My First Investor Was My Wife, and Why That Matters More Than You Think

When people ask who my first investor was, I tell them the truth: it was my wife.

Not a fund, not an angel group, not even a friend with a checkbook. Just one person who believed in me before there was a pitch deck, a market, or even a product. Her check wasn't big by Silicon Valley standards, but it was everything emotionally. It wasn't capital as much as it was permission—permission to try, to fail, and to put our personal life on pause for a dream with no guarantees.

That was the real first check. The one that mattered most.

Ten years ago, I stood on stage at the 2014 MIT Global Founder Skills Accelerator demo day in San Francisco. I was essentially a kid fresh out of grad school—PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, sure, but what did I really know about building a company?

I had passion. I had drive. I had conviction that could power a small city. The business plan? Looking back, it was honestly pretty naive. The kind of first-time founder pitch that makes experienced investors politely nod and quietly back away.

Sam Lessin didn't back away.

He wrote one of the first checks to Smarking—not because my business plan was perfect, but because of who he saw in me: a founder willing to run through walls to make it happen. He bet on grit, not on the pitch.

Over the years with Smarking, there were multiple near-death moments. The kind that tests everything you believe about yourself. The kind where you wonder if you're destroying your team's lives for nothing. The kind where investors typically start hedging, protecting their positions, preparing for failure.

Sam's message during those dark times?

"Hey Wen, don't worry about us investors. We're all big boys. Take good care of your team, yourself, and run with it."

That support—that unconditional backing when things looked bleakest—made all the difference. It gave me the mental space to focus on what mattered: the team, the product, the mission. Not on managing investor anxiety or protecting egos.

Smarking, a YC and Slow Ventures backed enterprise SaaS company, eventually got acquired by JustPark in 2022. Not because the path was smooth, but because I had people in my corner who believed in me through thick and thin.

Deep down, I wish I could make Sam and Slow a fuck ton of money whenever possible. That's who I am. But more importantly, that's the bond that was forged—not through contracts, but through trust earned in the trenches.

Today, I'm the Co-Founder and COO of Genspark.ai - a Palo Alto-based AI company building agents for 1 billion+ global knowledge workers. I co-founded it with an incredible group of partners who have scaled technology systems at Microsoft, Google, Meta, YouTube, and Pinterest from zero to billions of users.

This team? They're the real deal. Multiple of my cofounders have shipped products that touched billions, navigated some of the most demanding technical challenges in the industry, and learned what it actually takes to build at true scale.

In April 2025, we launched our Super Agent suite—an all-in-one AI workspace where knowledge workers can research, create content, generate presentations and spreadsheets, design marketing materials, and automate complex tasks with a single prompt. The platform features over 80 specialized agents including AI Slides, AI Sheets, AI Docs, AI Designer, AI Developer, and even capabilities like making phone calls and restaurant reservations on behalf of users.

The response has been extraordinary. We grew from 0 to $50M ARR in just 5 months—the fastest growth in the agent space. We've raised $435M across three rounds in 20 months: $60M Seed, $100M Series A, and a $275M Series B that brought us to unicorn status at a $1.25 billion valuation. Our backers include Emergence Capital Partners, LG Technology Ventures, SBI Investment, UpHonest Capital, and Pavilion Capital (a Temasek subsidiary).

Both OpenAI and Anthropic recently published case studies recognizing Genspark.ai as a strategic partner and world-class AI agent technology company. They highlighted our no-code personal agents and innovative use of cutting-edge AI models. And at OpenAI Dev Day 2025, Sam Altman spotlighted Genspark as one of only 30 companies globally recognized as a "Trillion Token Company"—processing over a trillion tokens through OpenAI's platform.

We've also partnered with the industry's leading infrastructure providers. Microsoft featured us as a launch partner for Agent 365, making our agents securely available within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. And AWS selected us as their preferred showcase for agentic AI, helping us reduce costs by up to 72% through Amazon Bedrock while serving over 20 million users worldwide.

Here's what the headlines don't show: the decades of battle scars that made this possible.

Our founding team has worked in some of the most demanding, competitive environments in tech. We've seen what works at scale and what breaks. We've launched products to billions of users and watched others fail spectacularly. We've navigated complex distributed systems, shipped under impossible deadlines, debugged production issues at 3 AM, and learned from some of the best operators in the world.

And then there's the startup world—Smarking and everything that taught me. The real failures. The real pivots. The real moments where you question everything.

You can't get this kind of depth from theory alone—it comes from years of building, breaking, and rebuilding in the real world.

Our platform combines 30+ SOTA AI models, 20+ premium datasets, and 150+ proprietary tools. We leverage models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemina and many others—always choosing the best model for each specific task rather than forcing everything through a single LLM. As my co-founder Eric puts it, "We want our users to talk directly to the business outcome, instead of talking to a chatbot."

That means when you need a presentation, you talk to the slide deck directly. When you need research, you interact with comprehensive analysis, not just chat responses. When you need to automate workflow, the agent understands context across your entire workspace.

Genspark.ai is hot right now because of the decades of preparation that came before it. Because of the scar tissue. Because of the people—like my wife, like Sam, like my incredible co-founders and team—who believed when there was no reason to.

That's what builds companies that last.

We're on a mission to enable the 3-day work week for knowledge workers globally—not by making people work less, but by making AI agents that handle the grunt work so humans can focus on what truly matters: creativity, strategy, and meaningful work.

After ten years, multiple companies, and working across some of tech's most iconic platforms, here's what I know:

The first check you get isn't financial—it's emotional. It's a belief, long before there's evidence.

The best teams are built on decades of real experience, not just resumes. It's about having been in the trenches, having the scars, knowing what breaks at scale.

The best investors don't just write checks—they stand by you through hell. Sam and Slow backed me when I was a naive kid with an imperfect plan but unshakeable drive. They stayed with me through Smarking's near-death moments. They gave me the space to take care of my team and myself when things got darkest.

That's the kind of investor you want. That's the kind of founder you need to be.

Not someone chasing hype. Not someone building because it's trendy. But someone with real expertise, real grit, and real commitment to running through walls when everyone else has gone home.

– Wen Sang
Co-Founder & COO, Genspark.ai

P.S. If you want to see what Genspark.ai can do for your work, visit us at genspark.ai. We're building the future of how knowledge workers get things done—one agent at a time.

For all the Slow community members, here is 1,000 free credits as a token of gratitude.