EP 61 | Forbes 30 Under 30: Making Venture Capital Accessible with Shuo Chen

And you're like one of the first people that I've actually looked through that I feel like is totally ten-x, and you probably don't even know what Ten-x is, but that's something that's big in this community of listeners who watch and listen to this podcast. So without further ado, welcome Shuo Chen to the Work Women podcast. Shuo, how are you doing today?

family ever since. So I was born in Beijing myself, though my sister was born here and grew up on the West coast, had spent some time in Vancouver, Canada, which is also, as I was sharing with you earlier, Natalie, where I'm spending some time now, spending time with my grandparents who are still retired in this area and then also am based predominantly out of San Francisco Bay area.

What I'm working on now full time, I'm on the venture side, so I run an early stage fund that focuses on investing in startups based out of Silicon Valley, and I also teach as faculty at UC Berkeley.

I always really was. A very curious child would get myself in trouble a lot, but would get to work on just kind of cranking out different solutions to problems

that other people usually deem as either giving up or impossible. And, uh, that led me down to a path of a lot of exploration where I didn't really know what I wanted to study, so took a bit of classes here and there, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and that took me down eventually, the path of entrepreneurship, where my business partner and I together had started a company that was really selling into large universities as well as

large banking institutions. After our startup exited, I went into work on Wall Street myself, covered technology during that time, and really missed working with startups and founders. So seven years ago came back to the venture side. Uh, but to your point, earlier on representation for young kids, for role models growing up, I do think it would be so cool if someone listening to this would go back and talk to say their kids and say, you know, there are so many cool careers. Let me give you

a sense of what might be possible. That would be so cool.

And my guess is you would probably argue that it's absolutely accessible to anybody who was interested in in going down that path.

Whereas I think with hard work, it's possible to get in for folks who come from more traditional backgrounds where they didn't have the luxury of getting exposure to venture capital. For example, during their earlier operating days, they had bootstrapped the whole thing. For example, they might not have had the same ease of accessibility to if they wanted to

become an investor. So one of the things that I do now, outside of my full time investing role is, um, serving on the board of this nonprofit that we had helped co-found, where one of the programs that we run is a venture fellowship program for folks who are ten plus years into their respective careers, never had exposure to venture now, heard about venture for the first time and

want to get involved in some capacity. And we help those folks make a career switch or at least learn more about what venture capital is like and how to get involved.

now is likely a business owner, small business owner. So Carnal Ventures and the company that I work with, um, that's who we help. We help the small business owner in specifically the United States of America, help grow their business from likely they're starting at $1 million business. They probably had their business for a handful of years. It might even be a family business. And they have aspirations to grow their business from 1 million to 5 million

And then from 5 million to 10 million. And so they're listening to this podcast in order to understand how do they go about scaling and growing their business. And we normally go through this very traditional route of how do you optimize your people, and how do you add marketing to the equation that actually targets the right customer so that you get more sales, that grows your business. But on the VC side, how does that become accessible to a small business owner operating in today's climate?

for someone else. So really, kudos. And to answer your question about how to learn more about venture capital, I think now with is particularly post pandemic, with a lot more things going virtual, there's a lot more accessible content

than ever before. If you wanted to learn about venture capital as an industry or even emerging technologies and figure out, I know you mentioned Ten-x, and I'm not sure if this is the same context in which you use it, but how emerging technologies could help scale a business ten-x and leverage the power of technology to automate things and bring in, um, more optimization to a company than ever before.

So one of the top resources that I personally always enjoy is going to all these major universities that are known for their technology and innovation hubs. And I say that because a university is a great way of attracting talent, not just at a early stage from college level students, but all the way up to executive programs, to folks who are working in large scale institutions. So you have a widespread, uh, spectrum of content that may be interesting

and are relevant. So I would certainly recommend looking at your local university or your local educational institution and trying to figure out what, uh, in-person or even virtual events and activities are going on. So the nonprofit that I mentioned earlier, that has a venture fellowship program, I have the fortune of serving on this board. This nonprofit is called Decode. It is affiliated with Berkeley and Stanford. It's it started really out as the largest technology and innovation

community that's co-hosted between Berkeley and Stanford. But since the pandemic, have really scaled and grown way beyond the two universities. And there's a ton of conversations that happen within this particular ecosystem that are really interesting and are oftentimes extending

across multiple communities. For example, if you want to learn about venture capital as specific to blockchain and cryptocurrencies, well, there's plenty of recent conversations there around that you want to learn about venture, particularly as it applies to education technologies and how to scale up an education startup. There's a ton of conversation around there, so for folks who are interested, it's definitely possible to find videos available on

YouTube online. Beyond non-profits and universities, I think another really good channel is to directly go onto the websites and platforms of all of these funds. More funds than ever before are more public about how they invest, what they invest in, and sometimes might even share some of the investment memos that they've written to conduct analysis on the

kinds of companies that they're looking at. So I think it's a great way of leveraging that to learn about what is venture capital, how does venture capital work and what are best practices to leverage.

accessible to me. Therefore, I'm going to go learn about this new thing that could help my business before it's, you know, not not that it's too late, but before it's so widely used that it's forced upon people and it just becomes commonplace. Like, how could they get a little bit of an edge and change that mindset earlier?

now in mainstream media than ever before. But still, very few people have taken the steps to just hands on go beyond buy a bitcoin or buy Ethereum to say, how can I think about using that in my respective business?

I do think it is picking your battles, and once you pick something that sounds interesting that you want to learn more about, then figuring out, how can I make this so small that it's something that I can commit to doing, and it could be so small as to let me sign up to attend an event live and actually show up. And once I show up, let me actually ask a question. And once I ask a question, let me take the pains of following up with the

speaker afterwards. So you would be surprised how many people are openly sharing their contact information online, or how easily reachable they are on LinkedIn. And you would also for the average listener, I think they would be surprised how few people typically reach out after an event. So I can tell you from firsthand experience that I'm speaking to an audience of, say, a thousand people live all at

the same time. Even if I encourage people to reach out, I'll get a handful of people, around a dozen who actually follow up on email. Even if I shared my email broadly. And out of the dozen people, maybe like 2 to 3 will follow up again afterwards. So that really tells you how few people are taking the initiative and the proactivity to really have a conversation. I think if you find a technology area or a particular concept or a new business model to be really interesting, find

events that are relevant to that. Make sure that you show up to the event live. Ask the speaker a question. Be memorable in engaging with that question, and really follow up.

We met people, we talked to people, and then we formed this business partnership. Most of the game is actually just showing up to an event and it sounds so silly and like, okay, what event do I go to? But once you pick that target and then you get around people who are talking about it, it is wild how accessible information and people really are, and it's cool

to see that. That's also, I feel like the spaces that we operate in are very different, but it's it's still the, the resounding advice that that you're also giving as well.

can potentially add value. And I think in my early days, all I did was show up to events and just offer my time to be helpful, even if it's as small as helping the event organizer move chairs around or help coordinate logistics. And I think it's just by offering some of the most basic things, but showing consistency to willingness to do that, that makes a huge difference.

a person just being bad. It's so important to separate who you are and what you do. Even I think oftentimes, especially as founders, we link our personal identities so much with what we do that if the work that we do doesn't go well, that we also personally take a huge hit to our confidence. And I think it's just so important to separate the two, even if they're intrinsically

linked brands. I wouldn't say by any stretch that confidence is something that I'm really good at, but rather I think over time I've learned to distinguish between what I do and how I can iterate on that, build on that, and become better over time, while simultaneously not having failures be a huge hit to to who I am.

I improve on from the previous time? And if I feel like I had done everything right and the outcome was just not in my control, no regrets whatsoever. And because I think there is a difference between process versus outcome, we can only control the process and the outcome. Sometimes it is a matter of luck. So is there really, for example, if we're applying for a job, is there really a tangible difference between the top, say, three people who get a job, the third person and the fourth person?

It's not as clear that there is an obvious difference. I was even having this conversation, uh, the other day

with a very close friend. We were looking at research in this space that said, Oftentimes, if we're looking at grants that are given out or startups that receive funding or people who get jobs, you look at the top number of people who have gotten it versus the immediate runner ups who would have gotten it but didn't get it in the long term, you actually see people who didn't get it with more success because they have more of a chip on their shoulder, and they work even

harder at getting to where they need to be. So I personally see every single time where it hasn't worked out as one point in time, in a much longer time horizon, where I have then more time to keep trying and do better.

And so. sometimes I think it's easy for people to look at people who have accomplished a lot and think, oh, well, maybe they handle it in this, like, beautifully happy way

and there's no rejection and things aren't hard. I think people could very easily mistaken your just accomplishments as something that might have been an easy road for you, where I'm certain that that's not the case, and you have to figure out the way to leverage and utilize the chip on your shoulder in whatever form it comes to you, even though it might come to you in a different way than it comes to somebody else. Mhm.

to do to just pay for tuition. And I think that's just one of many things. Each of us have our own struggles. Some people are born with certain disabilities, others are born with certain family structures. And I think we all have these different experiences that uniquely shape who we are outside of work. A lot of my time, at least within the space of giving back, has been

really spent on mental health related topics. And I think for folks who are born with mental health challenges or born into a family with mental health challenges, that's a whole slew of different circumstances that you grow up with. So I think it's so important to think about what's possible, not from a what does my circumstances allow me to, but rather where can I go? And then I think this is really going back to first principles. What do I want to do. And then let me take the

small steps to getting there rather than. Well, given these limitations, I don't think that's a possibility. I'll back out. I think that's a lot of how you talk to yourself is so important. I think being kind to yourself and telling yourself that everything is possible is a very important piece of the story, too. I wouldn't say by any

stretch that my career path was certain. In fact, it was really from these challenges during school that I had realized a lot of other people also struggled the same way that I did, where they needed to work multiple part time jobs. They didn't know how to negotiate for rent. They had no idea how auto loans worked. And it's from there that my first startup had emerged. And that kind of threw me into the world of entrepreneurship and investing in entrepreneurs.

less and less affordable for her. So the three of us would get together on a regular basis and just share best practices with each other. How did you negotiate something as small as a phone bill all the way up to? Do you have any hacks for thinking about how student loans work? We came to a point in time where we realized that student loans were, uh, for the very first time in history, exceeding auto loans in the US. So we realized that it really wasn't a

small thing and we wanted to do more. Can we just design a course that would share our learnings and best practices that we would share with each other to other students in the same school? So we went to our faculty members, written up this proposal for why we think a course on money management and financial literacy is so important, and eventually ended up pushing through this course and got a room allotted to us for 35 people

for the semester. We had no idea how to do any marketing, so we just kind of put this Google form out there and really without any marketing at all on our behalf. And it was just organic word of mouth. We had almost 400 applications come in for the class, and even after we emailed everyone saying we didn't have space in the class, we still had about 170 people show up on the first day of class trying to

cram into this tiny 30 person classroom. And so that's when we realized that there was an opportunity here for us to turn this potentially into a much bigger business, where we would start by teaching content as well as turn this into software so that we could provide similar curriculum for other universities, as well as for other financial institutions.

We had no idea how sales worked, and in the very early days we would just cold call people, show up to conferences, try to be very proactive, try to find the best point of contact, ask for referrals and intros wherever we can, and really rely on the kindness of people who are willing to guide us and show

us where we go. And one of the things that till this day, I absolutely do myself and very much appreciate about the culture in Silicon Valley, is that it's all about bringing people up with you so you can absolutely cold outreach to someone on LinkedIn and expect that they might be willing to grab a coffee with you and share how they had gotten there, because they had also gotten there from help of other strangers and really

from kindness of others. So we had learned so much during that time and ended up selling into a lot of large banks, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America. We also got a ton of no's from amazing companies too, and we didn't really understand why. At the beginning. So wherever possible, we would ask people for feedback like we really respect your answer. We just love to hear why this wasn't the right fit for you at this time. We sold into universities, we sold into these banks and

learned a ton from this process. So it was really from here that I had even any exposure to the world of finance and banks. And prior to this, it just felt like something that was really far away. I had thought that I might become a historian or go into some sort of public policy field prior to this. So I think it also tells us how great life can be when we take our paths down for unexpected turns.

wanted to be very quick moving. What we realized was that the word was agile. It was very difficult to pronounce in some foreign cultures, and so we eventually rebranded ourselves to for phonetic letters. I share this very short story because I think in my earlier in my career, I had overlooked how important marketing and branding was to

any sort of platform, brand or community. And I think this is something that I learned so much about from picking what I thought was a really cool name, calling ourselves agile VC, to realizing that it's important to be inclusive in our target audience and in facing a very diverse audience to rebranding and all of that learned so much from the experience.

and smartest people. Number two, we get to learn from their best practices and help share our experiences with them to hopefully help other early stage entrepreneurs and founders avoid the same mistakes that we had made in the past. And I think three investors, what they really do is put their money where their mouth is and invest money

into what the future can and should look like. It's a responsibility that we take very seriously as well, because if we want to build a future that is more inclusive, that is more innovative, that is better than we really have to think long and hard about what we're doing now so that we can get there in X number of years. So I think we spend a lot of time thinking about what can the future look like, what should the future look like? What criteria are we following?

Are we investing if we want to see a future that is diverse, are we investing and backing in diverse founders? So all of those are things that I think I'm incredibly lucky to get to do. In fact, the other day I was having a conversation with a very close friend, and we were talking about if we had to summarize our jobs in verbs, what would be some of the top things that we would say? I think in my job, really the top things are to meet people and to learn.

I love understanding how they grew up, who they are, how they were shaped to be, who they are. And I love finding out the background stories, the less told things. I love asking about what didn't make it into your pitch deck, what almost made it, but that you took it out, and how does that work? I love doing that. At the same time, I think my business partner is really good at keeping to time and making sure that we hit the milestones that we need to in reasonable time.

So I think being able to identify strengths and weaknesses and realizing what you're good at and finding someone else who can help check for those spots are so important. So I'm incredibly lucky to have met my business partner and to be able to work with him across all of these years, so I think that's something really important

to think about. One of the things in my entrepreneurship class at Berkeley that I always start by sharing with folks is that oftentimes in entrepreneurship, the average time it takes to an exit of some sort, whether it is getting acquired or going public even, or coming to a place where you're getting to stable revenue, where you have somewhat of a scalable business model, where you don't have

to work as hard. Um, that average time period for entrepreneurs is about ten years, and that is longer than the average American marriage, which means that whatever it is that you do, finding the right business partner in many ways is harder than finding the person that you want to marry, because you really have to be certain that this person is the right fit across all of these

different ways. So I like framing it, especially for students this way, um, particularly college level and graduate level students, because I think it's important to think about life and career on a very long term, decades long term kind of time axes rather than just in the span of months or years.

to break ties, if any, and to make decisions moving forward. And, um, I do think it's important to figure out over time what you prefer as well. Some people think that it's important for them to be the CEO and to call the shots, but at the same time, they might not yet be in a place where they feel really comfortable with making all of these big decisions. So I think having a serious, self-reflective conversation or thinking session where you really ask yourself, do I want to call the shots?

Is it helpful or is it better for the business in order to call the shots? I think those are all really important pieces. But to answer your question directly, I don't know other than the fact that we had a clear majority shareholder, I don't know that we followed best practices for how to do equity.

of thought. Because the reality is the business is, in many cases, starting because they're trying to solve a need in the marketplace and they're not thinking about, how do I create wealth, how do I exit this, how do I structure this to allow for a board and executives and just team members to be able to help? It's just kind of bootstrapping and figuring it out, which is

what's so cool about starting a business. But then also what can be scary when it comes to the things that you just you don't know what you don't know.

in because they don't necessarily know. And ideally, there are people out there who are giving guidance and advice and sharing wisdom and getting the attention of people so that they can at least structure it properly so that no relationships are ruined and nothing, nothing bad happens. But unfortunately, it's just not. It's not the reality yet. Today.

For example, if I eat really good food and I write up a note, even if it's posting on Yelp, for example, um, as like a mini food critic, I think that is a small act of producing something. Or if I love movies and I write a small commentary about my thoughts on the movie, that's being productive in a way, it doesn't even have to be as small as that. It could be as small or as big as something that is core related to the company that

you're running. But I bring that up because on this topic of we don't know what, we don't know if we just dedicate a small portion, even if it's like this week or for once a year I'm going to dedicate myself to productive habits of learning about something and writing something about this new thing that I've learned. I

think that really brings us very far. Even if it's not something that we repeat on a monthly basis, but like once a year, that's a really great way of helping us explore what we don't know, that we don't know.

everyone else is up. So I have a I have time to, uh, really reflect on what my top priorities are for the day and hopefully get to Inbox Zero. Then I try to do deeper work earlier during the day rather than meetings, because those are some of my productive, most productive hours. And then later on, from afternoon onwards, when I usually would start to get tired, I try to do meetings. Then because I derive a lot of

energy from meeting with other people. So I try to schedule things that I get a lot of energy out of when I am most tired, and then towards evening time, it's, you know, again, doing follow ups or any to do items. As a result of the meetings that I did in the afternoon. And then of course, towards the end of the day, I try to set up time, set aside for exercise, for walking my dog, for spending quality time

with family, for just enjoying outdoor time in nature. Um, and then I try to have no screen time for about an hour prior to going to bed. That's the ideal schedule. I don't know how much of my time I've managed to stick to that schedule. Um, I'm very good at being spontaneous and haven't been as good at

sticking to routines, but that is what I'm striving towards. Um, the last thing I would add on this is that one of the top things I learned from a mentor years ago that brought a lot more peace to my mind is this concept of a weighted average week. So instead of trying to get to the perfect day every single day and hitting all of these things in a day, that's just too much pressure. So I learned from her to think about my week being weighted over time, so

that today maybe I've done great on work. tomorrow. Maybe I do great on exercise the day after. Maybe I'm great at family and quality time with my significant other, and over the course of a week, I would have hit all the major things that I wanted to hear, that I wanted to hit. And that significantly takes pressure off of having to have a perfect day and being able to focus on different priorities throughout a week.

long term career goal. Outside of my full time role on the venture side and just learning and becoming better, I definitely want to continue to give back by educating. So I've always taught part time outside of my different roles, and I do think it is extremely rewarding of an experience, because now I feel like I learn way more from my students than I'm teaching sometimes. So I get about now, at least in my faculty role at Berkeley, I get

about 60% undergrads and 40% grad students. The grad students are more quote unquote normally aged. Whereas my undergrad students, I get everything from students who are born in zero four and oh five, and they are incredibly young, but also incredibly inspiring. Many of them have had prior startup experience, have even exited from companies or have interned at all of these amazing companies. I look at them and I feel so much more optimistic about where the future of

the world is going. They're very mission driven. They are extremely passionate about what they do, energetic about changing the world for the better, and all of that, I continue. I hope I can continue to give back in that way, and continue to be inspired by and learn from all of my students. So when I look forward in my career, definitely continuing to be an investor and then teaching as well as learning in my role as faculty.

What I think is incredibly cool is that for all the events that we do, there's always both a public facing component as well as a private roundtable discussion segment where for all the speakers that we've brought in and we've brought in some really cool people, including the CEO and founder of zoom, the CEO of Google X, and just really, really cool people in the space that are driving the frontiers of technology and innovation. We had the

founder of Siri a while ago. They always do a very small roundtable at the end of the public facing event, where it's just a handful of less than a dozen people, and they get to interact in a very small group setting with our speaker. So if anyone who is listening here is just interested in getting involved and participating in these smaller group gathering sessions, I think that's another great way to plug in. And of course, any university network

will always have classes that are open. Berkeley, for example, I have a ton of folks who have audited or sat in on my classes. So I always encourage people to reach out if they're interested in plugging in in any way. And I'm really excited to continue to see where you take your community as well, because I think this is really meaningful work that you do.