Debut Midas listers including Anduril cofounder Trae Stephens and Google Voice creator Wesley Chan inked huge deals in defense, consumer tech and enterprise software.
By Richard Nieva, Forbes Staff
When Trae Stephens got a call from Peter Thiel in 2013, he didn’t know what to think. Thiel, the controversial tech billionaire and cofounder of defense and analytics giant Palantir, was raising a new fund at his venture firm Founders Fund, and he wanted Stephens, an early Palantir employee, to join as a deal maker.
“He was kind of my boss, so it wasn't clear if it was an offer or an order,” recalled Stephens.
Now more than a decade later, Stephens is making his Midas List debut, along with five other investors—FPV Ventures’ Wesley Chan, BAI Capital’s Annabelle Yu Long, IDG Capital’s Justin Niu, Emergence Capital Partners’ Kevin Spain and Spark Capital’s Jeremey Philips—who have proven their mettle with prescient bets that paid off big.
For Stephens, a key sector was defense and manufacturing, where recent investments include Gecko Robotics, a military contractor that develops hardware and software to maintain defense infrastructure, and Varda Space Industries, which builds aircraft that manufacture things like fiber optic cables or pharmaceuticals in space. His biggest venture win, though, was from the company he started: In 2017, Founders Fund provided seed funding for Anduril, the defense contractor Stephens founded with Oculus VR headset creator Palmer Luckey, now valued at $10 billion.
“He was kind of my boss, so it wasn't clear if it was an offer or an order.”
Aside from Anduril, Stephens made perhaps his other signature bet at the very beginning of his VC career: leading the firm’s series A investment in Flexport, the supply chain logistics platform now valued at $8 billion. “It's pretty crazy to look back on my 10 years in venture,” Stephens said. “The first check that I wrote was maybe the best one, aside from the company that I started.”
Wesley Chan, who is based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, took a different route to the Midas List. His parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1971, and as a teenager he washed dishes in a biology lab to help his family make money. After earning his masters from MIT in 2001, he became an early employee at Google, where he helped develop key products like Google Analytics and Google Voice. He transitioned into venture investing in 2009, joining the search giant’s VC arm Google Ventures. He cofounded FPV Ventures in 2022.
Chan’s 14 years at Google, one of the most valuable consumer tech companies on the planet, has informed his focus on consumer tech startups. He parlayed that DNA into blockbuster deals in the Australian design tool company Canva (worth $26 billion), smart doorbell maker Ring (acquired by Amazon in 2018 for $1 billion) and Robinhood, the popular stock trading app (market cap $17.2 billion).
Another Midas newcomer is Annabelle Yu Long, founder of BAI Capital, short for Bertelsmann Asia Investments, a venture arm of the German media conglomerate. Long started her career as an anchor and producer at a local broadcaster in her native Sichuan province. She discovered venture while attending Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, describing it as a “natural path” after being around so many entrepreneurs on campus. After graduation, she became the first-ever Chinese national appointed to the school’s advisory council.
BAI Capital, which has more than $3 billion in assets under management, has at least 18 IPOs under its belt and has backed more than 40 unicorns. It has invested in several popular Asian companies, including the video streaming app Bigo, dating app TanTan and grocery app Dingdong Fresh.
Based in Beijing, Long brings another perspective to the list. Some of the biggest stories in tech today involve issues with China: The Biden administration has enacted export restrictions on the country for AI chips, causing companies like Nvidia to create lower-performing components specifically for that market. “That’s a reality we do face,” Long told Forbes, adding that it’s also a “real opportunity” for Chinese companies to make advancements in AI and hardware.
Meanwhile, a potential TikTok ban is on the table in the U.S., unless Beijing-based parent ByteDance divests ownership of the service, used by 170 million Americans. Long, who says she’s talked to TikTok management about the potential ban, said she hopes it can continue to operate in the U.S. “Here in Beijing, I think if you speak to common people, they certainly hope it can survive as a global brand,” she said.
“VCs make for incredible dinner party guests because they have six inches of depth and a mile wide of conversational topics.”
Also based in Beijing, IDG Capital partner Justin Niu makes his debut on the Midas List this year. Niu has done deals in enterprise data service DEEPEXI (leading the company’s angel round), SenseTime, a partly state-owned AI research company, and AI enterprise provider Everstring, acquired by ZoomInfo in 2020 for $575 million. Before joining IDG in 2007, Niu worked at McKinsey and Company in 2007 as a consultant in corporate strategy and market entry.
Kevin Spain, from Emergence Capital, makes the list for the first time thanks to big bets like Doximity, a mobile platform for medical professionals with a $5.2 billion market cap, and Blend, a cloud banking service valued at $4 billion. Before joining Emergence in 2006, Spain founded marketing company AtMadison in 1998, riding the dot-com boom and eventually becoming a casualty of its bust. After that he joined Microsoft, where he became a senior member of the corporate development team that launched Electronic Arts' original online gaming business.
Jeremy Philips, a general partner at Spark Capital, makes his list debut on the strength of bets including Affirm, the buy-now-pay-later company founded by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin (market cap $9.4 billion). He also sits on the boards of the travel giant TripAdvisor and the home services platform Angi.
The Australian investor found his way into deal making after working for News Corp in New York City, where he focused on corporate strategy and acquisitions in the office of the chairman. He joined Spark Capital after that, and also teaches a course on digital investing as an adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School.
For these Midas newcomers, many of whom are former founders and operators, a common path to success has been investing as generalists, going broad on several different topics and disciplines, rather than going deep in a sector in which they have particular expertise. That’s the biggest difference between investors and founders, said Stephens. “VCs make for incredible dinner party guests because they have six inches of depth and a mile wide of conversational topics,” he said. “Breadth versus depth.”
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