at US$390m, LiveRamp at US$310m, and Acompli at US$200m).
“Wesley has already hit the ground running with two pending investments, which we look forward to announcing in coming weeks,” Senkut added.
According to Forbes, Felicis Ventures always looks for feedback from founders, even the ones who reject it, to figure out where it’s weak. Operating experience, where Chan is known to be strong, has been one of those areas.
“Felicis also brings a different look to the deal table, with an eight-person team more diverse than the typical firm. Most of the staff are women, and each Felicis investor speaks multiple languages,” according to Forbes.
