CyberWire Daily - Chenxi Wang: Overcoming the obstacle of fear. [Venture Capital] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

Founder and general partner of Rain Capital, Chenxi shares her story and how she conquered and got over the obstacle of fear to reach her goals in life. " I realized a lot of times my obstacle is my own fear rather than a real obstacle" Wang states, she also shares her story of breaking glass ceilings as a female founder and working in the field of cybersecurity. She hopes to be remembered for being a kind person and developing her own venture fund, as she shares her story to the top, she states what she does and how she got to be where she is today. We thank Chenxi for sharing her story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. Hello, my name is Chen Xiwang. 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 a town will be transformed in the course of a year, a completely different look.

And I was fascinated by that. 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 a university at the time in China, and I somehow got aware of an opportunity of scholarship, and I attended, I think, some kind of contest, and I won the scholarship to attend a U.S. 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 the 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 and lo and behold i spent now more than 20 years in in cyber security 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.

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, you know, Google and those large companies are beginning to really impact the way our lives were every day, right? So I decided to leave academia and move to the Silicon Valley to get my hands dirty, if you will, in the real world. And so 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 we do, if we do get in sort of a deeper discussion with the company, we spend a lot of time 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 and 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, right? 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 a 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 a woman 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 growth 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 albomeness in the industry in general and in VC

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