VC Spotlight: Rich Wong of Accel Partners

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Rich Wong is one of Silicon Valley's most successful venture capitalists and partner at Accel Partners in Palo Alto, CA.

For you who are not familiar Palo Alto, CA is where companies like facebook, Survey Monkey and so many others were founded.

Accel Partners is well known for their investments in Atlassian, facebook, DropBox, Kayak, Spotify, and other great companies. Accel runs a very innovative EIR program that yielded well-known companies like Cloudera, which provides Apache Hadoop-based software.

I first met Rich Wong in 2010 when he invested into MoPub's seed round, along with Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal. Rich was a very, very active member of the board, but more importantly he was deeply involved with the leadership and cared alot about our business's success.

I think for me, the most important quality that Rich has is his loyalty and friendship. Even now, 2 years after the acquisition, Rich is an email away and is still super supportive.

We were recently discussing topics like:

  • What tips would he give an early stage founder when looking to raise VC?
  • Is there such thing as a "bad space" to launch a startup within or around?
  • What attributes he has been able to identify that successful companies tend to display?