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Kenneth Chan / Founder and CEO, tobi

Kenneth Chan is the founder and CEO of tobi, a leading online fashion boutique. Before tobi, Kenneth was the founder and CEO of Next Internet, an Internet incubator and holding company where he founded, funded, and helped build multiple successful Internet businesses including the 2nd largest insurance click marketplace (Webjuice), the 3rd largest free dating site (mingle2), one of the fastest growing GRP prepaid debit card businesses (Achieve Financial Services), and tobi. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Connexus/Netblue, an Internet marketing company that he grew from his apartment to a profitable $100M business, and Everyone.net, a plug-in-portal provider to websites, which he grew to a top 50 website with over 25 million users. Kenneth received his BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and his M.S.in Management Science from Stanford University.

In His Own Words
I never liked bios. I believe that bios are, more often than not, dry and boring and never bring the person to life. Because of this, I wanted to dig a bit deeper to come up with an “about me” that truly reflects who I am.

I was born in Taishan, a city in Guangdong province of southern China. As a kid, we were amazed to see buses driving by and planes flying over our village. We just didn’t see buses and planes every day.

I immigrated to the U.S. at age 8. I was amazed by all the cars driving so fast on the highways. I was also overwhelmed by supermarkets with so much food in one place.

Raised in Chicago, I graduated from Lane Tech High School. Lane Tech is the largest high school in Chicago and is extremely diverse with over 60 different ethnicities. I played baseball and ran cross-country. I also went to many Cubs’ games since Lane Tech is about 2 miles from Wrigley Field.

Growing up, my dad worked as a cook and my mom worked at a factory. It took about 10 years before my parents saved enough money to buy a carry-out Chinese restaurant in the south side of Chicago. My brothers and I worked at the restaurant. It was there that we learned hard work and entrepreneurship.

My parents are my heroes. From my mom, I learned patience and wisdom. From my dad, I learned duty and will. They currently reside in Chicago Chinatown.

I graduated from University of Illinois and received a BS in Computer Engineering. I was there when the Mosaic Browser was launched and I remembered a bunch of computer-lab helpers dropping of out U of I to form Netscape. I also remember using “Jerry's Guide to the Web” (Yahoo), watching streaming video for the first time via the web, and wasting far too much time playing MUD (one of the first online multiplayer games).

After graduating from U of I, I came out to California and worked at Intel on the Itanium project with the intention of attending Stanford. I was 21 when I drove out here from Chicago in my Integra. Besides my roommate Visal, who also went to U of I and worked at Intel, I didn’t really know anyone else in California.

I graduated from Stanford University and received an MS in Management Science. The best thing about Stanford was the videotaped lectures you could view at the library. So I never attended my classes and just worked out every morning. The most impressive thing about Stanford was the open access to world-class professors, engineers, and entrepreneurs — current and future leaders.

During the dot-com boom, I started Everyone.net, a plug-in-portal (email, search, discussion boards, etc) service provider, with five of my friends. We were extremely young. (I think we were all 24 or 25.) We lived together, worked together, and partied together. I was the CEO and raised the first million dollars in funding from Tony Hsieh/Venture Frog (Tony is the current CEO of Zappos.com) and $10 million in additional funding from El Dorado Ventures. I was 24 years old when I raised the funding. We were able to grow the business on an advertising model to a top 50 website by May, 2001. But in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, we moved to a safer business model of subscription revenue by providing email service to small businesses. I left the company in August of 2001 and Everyone.net was sold to Proofpoint .

I started Netblue out of my San Jose apartment in early 2002. It was just after 9/11 and the U.S. was suffering from a recession. My goal for starting Netblue was just to create a stable job for myself for 3 to 4 years. I gave myself $100,000 to work with and told myself that I had to build a profitable business with that amount of resources. We achieved profitability within six months.

I was able to grow Netblue from my apartment to over 100 employees. We went from zero revenue to almost $100 million annual revenue in four years. I was able to raise a $20 million recapitulation with Oak Investment Partners. Netblue merged with Vendare Media (Renamed Connexus), which merged again with Epic media group to form one of the largest privately-held digital marketing companies. As CEO there for four years, I did manage to achieve my original goal of creating a stable job for myself.

In November 2005, after leaving Netblue, I started Next Internet, an internet holding company and incubator. I was 31 at that time and didn’t want to start another company so I started a bunch of them. Looking back it was a bit crazy. At Next Internet, we incubated seven projects. Two failed, four are successful and profitable, and one is a big long term play (tobi).

Winzy: I figured the #2 search engine after Google should be funny, dorky, and a great direct and brand marketing company. Something like the snuggy or the shake weight. So bad but so good at the same time. So I started winzy, search and win!! The biggest issue was that the search feed was provided by our main competitor and they were very restrictive on what we could do and how we could market, so the business failed!
Webjuice: I started a vertical internet marketing company with my younger brother. It’s been very successful and profitable. It’s a bit tough working with your brother but it’s amazing watching him succeed and grow up. Webjuice operates a vertical ad network focused on Insurance, selling clicks and leads to companies such as State Farm, All State, and Geico.

Mingle2: I started a free dating site with my friend Vanchau. It’s one of the largest free dating sites on the internet. Dating is a bit boring but it’s a stable and profitable business.

NextClick: My friend Albert and I started a company to build a platform for ecommerce (store, recurring billing, support, operations). It turned into a big mess. It was worst project of my career and probably my only regret.

Achieve Card: I started a company with my friend Brett that turned into Achieve Card, a pre-paid debit card provider. It is a similar to Green Dots and Netspend but leverages the Internet for customer acquisition. The business is doing extremely well and recently raised an external round of funding.
Adteractive: I invested and led the turnaround of Adteractive, an Internet advertising company. We were able to stabilize and turn around the company, but it wasn’t fun.

tobi: I started an online fashion boutique with Cathy and Corina of AzaleaSF. It’s what I am focused on right now. My personal goal is to build tobi to be the leader in internet fashion. When we started the company in 2007, I wanted a big opportunity with a stable business model, something that I could build and operate for a long time, and something to share with my loved ones (it’s hard to explain to my mom why people pay for clicks). This was right before mobile, social, location, etc.Ecommerce was the only opportunity that fit those criteria. We have done an amazing job of building the company so far and I am extremely excited about the future of tobi and the opportunities ahead.