The Quest Minutes: Dan Kan
The Kan Bro with a Billion-Dollar Exit
This piece is written by Jimmy Hsu, a Quest Minutes contributor. We are always looking for great storytellers. You can apply to have your writings featured here.
Introducing: Dan Kan.
Dan Kan, the brother of Justin Kan, started off his career with 30+ rejections for jobs, he then went on to:
- Work at UserVoice (helping companies gather user feedback)
- Found Appetizely (app for every restaurant)
- Run Exec (personal assistants on-demand) with Justin
- Become co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Cruise — a self-driving car company that sold to General Motors for more than $1B.
The Kan elements
Entrepreneurship ran strong in the Kan household. Dan Kan pays much of the tribute to his mother, who started various businesses.
“There’s probably some aspect of, we were around someone who just said, ‘okay, you got to get it done — here’s the task, figure out how to get it done’ and that’s a lot of entrepreneurship.”
— Dan Kan
Trial by fire
In 2009, Dan graduated at the height of the recession with two jobs offers — teaching English in Korea or joining a startup called UserVoice.
Dan chose UserVoice, and it was a trial by fire as his boss was let go on the day he started.
“I was then in charge of basically everything except for the product — like sales, office stuff, company culture, meeting things, was random things, but primarily the sales of the company.”
It taught him the early skills needed to run a startup and after almost 2 years he decided to strike out on his own.
The first stop
Dan started Appetizely with a friend letting restaurants build apps for themselves. Two months in, Apple called and told the restaurants to combine all the apps or buy separate developer licenses which most couldn’t afford.
“Seeing you and others around me and start companies was like, ‘that doesn’t seem that hard.’ Turns out, I was completely wrong.”
They had to pivot and thus, Exec was born with Justin joining the team.
Little did he know, it would be one of the most challenging and emotionally taxing startups they’ve ever built.
Exec: ahead of its time
Exec is essentially an errand service. However, the adoption wasn’t great. Soon, the Kan brothers realized they were in two markets:
Groceries and house cleaning.
“I remember debating whether groceries or house cleaning was better to pivot into and for whatever reason we decided to pivot into house cleaning, which turns out is fucking awful market.”
— Justin Kan
The margins were too thin. Homejoy and Handy were two giants fiercely competing, and they had to get out of this business.
“I remember thinking, okay, we’re going to sell it. We went to these other venture backed companies like Handy and Homejoy. They were in this deadlock race where they were basically at the same size competing for the next round of funding and I just said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna sell it to one of you guys, by Thanksgiving, for whatever you offer me — whatever is the best offer.’ And that worked. It was the most funny, hilarious, surprising thing.”
The story of Cruise
After exiting, Dan connected with an old friend, Kyle Vogt, from when he was interning at Justin.tv to start Cruise.
“Kyle telling me about his new startup idea, which is building self driving cars and coming out of cleaning services. I was like, you know, that sounds amazing.”
— Dan Kan
Dan kept the company running as the non-technical founder while Kyle built a MVP in 3 months to run live demos on the highway to raise funding.
“Over the course of a year, we took it from the prototype that would drive down the highway for some number of seconds to driving from San Francisco to Palo Alto.”
Despite the challenges tech and costly pivots, the enormous impact of what they were doing made it exciting to work on.
“Sometimes naivete about the space and just coming in with the beginner’s mind that you can do anything is what enables you as an entrepreneur to get enough momentum where you aren’t discouraged when you find out how hard the problem really is.”
— Justin Kan
Cruise may seem like a giant today, but each step of the way was built from the lessons of the past.
From getting shit done at Dan’s mother’s early businesses, to being at the ground floor of a startup at UserVoice, to the experience negotiating with Handy that lead to the $1 billion acquisition by GM.
Each step came with great emotional growth and invaluable lessons that would be applied to the future, which Dan guides and brings to Cruise today.
“Anything can be broken down into small enough steps so that they seem manageable. What people don’t remember or forget is that you just have to not give up before you get to the end step.”
— Dan Kan
Thank you Dan for this great conversation.
This piece is written by Jimmy Hsu, a Quest Minutes contributor. We are always looking for great storytellers. You can apply to have your writings featured here.
Jimmy is the founder of Astro which supports creators with every transaction. He is also a self-taught immigrant who’s overcome homelessness and poverty, and has previously worked at WeWork and Pandora as a Senior Lead Engineer.
In his free time, he likes to cook with his flamethrower and build communities wherever he goes.
You can find Jimmy on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Clubhouse @doge.
