Wesley Chan


Wesley Chan is an early product innovator at Google Inc., best known for founding Google Analytics and Google Voice, and for building Google’s early advertising system. He is currently a Managing Director at Felicis Ventures and invests in early-stage technology and software startups, including Canva, Flexport, Gusto, Dialpad, and Ring.com.

Early life and education

Chan holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his graduate research at the MIT Media Lab.

Career

Chan joined Felicis Ventures as a Managing Director in January 2015. He co-manages the fund with Aydin Senkut, whom he met when they were both early employees at Google. Since joining Felicis, Wesley has invested in and sits on the board of directors of several "unicorn" startups, including Canva, Guild Education, and CultureAmp. He also led investments in Gusto, Flexport, Ring, Orca Bio, Turvo, and HyperScience.
Chan started his career in Venture Capital as one of the early General Partners at GV from 2009 to 2014. He led investments in and sat on the Board of Directors of software and enterprise startups, and biotech firms, including Gusto, Plaid, Robin Hood, Vungle, AngelList, iPerian, Dialpad, The Climate Corporation, Coolplanet Energy Systems, Parse, and Optimizely.
Prior to joining GV, Chan helped to build and launch Google AdWords and AdSense. He also founded and launched Google Analytics and Google Voice where he led acquisitions of Urchin Software Corporation and GrandCentral Communications.
Among the projects he built, led, or founded while at Google include:
Chan was also a software engineer and research lead at HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA and started his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Fujitsu.
Chan is an Industrial Advisor to private equity firm EQT Partners and sits on the board of directors for FocusVision, Inc.

Awards and recognition

Chan holds 17 US patents from his work building Google AdWords and AdSense.
He is a recipient of a Google Founders' Award for his work on building the Google Toolbar and growing it into one of the most installed client products in the world.
Chan was selected by Technology Review Magazine as one of their top "35 under 35" TR35 innovators in 2010 for his work on founding Google Voice and Google Analytics.
His story as an early product founder at Google is featured in Steven Levy's book In the Plex.

Other interests and positions

While at MIT, Chan was an opinion writer and on the editorial staff at The Tech. He was also the Chief Photographer Emeritus for Google.