Kenneth
Chan

The engineer who dressed the internet

Before Kenneth Chan worried about hemlines and seasonal palettes, he was building infrastructure. Email portals. Ad networks. Incubators. The kind of back-end machinery that the web runs on but nobody names after you. Chan spent the late 1990s growing Everyone.net into a top-50 US website with 25 million users - not bad for a portal that most people today couldn't pick out of a lineup. He wasn't trying to be famous. He was solving engineering problems.

Then in 2002, he founded Connexus - later Netblue - from his apartment. An internet marketing firm. Not glamorous. Very profitable. He scaled it past $100M without fanfare, without venture money, and without a press profile. It's the kind of company that exists in the gap between "tech startup" and "boring but lucrative," and Chan was completely comfortable there.

By 2006 he'd set up Next Internet, his own incubator, to back the next set of consumer internet bets. One of them was a little project called Tobi. He liked what he saw well enough that by 2010 he stopped running the incubator and stepped in as Founder and CEO full-time. That's the tell - when the portfolio company is so interesting you give it your whole calendar.

What Chan built at Tobi wasn't a fashion brand that tacked on technology. It was the other way around: a technology operation that happened to sell clothes. He recruited engineers. He built the e-commerce platform from scratch, in-house. He wired up data analytics to track what was trending before the trend became obvious to everyone else. Most fashion companies buy their tech. Tobi wrote it.

The supply chain piece is where Chan's engineering instincts really show. Most fast-fashion brands talk about speed; Tobi operationalized it. Chan got his team to a position where they could take a garment from sketch to production-ready in under eight weeks. That's not just a timeline - it's an organizational discipline. It means design, sourcing, manufacturing, quality control, and logistics are all tightly connected, with feedback loops rather than handoffs. It's how software teams ship. It just happens to produce crop tops instead of code.

The results were real: roughly $90 million in annual revenue, serving customers across more than 100 countries, with a 130-person team in South San Francisco and Los Angeles. For a company that never announced a funding round, that's an unusual number. Most D2C fashion brands at that scale have raised several rounds of venture capital and still haven't turned a profit. Chan built his the old way - selling things people actually wanted, for more than it cost to make them.

In 2019, Apparel Magazine named him one of retail's top innovators, pointing specifically to Tobi's app relaunch on the Poq commerce platform. The numbers were striking: within one week of launch, the new app was delivering 2.2 times longer shopping sessions than the mobile website. That's not a marketing metric. That's product quality, measured in time.

Chan's approach throughout has been consistent: find an old industry, treat its core problem as an engineering problem, build the infrastructure to solve it at scale. He did it with email (Everyone.net), with digital advertising (Connexus), and with fashion (Tobi). The industries look different. The method doesn't. That's either a very clear philosophy or a very persistent personality trait. Probably both.