What Actually Happened With Simon Wan
Simon Wan built a pretty unusual career trajectory without really making a show of it. He co-founded HAX, which is one of the oldest and most active hardware accelerators in the world, based out of Shenzhen. Before that he worked at Google on Android. He founded Volo Mobility, which was acquired. Then he started Beringea, a venture firm focused on deep tech and climate solutions. The headline version of his story is that he went from engineer to operator to investor, but the actual texture of it is messier and more specific than that reads. The reason he keeps coming up in conversations about where money should go in the next decade is not that he's charismatic or media-savvy. It's that he has a track record of being early on things that actually shipped. HAX has graduated over a thousand companies. That is not a small number. Most accelerators hand out certificates. HAX turned out products that got bought or went public. Wan was in the room when a lot of that happened, which gives his investing thesis more weight than most people who talk about hardware or climate tech.
The Business Worlds New Darling Simon Wans Rise To Prominence
People started calling him that a while back, mostly because the narrative around where venture capital is headed keeps circling back to him. The climate tech cycle is real. Hardware is hard again, in a way it wasn't during the app boom. Wan sits at the intersection of those two trends and has been saying the same things for years before they became fashionable. That consistency reads differently when you are watching the market rather than reading about it. I worked closely with a founder who was evaluating whether to take a check from Beringea. The due diligence process took longer than anything we had experienced with software VCs. That was not a complaint. They asked to see the supplier relationships, the DFM documentation, the pilot data from actual customers, not just slide decks. One of their partners spent forty-five minutes on a call with our mechanical engineer asking about thermal management on the power board. That is the kind of question that separates people who understand hardware from people who fund it superficially. We signed the term sheet two weeks later. Here is the counter-intuitive part that most people miss about Wan's approach. He does not actually look for the biggest total addressable market. He looks for supply chain concentration. If a category has a massive market but the manufacturing is diversified across hundreds of factories in three countries, his interest drops. If the market is smaller but the key component only comes from two suppliers in one province, that is where the leverage is. It sounds backwards until you have watched a portfolio company get held hostage by a single foundry allocation decision. Wan avoids those stories by front-loading the constraint analysis. You should do the same if you are raising from him or trying to emulate his investing framework.
The other thing beginners get wrong is assuming he wants the typical SaaS multiple. Hardware margins are different. Unit economics matter more than recurring revenue projections in his model. I had a startup that came to us with a beautifully formatted financial model projecting seventy percent gross margins by year three. When we dug into the bill of materials, the actual landed cost was closer to fifty-two percent after assembly, packaging, and shipping. The model assumed no warranty reserve and no returns. We walked away. The company later tried to raise from another deep tech fund and went through the same exercise. That is just how this game works now. If you want to position yourself in Wan's orbit, the practical steps are not glamorous. Document your supply chain. Know your single source components. Build relationships with contract manufacturers before you need them, not after you have product-market fit and are desperate. Get pilot customers who will write reference letters, not just letters of intent. Write your technical documentation in a way that a non-engineer investor can follow the architecture without calling you three times for clarification. Wan's team reads the docs first. If they cannot understand what you built in ten minutes, they move on. There are legitimate downsides to this whole setup that nobody talks about enough. Beringea and similar funds moving into hardware are constrained by their own capital structure. They cannot deploy at the speed software VCs did during 2020. The check sizes are meaningful but not unlimited. You will hear about slow communication and long decision cycles. That is real. It is also the tradeoff for getting investors who will not force you to pivot your hardware company into a software subscription play because someone on the LP side wants quarterly returns. Those bad fits used to happen silently and then you discovered the problem after the board seat was allocated. Wan's type of fund makes the misalignment visible earlier, usually during that first deep technical call.
Get the Full Details
For people who are not in hardware, the parallel lesson is about domain competence in investing. The market is moving toward people who actually understand the physics and economics of what they are funding. Generalist VCs who only look at growth metrics are going to get crushed on harder tech bets over the next few years. That is not a prediction. It is what the last two funding cycles already showed. Wan was doing that discipline before it was a talking point at conferences. I do not have a download link or a template to share. There is nothing to download here. The practical takeaway is that if you are building something physical and looking for capital, stop sending pitch decks to generalists and start preparing your operations like you are already running a public company. It takes more work upfront. It saves a lot of time later when the questions start coming from people who have seen this exact breakdown happen twenty times before.
