At just 29, Brian Zhan, who practices what he describes as “nerdy investing,” has already made early bets on buzzy AI companies now valued in the billions.
After quietly leaving Silicon Valley VC firm CRV this summer, Zhan recently joined Striker Venture Partners, where he and veteran investor Max Gazor plan to upend traditional VC playbooks with a $165 million fund that aims to make massive seed bets on the next generation of AI startups.
“We’re only investing in 10 companies per fund, and we’re going to show up with checks up to $30 million,” Zhan said. “That takes conviction.”
$30 million is what companies typically raise in a later funding round once they have achieved product-market fit, but Zhan believes VC is undergoing a radical transformation that requires firms to pounce with big checks when an early kernel of an idea presents itself.
“Seed-stage investing is moving earlier and earlier,” he said. “Seed rounds today are often just 22-year-old founders with a great idea.”
Zhan, who studied computer science at Northwestern University and started his career writing code at Facebook, is emblematic of a shift taking place in venture, where investors switch firms more often and technical backgrounds are prized above MBAs because many of the most promising new startups have few business metrics to evaluate.
“It was on the Facebook data team where I saw a pattern that really stuck with me,” he said. “The best technical minds at the company were founding startups and then struggling to raise meaningful capital, despite having résumés that Silicon Valley normally drools over.”
He started angel investing in his spare time, writing small checks into projects led by former Facebook engineers. At CRV, Zhan transitioned to a full-time VC role, making early bets on Skild AI, Dyna Robotics, and Periodic Labs.
“Today, these companies are some of the best-known companies in AI, but back at the seed round, a lot of VCs just didn’t really know who these founders were,” Zhan said.
His biggest win so far is the model startup Reflection AI, which he views as proof that VCs should not be afraid to pay up in seed rounds.
Zhan co-led Reflection AI’s seed round just last year at a $200 million valuation, a very expensive price that many other VCs passed up. Last month, the company raised $2 billion at a valuation of $8 billion.
“Founders want someone who can speak their language,” said Misha Laskin, CEO and cofounder of Reflection AI. “Brian is rare in that he’s actually done the work, is incredibly well connected, and is insightful about what’s happening at the frontier.”
Excited about AI for science
Zhan grew up in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Palo Alto. His older sister is Stephanie Zhan, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, who was also an early backer of Reflection AI and Skild AI.
“I would say we have very similar tastes, and sometimes we land on the same companies,” Brian Zhan said.
Asked if they will be discussing deals around the Thanksgiving table, he said: “No, we keep work separate.”
While many VCs spend their days in coffee shops meeting as many founders as possible, Zhan finds it more useful to devote hours a day to reading the latest AI research curated by his own custom AI assistant.
He says he was drawn to reunite with Gazor, an MIT Ph.D. dropout who has appeared four times on the Forbes Midas list, because of their similar intellectual style.
“We spend all morning reading papers and trying to identify the trends and who has the most exciting ideas,” Zhan said. “We take very few meetings every day. We just spend more time figuring out what the frontier is, and when we reach out to founders, we have already made up our mind to go back to them.”
Gazor, who is probably best known for his early investment in Airtable, helped recruit Zhan to CRV in 2023 and wanted to work with him again.
“I saw him become one of the most trusted advisors to some of the most high-profile AI founders, and I was really in awe of how he related to them,” Gazor said. “He’s got a fantastic trajectory ahead of him.”
Zhan says he is most excited about founders who are harnessing the power of AI for science, such as William Fedus, a former OpenAI researcher who recently cofounded Periodic Labs to automate scientific discovery.
“Imagine if we could use AI to dramatically shorten drug discovery timelines?” Zhan said. “I think that AI for science will become as big a category as AI for robotics is today.”
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