Paul Hsiao

Paul joined forces with Rebecca Lynn and Gary Little as a founding member of Canvas Ventures in 2014, with the purpose of creating the type of boutique firm he would have liked to work with as an entrepreneur himself, one where every investment is meaningful and where he can spend his time working with his founders to scale their business. At Canvas, Paul’s investments include eporta, Fluxx Labs, Kidbox, MasonHub, Flowspace, Roofstock, Shoreline Software, Skyflow, Thrive Global, Transfix, and Zola. He has also pioneered the firm’s work in co-creation— helping start new companies by match-making domain experts with market opportunity in areas ripe for disruption. A former partner at NEA, Paul spent ten years helping companies scale from garage-scale startups to IPO and acquisition. Paul found that he loved the venture business, and he had an innate curiosity to learn about how others built meaningful companies. While at NEA, he worked alongside companies including Salesforce (CRM), Tableau Software, Coursera, Spreadtrum Communications, Workday (WDAY), Upwork, Gaikai (SNE), Boingo Wireless (WIFI), SMIC, and many others. Paul is an entrepreneur at heart. He immigrated with his parents from Taipei in junior high. Contrary to his parent’s wishes for him to become a doctor, he leveraged his mechanical and biomedical engineering degrees from MIT, where he launched startup in the medical device space tackling open-heart surgery, and his MBA from HBS, where he launched a startup in the network security space called Mazu Networks. Paul financed the early days of Mazu on credit cards, camped outside of customer prospects and venture firms in minivan rentals, and got his break when he attracted financing support from Greylock, Matrix and Benchmark Capital. Mazu was a pioneer in network security built from technology developed at MIT. Early adopters of Mazu’s proprietary DDoS-security platform, which was eventually acquired by Riverbed Technology, included Yahoo, eBay and CNN, and Paul is proud to say that the engineering team and underlying software paved the foundation later for Meraki