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Chad Byers - The Life Story Behind Robinhood’s Earliest Investor

By: Kyan Yang ・ 12 min read

The Byers Bloodline

There were three core values that the Byers household rooted itself upon:


First, “a serious amount of humility”—that luck plays a large role in anyone’s life.

Second, “honesty”—especially in moments when it’s easy to lie.

Third, a “reverence for founders and entrepreneurs”—that the world continued moving because of them.


⎯


From his mother’s side, discipline and honesty were the roots. Her father was a military officer turned superintendent, running U.S. military academies as a lifelong educator. His world revolved around discipline, rules, and education, instilling in their household values of honesty and respect. And those roots showed in Shawn (Chad’s mother). She was, by neighborhood consensus, “the most personable person they’ve ever interacted with.” 


⎯


From the other side of the family tree came a strong sense of humility and a reverence for entrepreneurs. Brook Byers—Chad’s father—grew up alongside two brothers, raised in 1950s Atlanta by their grandmother. Their mother had passed away when Brook was young, and their father worked long hours for a telco that would later be acquired by AT&T. Naturally, adolescent Brook leaned towards the outdoors. He’d spend a large amount of time running through the dense peach forests, enjoying the rush of trees blurring past. But luck was never really on his side. When he was 13, one off balance step sent him into an unseen low hanging branch, leaving him blind in one eye and a thick prescription to compensate. Classmates taunted him as “four eyes,” and Brook’s isolation continued to deepen. Slowly, a resolve took hold—


“I need to get out of here.”


In the early 70’s, after studying electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, he would find his escape out on the West Coast at Stanford Business School. In the Bay, luck would finally turn its way towards Brook, as he stumbled into Silicon Valley right when the Valley’s hardware revolution was taking root. Then by sheer accident, he became a biotech investor despite knowing “nothing related to biotech, healthcare, anything.” Climbing his way up the space, being “fully self-taught,” Brook would go on to found Kleiner Perkins, a Venture Capital firm which became a leading incubator in the biotech sector.


His brothers pursued careers in entrepreneurship too. One brother became a professor at Stanford, running the Mayfield Fellows program and nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs. The other founded an engineering firm, leading it for fifty years and scaling to hundreds of employees. 


A teacher, a builder, an investor—the three brothers took different lanes yet all shared this common theme, pushing each other and all believing “in this spirit of entrepreneurship.”


⎯

These were the stories Chad grew up around—and in a household where entrepreneurship “is the North Star,” Chad naturally found himself exploring the space too.


At six, he hawked crayon sketches and art class paintings to relatives. By eleven, he was scaling oak trees to snip mistletoe, tying up bundles with string before negotiating shelf space at the local town grocery store. 

Then in his 8th grade, eBay had started to make rounds on the internet. Chad, fourteen, was “obsessed with collecting things,” from international money to Beanie Babies to “all sorts of stuff.” One lucrative hustle came when he began pre-ordering Beanie Babies by the carton through a summer-camp friend in China, then reselling them on eBay with a markup. One of the biggest hauls he got was of “these purple elephants,” the most prized variant at the time. Flipping the stock for five thousand, it left Chad with “all the money in the world” for a 14-year-old in the early 2000s.

But when the client received the package, Chad would be hit with a disappointing discovery. He was still young , and “didn’t know what counterfeiting was.” The client noticed the Beanie Babies were missing something on the tag, refunding the order and leaving Chad to ship them all back. 


Luck would have UPS lose the package. But unbeknownst to Chad, his parents had put an insurance on the package. So UPS cut him a check for the supposed value of the goods, leaving Chad with the original five thousand he would’ve gotten if the Beanie Babies were real.


That small stroke of insured serendipity stitched the household truths into one lesson for young Chad: build boldly, respect luck, and operate with humility—because sometimes luck misplaces a package and bails you from a box of unsellable counterfeits. 

The Beanie Babies reselling certified the Byers blood in Chad Byers, a bloodline that instilled Chad’s strong “pursuit of wanting to do things in the world and start things.”

The Byers Bloodline

There were three core values that the Byers household rooted itself upon:


First, “a serious amount of humility”—that luck plays a large role in anyone’s life.

Second, “honesty”—especially in moments when it’s easy to lie.

Third, a “reverence for founders and entrepreneurs”—that the world continued moving because of them.

⎯


From his mother’s side, discipline and honesty were the roots. Her father was a military officer turned superintendent, running U.S. military academies as a lifelong educator. His world revolved around discipline, rules, and education, instilling in their household values of honesty and respect. And those roots showed in Shawn (Chad’s mother). She was, by neighborhood consensus, “the most personable person they’ve ever interacted with.” 

⎯

From the other side of the family tree came a strong sense of humility and a reverence for entrepreneurs. Brook Byers—Chad’s father—grew up alongside two brothers, raised in 1950s Atlanta by their grandmother. Their mother had passed away when Brook was young, and their father worked long hours for a telco that would later be acquired by AT&T. Naturally, adolescent Brook leaned towards the outdoors. He’d spend a large amount of time running through the dense peach forests, enjoying the rush of trees blurring past. But luck was never really on his side. When he was 13, one off balance step sent him into an unseen low hanging branch, leaving him blind in one eye and a thick prescription to compensate. Classmates taunted him as “four eyes,” and Brook’s isolation continued to deepen. Slowly, a resolve took hold—


“I need to get out of here.”


In the early 70’s, after studying electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, he would find his escape out on the West Coast at Stanford Business School. In the Bay, luck would finally turn its way towards Brook, as he stumbled into Silicon Valley right when the Valley’s hardware revolution was taking root. Then by sheer accident, he became a biotech investor despite knowing “nothing related to biotech, healthcare, anything.” Climbing his way up the space, being “fully self-taught,” Brook would go on to found Kleiner Perkins, a Venture Capital firm which became a leading incubator in the biotech sector.

His brothers pursued careers in entrepreneurship too. One brother became a professor at Stanford, running the Mayfield Fellows program and nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs. The other founded an engineering firm, leading it for fifty years and scaling to hundreds of employees. 

A teacher, a builder, an investor—the three brothers took different lanes yet all shared this common theme, pushing each other and all believing “in this spirit of entrepreneurship.”

⎯

These were the stories Chad grew up around—and in a household where entrepreneurship “is the North Star,” Chad naturally found himself exploring the space too.


At six, he hawked crayon sketches and art class paintings to relatives. By eleven, he was scaling oak trees to snip mistletoe, tying up bundles with string before negotiating shelf space at the local town grocery store. 


Then in his 8th grade, eBay had started to make rounds on the internet. Chad, fourteen, was “obsessed with collecting things,” from international money to Beanie Babies to “all sorts of stuff.” One lucrative hustle came when he began pre-ordering Beanie Babies by the carton through a summer-camp friend in China, then reselling them on eBay with a markup. One of the biggest hauls he got was of “these purple elephants,” the most prized variant at the time. Flipping the stock for five thousand, it left Chad with “all the money in the world” for a 14-year-old in the early 2000s.


But when the client received the package, Chad would be hit with a disappointing discovery. He was still young , and “didn’t know what counterfeiting was.” The client noticed the Beanie Babies were missing something on the tag, refunding the order and leaving Chad to ship them all back. 

Luck would have UPS lose the package. But unbeknownst to Chad, his parents had put an insurance on the package. So UPS cut him a check for the supposed value of the goods, leaving Chad with the original five thousand he would’ve gotten if the Beanie Babies were real.


That small stroke of insured serendipity stitched the household truths into one lesson for young Chad: build boldly, respect luck, and operate with humility—because sometimes luck misplaces a package and bails you from a box of unsellable counterfeits. 


The Beanie Babies reselling certified the Byers blood in Chad Byers, a bloodline that instilled Chad’s strong “pursuit of wanting to do things in the world and start things.”

The Byers Brothers

Being born and raised in the Bay with a father who had founded a venture fund, Chad was by no means driven by capital.

Instead, Chad’s drive came from his internal competitiveness. He grew up with an older brother—Blake—who would be his “best friend in life.” Blake was “absolutely brilliant”, going on to graduate early in bioengineering, attain a PhD from Stanford, start a longevity company, and invest as a general partner at Google Ventures. 


Both Chad and Blake hated losing. Growing up together, there was a “serious amount of competitiveness” between the two—in “a healthy way,” they would find competition in anything they could. Though, because Blake didn’t play sports and Chad was “larger than him by age 11”, physical fighting “got very boring very quickly.” As a result, their primary way of competing as kids came through video games. From Starcraft to Warcraft to Dota 2, video games would be a hobby they “loved and still love” to this day—though Blake would always be “just slightly net better” than Chad.

But while they primarily competed against each other, the Byers brothers also teamed up in moments. 


⎯


In the early 2000s, the narrative around kids using technology had already begun starting. Parents didn’t “love you spending 10 hours on a Saturday on a screen,” so as Chad and Blake spent extensively more time in their home computer lab, Mr. and Mrs. Byers would frequently intervene to stop the gaming sprees.

But being the “kind of kid who was building kit computers and stuff as a kid,” Blake would architect a work around. He went to Fry’s Electronics and bought the smallest camera he could find, setting it up to point down the hallway approaching the computer room. He lined the cable along the wall of their TV room and under the rug, before hooking it up to a screen under their gaming computers. Then, whenever their parents would go in to check on them, the brothers would see it on their screens, Alt+Tab to a Word doc, and pretend they were writing essays. With this scheme, the Byers brothers got away with spending the “majority of weekdays” gaming. 


For the “absolutely brilliant” Blake, the intense gaming schedule posed no issues to his schoolwork.  But Chad had trouble following along in class. Being scatterbrained from his ADD, he was a “terrible test taker” and “always preferred to work for stuff and build things”. He knew education was important, but he wanted to primarily enjoy his life and “meet great people”—and for Chad, his passion growing up “was sports and the outdoors.”

So combining the two passions, Chad decided to pursue being a park ranger.

The Byers Brothers

Being born and raised in the Bay with a father who had founded a venture fund, Chad was by no means driven by capital.


Instead, Chad’s drive came from his internal competitiveness. He grew up with an older brother—Blake—who would be his “best friend in life.” Blake was “absolutely brilliant”, going on to graduate early in bioengineering, attain a PhD from Stanford, start a longevity company, and invest as a general partner at Google Ventures. 


Both Chad and Blake hated losing. Growing up together, there was a “serious amount of competitiveness” between the two—in “a healthy way,” they would find competition in anything they could. Though, because Blake didn’t play sports and Chad was “larger than him by age 11”, physical fighting “got very boring very quickly.” As a result, their primary way of competing as kids came through video games. From Starcraft to Warcraft to Dota 2, video games would be a hobby they “loved and still love” to this day—though Blake would always be “just slightly net better” than Chad.


But while they primarily competed against each other, the Byers brothers also teamed up in moments. 


⎯


In the early 2000s, the narrative around kids using technology had already begun starting. Parents didn’t “love you spending 10 hours on a Saturday on a screen,” so as Chad and Blake spent extensively more time in their home computer lab, Mr. and Mrs. Byers would frequently intervene to stop the gaming sprees.

But being the “kind of kid who was building kit computers and stuff as a kid,” Blake would architect a work around. He went to Fry’s Electronics and bought the smallest camera he could find, setting it up to point down the hallway approaching the computer room. He lined the cable along the wall of their TV room and under the rug, before hooking it up to a screen under their gaming computers. Then, whenever their parents would go in to check on them, the brothers would see it on their screens, Alt+Tab to a Word doc, and pretend they were writing essays. With this scheme, the Byers brothers got away with spending the “majority of weekdays” gaming. 

For the “absolutely brilliant” Blake, the intense gaming schedule posed no issues to his schoolwork.  But Chad had trouble following along in class. Being scatterbrained from his ADD, he was a “terrible test taker” and “always preferred to work for stuff and build things”. He knew education was important, but he wanted to primarily enjoy his life and “meet great people”—and for Chad, his passion growing up “was sports and the outdoors.”

So combining the two passions, Chad decided to pursue being a park ranger.

University Days and Early Career

Jagged Flatiron Mountains watched over Boulder—a range of red sandstone giants catching the last light of day. In the summer, their slopes held on to snow long after the campus below had thawed. On the wide, green sprawl of Norlin Quad, students moved in currents: some hurrying to class, others stretched out in the grass with open textbooks and closed eyes, letting the sun press into their faces. The smell of pine hung in the air, cut through by the occasional gust of cold wind rolling down from the Rockies.

The University of Colorado in Boulder was a state school with, in 2005, a student body nearing thirty thousand students from “all over the country.” There were frat houses with American flags sagging on their porches, environmental science classes that took place ankle-deep in snow, and dorm rooms filled with the thrum of electronic music and the quiet glow of laptop screens.


Chad, looking “like a 12 year old kid,” was “pretty insecure and scared freshman year.” He didn’t rush a fraternity, but instead found a close group of five “really smart” friends who also enjoyed the outdoors. They spent their time mountain biking through the foothills, climbing with the CU Alpine Club, and carving the slopes of Eldora multiple times a week. They even built their own tracks, an experience “that was probably very different than the average person.”

Apart from being the “best place in the country to ski,” Chad was also drawn to CU by their strong environmental science program. Being near the Rockies, they had “all sorts of weird classes” in the field, with one requiring them to “catch squirrels in bags and tag their ears.”


It was an amazing experience for a “sports-loving, trying to figure out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do in the world kind of person,” and Chad loved every second of it. But a few years in, he realized that catching squirrels wasn’t fulfilling enough to become his career.

⎯


There was a small startup in Boulder called eSwarm, part of the early Web 2.0 buzz that hovered over across the country. eSwarm was “inverse Groupon before Groupon.” Users named a product and a target discount, then if enough strangers clicked “I’m in,” eSwarm bargained with the manufacturer to drop‑ship the bulk order. 

Chad began working with them in senior year, caught up in the adrenaline inducing, fast-paced energy of an early stage startup. At eSwarm, he hustled and poured all his energy into the work. He was a “true coffee-getter [and] cold caller,” squeezing in hours at 7 am before his day of classes started until he eventually started skipping them entirely. It was an “incredible experience” for young Chad, giving him an opportunity to develop his sales and outreach skills as well as experience the culture of an early stage startup. 

While Chad was still “intellectually interested in the outdoors and the environment,” he couldn’t let go of that taste he’d experienced at eSwarm. “Moving a number, seeing an output that’s real”—it was the same feeling he’d felt hawking mistletoe and Beanie Babies as a kid. 

Chad began to feel a sense of clarity. He realized that, while ecology could always be a hobby for him, professionally—he wanted “to start a business.” And “to start a business that could be important and could be big”. 


By the time he left Boulder, the boy who once looked twelve had developed a strong conviction that would lead him for decades.


⎯


After graduating in 2009, Chad went to mentors asking for career advice. They told him to “go get work experience,” and so Chad moved back to the Bay. Luck would favor him in San Francisco, as a new wave of Valley startups were beginning to form in the rebuilding after 2008’s financial crisis. 

In what was “an amazing time to be in San Francisco,” Chad began working for a venture-backed company called Silver Spring Networks. They were “in the early clean tech 1.0 era,” building smart‑meter hardware and Zigbee‑based mesh networks that enabled utilities like PG&E to automatically poll every home’s electricity usage. It was “a really good company”—they built chips and access points in neighborhoods to pull data, going on to IPO a few years later.

But Chad realized—he “hated working for people.” He couldn’t “stand reporting to people” and “doing work just to please someone, even though it didn’t actually move the business forward.” 


So in 2012, Chad quit. Then on a whim to explore and see new things, he packed the car up with all his belongings, embarking on a two month, 15 ski resort cross country road trip to New York City.

Nerd Glaze

Eight blocks from Times Square, on March 25th of 2013, studio floodlights lit up a stage as The Daily Show warmed up the crowd. Chad, freshly transplanted to New York, settled into the tiered seating with a few friends. Jon Stewart bantered with Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage about the perils of “binging on too much nerd content” before Stewart squinted at the camera, coining a phrase on a whim.

“That’s called nerd glaze.” 


A pause. A grin.


“If someone doesn’t own nerdglaze.com, they should.” 


Chad and his friends laughed in cue with the rest of the live audience. The moment was a hit, and would be brought up in conversation again later that evening as the group sat around a restaurant table waiting for their food. Laughing in recollection, they agreed “that part was really funny.” But a realization hit Chad. It was a fully taped show, and they “said a domain on TV—that’s really interesting.” Chad thumbed in the URL on his phone, and luck was waiting for him again.


“Affordable, Reliable Web Hosting Solutions”—the punch-line domain was unclaimed.


Chad bought the URL instantly. Mid-meal, with plates half finished, he “paid the dinner bill and rushed home” with his friend. Scrambling to their laptop, the pair cracked open WordPress and slapped Dinklage’s smirking face across their one-page site: “BIG THINGS COMING.” And with “no plan of what the thing was,” they set up an email submit bar with a call to action: “If you want to be involved, reach out.” 

They stayed up that night as the page went live. Soon, the East-Coast airing ended. Then Central. Then Pacific. Google Analytics fluttered like a slot machine gone feral—“tens of thousands of email submits” flooded into their inbox until sunrise. They answered from nerdglaze@gmail.com (no time to wire up custom MX records), fielding pitches from would-be columnists, anime obsessives, and indie-game critics.

Within weeks, the site had grown into a “Reddit-ish Barstool Sports for nerd content.” Categories ranged from anime to movies to RPG mods to “all sorts of content,” and they drew in a decentralized bullpen of volunteer writers slugging out opinion columns and content posts. And whenever a headline went viral on Reddit, the traffic would crater their budget server’s capabilities, setting Chad on a mission to hastily learn the dependencies and attempt to fix the crash.


The project seeped into a full time grind of late nights with a small team of close friends. They worked “on stuff that was a blast,” binged all the content people would write, and learned how to grow a business. It was an invaluable learning experience which reinforced the idea of “jump[ing] on opportunities if you see them,” because entrepreneurial sparks could come anywhere—whether it be local mistletoe trees or an improvised joke from The Daily Show.


But less than a year in, the Nerd Glaze stint had begun “taking up way too much of [his] time.” Chad had already started Susa Ventures in November of the prior year, and realized that Susa was “clearly what [he wanted] to go work on.” So after evaluating a few deals, they sold Nerd Glaze to a Midwestern content farm, closing the journey but having gained lifelong skills and a sizable sum of money.

Nerd Glaze

Eight blocks from Times Square, on March 25th of 2013, studio floodlights lit up a stage as The Daily Show warmed up the crowd. Chad, freshly transplanted to New York, settled into the tiered seating with a few friends. Jon Stewart bantered with Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage about the perils of “binging on too much nerd content” before Stewart squinted at the camera, coining a phrase on a whim.

“That’s called nerd glaze.” 


A pause. A grin.


“If someone doesn’t own nerdglaze.com, they should.” 


Chad and his friends laughed in cue with the rest of the live audience. The moment was a hit, and would be brought up in conversation again later that evening as the group sat around a restaurant table waiting for their food. Laughing in recollection, they agreed “that part was really funny.” But a realization hit Chad. It was a fully taped show, and they “said a domain on TV—that’s really interesting.” Chad thumbed in the URL on his phone, and luck was waiting for him again.


“Affordable, Reliable Web Hosting Solutions”—the punch-line domain was unclaimed.


Chad bought the URL instantly. Mid-meal, with plates half finished, he “paid the dinner bill and rushed home” with his friend. Scrambling to their laptop, the pair cracked open WordPress and slapped Dinklage’s smirking face across their one-page site: “BIG THINGS COMING.” And with “no plan of what the thing was,” they set up an email submit bar with a call to action: “If you want to be involved, reach out.” 

They stayed up that night as the page went live. Soon, the East-Coast airing ended. Then Central. Then Pacific. Google Analytics fluttered like a slot machine gone feral—“tens of thousands of email submits” flooded into their inbox until sunrise. They answered from nerdglaze@gmail.com (no time to wire up custom MX records), fielding pitches from would-be columnists, anime obsessives, and indie-game critics.

Within weeks, the site had grown into a “Reddit-ish Barstool Sports for nerd content.” Categories ranged from anime to movies to RPG mods to “all sorts of content,” and they drew in a decentralized bullpen of volunteer writers slugging out opinion columns and content posts. And whenever a headline went viral on Reddit, the traffic would crater their budget server’s capabilities, setting Chad on a mission to hastily learn the dependencies and attempt to fix the crash.


The project seeped into a full time grind of late nights with a small team of close friends. They worked “on stuff that was a blast,” binged all the content people would write, and learned how to grow a business. It was an invaluable learning experience which reinforced the idea of “jump[ing] on opportunities if you see them,” because entrepreneurial sparks could come anywhere—whether it be local mistletoe trees or an improvised joke from The Daily Show.


But less than a year in, the Nerd Glaze stint had begun “taking up way too much of [his] time.” Chad had already started Susa Ventures in November of the prior year, and realized that Susa was “clearly what [he wanted] to go work on.” So after evaluating a few deals, they sold Nerd Glaze to a Midwestern content farm, closing the journey but having gained lifelong skills and a sizable sum of money.

The Passion Behind Venture

At around the same time he started Nerd Glaze, Chad had begun angel investing—writing small checks to Boulder friends and early-stage founders he met around New York. Days blurred between scaling Nerd Glaze, attending TechCrunch Disrupt events, and cold-emailing established investors to “hustle [his] way into the New York tech ecosystem.”


New York’s early 2010s startup scene was intensely compact. For Chad, it felt like he “could truly meet everyone with a series of twenty emails.” Two of those emails would go to Chris Dixon (building Hunch) and David Tisch (running Techstars), where Chad asked “a bunch of just basic questions” from “How do you evaluate founders?” to “What made your winning investments succeed?”

Venture work and angel investing suited Chad’s instincts as well. Juggling multiple startups let him leverage his “ADD scatterbrain to handle whatever’s most important each day,” and it felt “amazing.” 

Chad realized he loved “building the business of the fund—fundraising, people, culture, strategy”—as much as investing. And that clarity led to the founding of Susa Ventures at the end of 2013—a firm anchored in the three Byers family principles from his upbringing.


One—honesty. “You cannot just be a cheerleader.” Be “as honest as possible, even if it’s negative.” Over time, you will “build enough goodwill that people assume good intention.”

Two—humility. “Build everything with humility.” Because “entrepreneurs move the world, and VCs are the supporting cast.” Any success Susa has is “because of the entrepreneur, not because of Susa.”


Three—empathy. “Acknowledge the founder’s grind.” Because “they grind their life down; they grind their health down; they sacrifice social relationships.” To “do it at the very best—it is really hard.”

Those were the “three pillars [Chad] wanted to build a career on.” And venture capital, Chad realized, was the ultimate vessel for all three.

The Passion Behind Venture

At around the same time he started Nerd Glaze, Chad had begun angel investing—writing small checks to Boulder friends and early-stage founders he met around New York. Days blurred between scaling Nerd Glaze, attending TechCrunch Disrupt events, and cold-emailing established investors to “hustle [his] way into the New York tech ecosystem.”

New York’s early 2010s startup scene was intensely compact. For Chad, it felt like he “could truly meet everyone with a series of twenty emails.” Two of those emails would go to Chris Dixon (building Hunch) and David Tisch (running Techstars), where Chad asked “a bunch of just basic questions” from “How do you evaluate founders?” to “What made your winning investments succeed?”

Venture work and angel investing suited Chad’s instincts as well. Juggling multiple startups let him leverage his “ADD scatterbrain to handle whatever’s most important each day,” and it felt “amazing.” 


Chad realized he loved “building the business of the fund—fundraising, people, culture, strategy”—as much as investing. And that clarity led to the founding of Susa Ventures at the end of 2013—a firm anchored in the three Byers family principles from his upbringing.

One—honesty. “You cannot just be a cheerleader.” Be “as honest as possible, even if it’s negative.” Over time, you will “build enough goodwill that people assume good intention.”


Two—humility. “Build everything with humility.” Because “entrepreneurs move the world, and VCs are the supporting cast.” Any success Susa has is “because of the entrepreneur, not because of Susa.”

Three—empathy. “Acknowledge the founder’s grind.” Because “they grind their life down; they grind their health down; they sacrifice social relationships.” To “do it at the very best—it is really hard.”


Those were the “three pillars [Chad] wanted to build a career on.” And venture capital, Chad realized, was the ultimate vessel for all three.

Susa Ventures

“Okay—we started a business. What’s my job?” 

“My job is finding startups—I’m going to find startups.”

Chad scoured events and “lived on the internet,” leading him to Canva within the first year of Susa’s founding. The browser-based design tool “wasn’t as heavy-handed as Adobe” and “felt easier to use for the average user.” Despite that, it was still powerful—Chad could see applications in “hardcore real design” while simultaneously also in “making a menu for a dinner party.” 

But the company was based in Australia, and Chad was “not going to fly down there.” So instead, he DM’d the founder—Melanie—on LinkedIn.


To Chad’s surprise, Melanie responded, thanking him for reaching out but informing that Canva wasn’t raising at the moment.

“Oh, great! She’s going to ping me when she raises—this job is super easy!”

But Melanie never followed up, as that’s “what happens when people get busy and have more options.” And as Canva grew into a $30 billion dollar decacorn, the lesson of that “hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar mistake” would only “get more brutal every year”:

 “It is your responsibility. You have to do the follow-up—no one’s going to do it for you.”

⎯


Nevertheless, luck soon balanced the scales. One of Chad’s first VC meetings took him to Sand Hill Road where he met Robinhood founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt. They pitched an unlicensed prototype—no live trading yet, but a UI starkly different from 2014’s cluttered finance apps. It was “by far and away, the most beautiful thing” Chad had ever seen in a mobile app.

And for a mid 20s Chad, Robinhood’s thesis hit home. Platforms like “E*TRADE, Interactive Brokers, and that wave 1.0 of online brokerages didn’t speak to [young people] as users,” so when Vlad and Baiju declared they would “change how this generation thinks about investing,” Chad backed them immediately.


What followed became a masterclass in focus. Robinhood’s founders vanished into execution—no press events, no conferences, no angel investing side quests. Just relentless iteration. They “truly just focused on company building.” And as such, they “built one of the most impressive companies of the decade”—one that Chad believes will be a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars “juggernaut of a business” and continue to “compound forever.”

Luck had once again favored Chad’s side, offering him a chance “to be part of Robinhood from the seed.” 


⎯


Robinhood was an anomaly. In the 12 years of Susa since then, Chad would watch companies shatter. He’d see “founders break up and fall apart,” he’d see “fraud in a companies [and] portfolios,” and he’d see market dynamics and all these things that are “nothing to the fault of the team” collapse momentous companies within days. 


Just as before, Chad’s three pillars would hold steady. He pushed forward with a strong sense of humility, knowing “you can only control what you can,” and that “there’s an incredible amount of things outside of your control.”


As Susa focuses on early stage, finding rare founders like Vlad and Baiju remains, in a way, Chad’s “entire goal in life.”

Motivations and Future Career

An early mentor of Chad had once told him—


“The reason to be the best in the world at something is not that you’re the best in the world at it. It’s that when you’re the best in the world at something, you interact with the people that are the best in the world at what they [each] do. And that’s what makes life so compelling.”

This philosophy crystallized in 2025 with Susa V—a $175 million seed-stage fund and one of the largest seed-only funds in the US. Amidst all the “buffet venture capital” that the world of “venture [was] obviously going,” Susa V had doubled down on specialization. He had dialed in on a niche—early stage—and was going “to try to be the best in the world at it.”

His purpose centered on three convictions. First came building the firm itself—“creating an environment where people can build careers” remained paramount. Second, backing exceptional founders—doing everything he can to “do right by them,” because it’s a “compounding thing that’s really powerful in the world.” Third, aligning capital with mission. When Susa V “switched the entire LP base to US-based nonprofits in education or healthcare,” it reflected Chad’s deepest motivations—including healthcare investments comprising 20-25% of Susa’s portfolio.

This healthcare focus actually traced back to his father, a profoundly private mentor who’d worked on treatments for the disease that claimed Chad’s grandmother. That legacy manifested through Chad in companies like Viz—a platform Susa backed at the seed. They would then grow to become the “leading platform in the U.S. for triaging stroke patients using CT scans,” being used by over a thousand hospitals in 2025 and “directionally saving lives.” It brought Chad “peak career happiness,” knowing that a product he supported changed the world in a material way.

⎯


Now, at 38 years of age, Chad approaches the next decades with a blend of conviction and intentional uncertainty. He firmly believes “you should always evolve yourself,” arguing that since “the market changes—you have to change with it.” For Chad, this philosophy stems from a core principle: 


“Every person has a way to have max impact.”


And so the question Chad asks people is, “if you really interrogated your life today, do you actually think you’re on that path? And if you’re not, why are you not trying to change that?”


Chad emphasizes that the constantly changing state of the world demands adaptability. Hence, he doesn’t know for sure what his future might look like. Instead, Chad “decides what [he] should be doing—and if [he’s] on that path—every year.” 


Regardless of what happens, though, three pillars remain non-negotiable for Chad. 


One—he will continue investing in companies in the same way he does today—“primarily early stage.” 


Two—he will persist in investing with people he admires, a practice central to his past 12 years. 


And three—his focus will stay on technology, “because technology is [his] passion.”


Those three elements are his constants. Everything else of “other shapes and forms” remains “TBD,” because “the best firms and the best businesses all evolve” with the market.

Chad Byers

Somewhere between mistletoe bundles and mesh networks, somewhere between the late-night WordPress binges and early-morning founder calls, there had always been a common undercurrent.


It’d started in childhood. His brother, Blake, was always a step ahead—from better grades to tighter Starcraft builds to longer patience in Dota. It wasn’t spite, but it fueled a rivalry that made Chad sharper, faster, and hungrier.

Most who feel that edge let go of it as they grow older. But Chad never did. He still feels it in board meetings, in reference calls; it’s there when a portfolio company wins and even more when one doesn’t. It makes him “miserable to play casual games with” and “probably comes from rooted insecurity I should talk to a therapist about.”


But it’s always been there, and if there was ever a book title that captured it all—the grind, the determination, the hunger beneath the humility—Chad Byers already knows what the title would be:


“I live to outcompete you.”

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