Jeffery: Welcome to the supporters fund ask an investor I’m your host Jeffery Potvin let’s please welcome Daniel Xu General partner at the new billionaires Club as our investor for today welcome Daniel it’s a real pleasure having you join us

Daniel: Thank you Jeffrey thank you for having me

Jeffery: Well I’m pretty excited Daniel because I get excited about everybody I get to interview because I really enjoy the conversation and being able to Deep dive into the backgrounds of the investors especially the investors in this early stage that are really making a big impact in the world and the way we like to start our show is we like to dive right into it learn a bit about yourself and then we have a whole genre questions that we can dive into but because you and I have a bit of a background you guys have been running events I had the opportunity of being part of one of your events a few weeks ago there’s just lots of exciting things that we can talk about so I’m ready to jump off and get into this and uh really deep dive into everything Daniel and what you guys are up to because it’s pretty exciting and being part of that makes it even more exciting so to start if you could share a little bit about your background all the way back to your U of T days you can talk about IBM all the great things that you’ve done and then one thing about you that nobody would know.

Daniel: All right Jeffrey yes yes uh so for me I was a engineer by training I studied Computer Engineering at U of T so that was uh I graduated 10 years ago and um my first job was very different compared to my peers so my first job was at Adventure Capital uh doing Hardware we see research analysis and that’s um uh that’s how I got my career started so we see it was my first job and I was the only one in the company who actually knew what’s going on with uh with Hardware uh I guess they were looking at one company right which was uh about to replace the others silicon in chips and that was pretty huge uh promise and they were trying to take off so that’s how I got started by accident but then I fell in love with adventures and with staffs in general so after year I started my own company called Multan International it’s an e-commerce e-commerce platform that sold high-end Asia consumer products to North American customers so that went well um and I exited the next year but we made a decent money and then I then I joined idea as a senior product manager so at that time I spent around four years as a Singapore manager at IBM cloud and and then went to Columbia MBA just to polish my skills in business because I I want to go back to the Venture world and uh after looking at the VC after looking for a start point of view and after looking at uh from a corporate point of view I I kind of got what uh what I was interested in so immediately after my MBA at Columbia I I could not resist uh going back to to the stop world so I started my second company in 2020 called space spai c and you can guess it’s a AI empowered space design software so at that time I was a CTO and we uh we started a company with uh with much better preparedness and we we got two million dollars investment uh eventually from Alibaba and it took off pretty well right now still uh striving uh I I let I left the company and now I’m an advisor to the company uh because after uh after two to three years I find okay maybe it’s time to give back to the start of World uh I had a and that’s why I’m starting a incubator called nuclearness club and also a VC firm new billionaires Capital uh to help other people although I am not a billionaire but I believe we will have billionaires in our incubator and in our intubated firms in the future

Jeffery: Awesome that’s a that’s an amazing background uh thank you for sharing that and diving into it but but before we start to dive into the layers can you share one thing about you that nobody would know

Daniel: One thing about myself uh nobody would know That even my wife

Jeffery: I’m okay with that whatever you think is uh worth sharing by all means yeah it’s it’s more of just ways for people to relate and say uh wow you can hold your breath underwater for six minutes anything’s feasible whatever it is that’s cool that people would want to know

Daniel: Okay um I love I love romantic novels that’s that’s the only thing like I don’t want to admit to other people uh like I love movies like Titanic okay and romantic novels and and people normally don’t believe

Jeffery: Ah that’s pretty cool yeah it’s a it’s a whole different side like you’re you’re in business you’re an engineer you’re a techie but you’ve got a strong emotional connection to uh good literature that has a has a good storyline to it so taking Titanic or any of the other ones like that so like a Daniel steals I think is uh is a famous author in this space so that’s pretty cool that’s pretty cool maybe not Daniel steals is more in a uh mystery but either way I’m sure there’s some side of that to it but that’s pretty exciting

Daniel: Yes yeah and that helps with uh uh picking movies with my wife you know we don’t have a conflict there

Jeffery: That’s a good point yeah yeah there’d be some aligns right there a lighting to it oh that’s pretty cool that’s a great uh great thing very uh very few people probably even know that they align to that but that’s good you’re uh you’re in touch with your inner self so that’s brilliant great share

Daniel: Yeah

Jeffery: So we’ll kind of go back to which I find really amazing is that when you first started your career and you started off at U of T uh working in the software engineer space when you first came out you landed in adventure role can you share a little bit about what you gained from that Venture role because it obviously over the last 10 years gave you a really strong perspective of what it takes to be an entrepreneur what it takes to be in this space you got first line understanding while working as an analyst in the hardware space meeting with Founders understanding the problems they were trying to solve is that what kind of triggered you to start creating your own companies and move forward in that space or was there something else that kind of triggered all that

Jeffery: Yeah great question so a little bit background before I started my first a real job I did my internship at AMD uh as a hardware tester for 16 months and I guess that experience uh was was captured by by one of the Venture Capital called pine tree Capital uh back in 2014. so I I really love coding like I was actually a very good coder and for my final Milestone year I did a nap it’s a mountain people uh again basically it’s online game and you can play with your cell phone but I have way too many ideas and to be friends with you Jeffrey I was not sure which career path I I should pursue at that time so I thought to myself okay maybe my kpi is to look at 100 companies and what’s the best way to do that for free it’s probably uh to join your VC so so I just I only looked at the VC and the PE opportunities and you know the interesting thing about that is that uh you don’t get a lot of competition if you are engineering student because all of your peers they are looking at uh back then was IBM uh Cisco I I think Amazon was not that big Google of course but we see I I don’t think people look for jobs sometimes given the peer pressure right but I don’t have any this kind of peer pressure so I just kind of stumbled into the lazy world uh with the word and after I’m in the Ouija board it’s as you said it’s a battle field so every single day I got to you know meet with um two to three founders sometimes I go to their company sometimes with our office and too much surprise they were very convinced what they were doing although I was not that convinced like my job was to just question there like how is that even possible like you’re talking about replacing Intel and AMD and media at the same time using this new material but most of them had this very uh ambitious idea uh with a hundred times return potentially if everything goes well and they’re so convinced so uh confident and that actually got me into uh this kind of mindset it’s like so for that year um I look at about 500 companies and we end up investing I think five to six in the tech industry uh one of them went Ico so that’s back in 2014 and that company was uh Spiel 3D which was a cloud company it’s like Google Google Cloud but earlier than that so so after one year uh after looking at so many companies I I thought to myself it was not that hard actually to start a company because I saw a lot of great funders and I saw some average Founders but eventually once you know the game uh it’s not that hard to raise money so so at that time I um I had a couple of good ideas and I just caught up my buddies from U of T and say hey uh do you want to start a company in e-commerce space because that’s a place we knew very well and that’s place where space we got in connections as well from supply chain side so we just started the company and I tried to lose money just yeah that’s my first two years after graduation which I really appreciate at this time

Jeffery: So taking that those first two years before you you kind of really dived into making your own your first business what were a couple of learnings that you gained from it and I can point out one that I really liked and I’m gonna the comment you made and I’ll dive into that in a second but is there one or two points that really stood out around the founders or the businesses that they were creating that really insured when you move forward in your next company that you wrote These on a wall or you wrote them on a piece of pa