Allen Lau, Co-founder and Operating Partner, Two Small Fish Ventures

Recovering CEO, 3x Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist by Profession, Electrical Engineer by Training, Founders’ Sounding Board.

Allen Lau is Co-founder and Operating Partner at Two Small Fish Ventures, an early-stage deep tech venture capital firm focused on the next frontier in computing and its applications, reshaping large-scale behaviour, driven by the collapsing cost of intelligence. The firm is renowned for writing the crucial ‘first cheque’ to promising startups that later became world-class companies, such as SkipTheDishes, BenchSci, Printify, Story Protocol, Ideogram, and Ada, among many others.

He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Wattpad, the world’s leading social storytelling platform. Allen led a global team that leveraged AI and data to disrupt the entertainment industry. Under his leadership from 2006 to 2022, Wattpad grew into a community of 100 million users, raised US$120 million from top VCs around the world, was acquired by the South Korean internet conglomerate Naver for US$660 million in 2021, and was subsequently spun out as part of the separate NASDAQ-listed company WEBTOON (WBTN).

Allen is a visionary serial entrepreneur, a leader in Canada’s tech community, and a sought-after speaker and authoritative voice on entrepreneurship and the innovation economy. Twice named one of the Top 50 Most Influential People by Toronto Life, Allen has also been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Canada's prestigious Report on Business Magazine, among other publications.

He also serves on the board of MaRS Discovery District, North America’s largest urban innovation hub; the Openmind Research Institute, a non-profit organization focused on conducting AI research to better understand minds; as well as various startups in which Two Small Fish has invested.

Allen received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Toronto’s Electrical Engineering program. In 2020, he was inducted into the Engineering Alumni Hall of Distinction at the University of Toronto.