In the past few years, I have been spending much of my time with researchers, professors, and deep tech founders sitting on remarkable breakthroughs and asking a difficult question:

What does it take to turn this innovation into a world-class company?

That question has become central to how I think about this chapter of my life.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Wattpad acquisition in 2021. That milestone naturally invites reflection. I am deeply grateful for that chapter and everything I learned from it, but I have 100% moved on.

Why?

Because I have even more fire in the belly for what comes next.

People sometimes ask me: Do I miss operating? Why am I doing this now? Why not just start another company and do it all over again?

Those questions all lead to a deeper one:

What does winning look like for me now?

For me, winning has always been about impact. Of course, many other things matter too. But without impact, I am not interested.

That has not changed.

What has changed is where I believe my experience is most useful, where I can have the highest-leverage impact, and what kind of challenge I feel most drawn to now.

I have no interest in simply repeating the last chapter. I have already co-founded and led one iconic company that reached 100 million users globally and became a cultural phenomenon. Fewer than two hundred companies in the world have achieved that 100-million-user milestone. Even fewer founders have stayed for the full marathon, from the first user all the way to a home run.

Rather than taking it easy, I want a new and even more ambitious challenge.

I have come to believe that one of the most important challenges in deep tech today is helping scientists and deep tech founders cross the very difficult bridge from scientific and engineering breakthrough to building a world-class company.

That is the work I feel most drawn to now. It is also work I feel unusually prepared for.

I started three companies. Between them, I have seen almost every major founder outcome: one VC-backed failure as CTO with tons of very stupid mistakes, one bootstrapped company as CEO with a small exit, and one VC-backed home run in Wattpad as CEO.

From the outside, Wattpad looked deceptively simple. In reality, it became an incredibly complex global business spanning consumer, enterprise, subscriptions, virtual goods, social media, frontier technology, traditional publishing, entertainment, and even geopolitics.

We were one of the pioneers in UGC and mobile, before the iPhone even existed. Over time, Wattpad also became a deep tech company. We started building our first of many proprietary machine learning models around 2013, long before most people had even heard of AI. That shaped how I think about technology disruption and how real technical innovation becomes enduring advantage.

I also lived through strategic investors, IPO preparation, multi-bidder acquisition processes, the constant need to disrupt and reinvent ourselves, moments when tech giants were clearly trying to kill us, and a few phoenix-from-the-ashes moments.

I do not say any of this to dwell on the past. I say it because seeing that many startup permutations from the inside gives you a massive toolbox of practical judgment and wisdom.

Those tools were built and tested through real-world operating experience from day one, scaling a business into a world-class company while enduring the full roller-coaster ride.

You learn them by starting a company when the market is not ready. You learn them by doing things no one has done before. You learn them by making painful mistakes. You learn them by carrying a company through long periods when it is working, but not yet obvious. You learn them by navigating the transition from prototype to product, from product to business, from business to company, and from startup to an enduring world-class venture.

That sequence matters deeply in what I do now, because very few people have lived it end to end: a breakthrough is not yet a product. A product is not yet a business. And a business is not yet an enduring, world-class company.

The bridge between those stages is turning innovation into product and then commercializing it. That is where many promising breakthroughs fail. Not because the innovation is weak, but because turning groundbreaking innovation into a world-class company requires a different set of skills and judgments: timing, technical moat, customer need, business model, smart capital, team building, endurance, and grit.

You need to understand how all of the pieces connect and work together to build a world-class company.

I now know what I did not know.

That belief sits at the center of how I now spend my time. My mission is to unleash the full potential of scientists and their innovations by helping them become entrepreneurs and build world-class companies.

That, more than anything else, is what this chapter is about for me.

That is also part of what makes TSF distinctly TSF.

We are not trying to be a generic early-stage fund. Across our whole investment team, without exception, we bring together a combination that is very rare in venture globally: deep technical chops, real-world operating experience, scar tissue from world-class company building, and a mission-driven commitment to helping scientists and technical founders build enduring, world-class companies. We are also proven full-cycle investors with the experience of backing multiple companies of exceptional scale.

To me, TSF is not simply an investment platform. It is one of the highest-leverage ways I can apply what I have learned to make the greatest impact.

Building one iconic world-class company is hard. Leveraging that experience to help build multiple world-class companies may be even harder.

That is the challenge I want.

The next chapter started four years ago when I stepped down as Wattpad CEO, and I have been building into it ever since.

I am entering this next stretch with a lot of fire in the belly and 100% commitment. For me, that is what winning looks like.

P.S. Don’t forget, I am moving from Allen’s Thoughts to my new Substack: recoveringceo.substack.com.

I will continue to post here for the time being. Whether you are a subscriber here or not, please take 30 seconds to subscribe to my new Substack, A Recovering CEO’s Thoughts by Allen Lau.