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CyberWire Daily
Chenxi Wang: Overcoming the obstacle of fear. [Venture Capital] [Career Notes]
00:09:52
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- [00:02]
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You're listening to the Cyberwire Network powered by N2K. Step into the digital upside down with Cyber Things Armis new three part podcast series which will dive into the unseen world of cybersecurity. From real life hacks to the digital shadows of the dark web, we connect pop culture and protection, fear and control. Episode one drops soon so look out for Cyber Things in partnership with Cyberwire.
- [00:38]
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- [01:57]
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Hello, my name is Chen Si Wang. I'm the founder and general partner of Rain Capital, which is a cyber focused venture fund. I grew up in China and when I was young, China was just beginning this growth stage, right? You see all kinds of skyscrapers being built and just like that town would be transformed in the course of a year. Completely different look. And I was fascinated by. I wanted to be an architect as probably you see with a lot of folks journeys. This is sort of a partially planned, partially, you know, by chance, right? So I was in university at the time in China and I somehow got aware of an opportunity of scholarship and I attended a, I think of some kind of contest and I won the scholarship to attend US College. And so this scholarship was for a computer science program, computer science degree, which I was in the related field I was in electrical engineering. So that put me on the path of computer science. And then within computer science I really fell in love with applied crypto because I was always good at math. I loved being able to play around with math algorithms and equations and crypto. Cryptography, not cryptocurrency. Cryptography was the one that I really fell in love with. So I began to dabble in this area and lo and behold, I spent now more than 20 years in cybersecurity I graduated from college and I attended University of Virginia as a computer science graduate school. I got my PhD at UVA and then I went to Carnegie Mellon University as assistant professor in computer engineering. I spent six years at Carnegie Mellon teaching and researching and obviously a great program, great school. What ultimately became a little bit unsatisfactory for me at that time was I yearned for seeing the real results of my work. That was also the time Google and those large companies are beginning to really impact the way our lives were every day. I decided to leave academia and move to the Silicon Valley to get my hands dirty if you will, in the real world. I did startups, I went to large companies. I also did a stint in Forrester Research as a VP of research covering security markets and ultimately led me to today where I am which is doing investments. What we do a lot of times is talking to prospective companies and entrepreneurs and understanding what they want to do, where they want to take the company and doing assessment of whether we want to be aligned with the company's vision. Then if we do get in sort of a deeper discussion with the company, we spend a lot of time to due diligence, right? So we talk to customers, we talk to their customers, prospective customers, we talk to their partners, understand what's the ins outs about their product and trying to put our thinking hat on to do a quick assessment about is this a company we want to invest money in? And then after that after you made the decision to invest, there's a lot of post investment support. So we talk to them, helping them, crafting the most viable product, if you will, and then how to go to market and introducing them to customers. Now on the flip side, we also have to do fundraising, right? So we have to fundraise to bring money into the fund. So there's a lot of aspects to this job. On the industry facing side, I also do a lot of work with creating women's executive network. In fact we have one that's called Forte Group. We have over 70 senior women executives as members and we meet once or twice a month. So I do a lot of community work. Build a network, build a support network in the industry, folks that are more senior than you or on par with you so that they could give you that guidance, that insight and that third party point of view that you don't necessarily know. I'm a natural networker. I always network even without thinking about it because that's my personality and my network really helped me in the sense that even without me consciously pulling my network, they provide me with advice and insight and things like that. I don't think I would have gotten where I am without leaning on my network. One of the things I've been told over the years is I'm kind of fearless. I wouldn't say I'm absolutely fearless. I still have fear in a lot of different levels, but I try not to let fear stop me from doing things. And at some point in my career I realized a lot of times my obstacle is my own fear rather than a real obstacle. So if you can convince yourself, get over your own fear, you can probably do more things than you thought you could. I think one of the things I hope people remember me as is somebody who broke glass ceilings. So I did break a few glass ceilings along the way. I established my own venture fund which is not common for for women and also not common for a technology person who didn't grow up in financing. I also got on the Fortune 500 public board to be a digital board member to help them with the journey of digital transformation. Again, that's rare as well. So I like people to remember me for that and I also like people to remember me as a community person. I build communities, I build relationships, I advocate for the lesser known voice. I help women and minority grow in their careers and in their life. I've been told a few times recently that I'm a kind person. I actually really like the word kind because it speaks a lot about a person. And even though there's a lot of sharp elbowness in the industry in general and in VC in particular, I want to be remembered as a kind person.
- [10:06]
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