Simon Chan
General Partner at Firsthand Alliance
New York, New York
Overview
Work Experience
General Partner
2022 - Current
Firsthand.vc is a “Salesforce mafia” VC fund. We invest in ambitious founders who are building the future of B2B from the earliest stage.
Firsthand.vc is an inception stage VC investing in autonomous B2B software across industries.
Angel Investor / LP
2016
I invest personally in startups that are not within the scope of Firsthand Alliance. I also invest in some funds as an LP. Highlighted personal portfolio: - Caper - AI self-checkout shopping carts (Acq by Instacart) - Indus.ai - construction intelligence (Acq by Procore) - Brightback - an automated subscription retention service (Acq by Chargebee) - Lawyaw - legal document automation (Acq by Clio) - Hummingbot - open-source crypto trading software - HomeCourt - an app that uses AI to record and track basketball shots, makes, misses, and location - Carta - company ownership management platform - Smith.ai - a receptionist service for live calls & website chat and other companies still in stealth mode. Select Web3: - OpenSea - Kraken - LikerLand Select funds: - Pantera Capital - Soma Capital - Animal Capital - 500 Global
Venture Partner
2019 - 2021
I'm excited to work with Shasta Ventures part-time as a Venture Partner to support entrepreneurs and further develop the firm's focus on smart enterprise software.
Shasta Ventures is a venture capital firm that focuses on investing capital in enterprises.
Executive In Residence (Investing)
2020 - 2021
Actively investing in early-stage startups globally.
Sierra Ventures is an early-stage venture firm investing globally with a focus on next generation enterprise and emerging technologies.
CEO and Co-founder
2013 - 2019
PredictionIO is a machine learning server. It empowers developers to build predictive engines and deploy them as scalable web services in a fraction of the time. The open source version of PredictionIO is ranked by Github as the most popular Apache Spark-based ML projects in the world. Acquired by Salesforce in Feb 2016. Built up the Einstein Platform product team after joining Salesforce. Initiated and launched AI-related platform products.
Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management software and applications.
Raised $65,375,124.00 from Starboard Value.
CEO & Co-Founder
2006 - 2010
Created two popular social networking sites: 1. WaZhua -- an online VR entertainment world. Pioneered China's live digital DJs and Karaoke market. 2. CityIN -- a networking site for professionals. Developed face-recognition technology for photo-tagging, QR code service for users to scan up to 1000 Chinese characters of data from the site into their mobile phones and a real-time learning recommendation engine. Acquired Moochi, a Tsinghua University spin-off company, which developed an online video editing platform for the China market. Managed a 50-people company in Guangzhou and Beijing.
CEO & Founder
2004 - 2006
Established the online career social networking. Powered by social graph recommendation and NLP for automated resume matching.
CEO & Founder
2003 - 2004
Established a tutor-student matching platform. Operated 6 profitable SAT preparation centers under the name Elite1600.
Software Engineer, Core Technology, Retail
2002 - 2004
Developed the intelligent Financial Advisor for mutual fund recommendation.
E*Trade is a financial services company that specializes in online discount stock brokerage service for self-directed investors.