Thomas Chen
Founder of Slow Rodeo
Thomas Chen
Founder of Slow Rodeo
Los Angeles, California
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder
2023 - Current
Slow Rodeo is a consumer technology & design firm. We are currently building better consumer brands.
Co-Founder
2021
I support the company as needed, which is mostly engineering and data work.
Co-Founder & COO
2018 - 2021
Stitchroom is the easiest way for interior designers to purchase custom made-to-order home furnishings. I focus on engineering, operations, and finance.
General Partner
2021
Magic Fund is an early stage VC composed of active founders investing in founders. We invest at the pre-seed & seed level across all sectors and regions: US, LATAM, SEA, and Africa. I focus on DevTools, Infrastructure, Security, ML/AI and Crypto.
Product & Design
2022 - 2022
The company pivoted. I transitioned to helping with product and design.
Investment Manager
2022 - 2022
I lead investment strategies. We focus on generating yield with stablecoins on decentralized finance protocols.
Product Management & Software Engineering
2017 - 2017
I helped the founder of the company out for a few months as he was focused on growing the business. I oversaw the product and did some software engineering to help develop core features and internal tooling to scale operations.
Software Engineering
2017 - 2017
I focused on refactoring the existing codebase to improve efficiency and code quality. This involved writing a new version of our API, full end to end tests, and proper documentation. I also built the first version of our web application in React.js + Redux which most likely never saw the day of light.
Software Engineering -- Operations
2015 - 2016
I started an engineering team focused on building internal software to help perform the company's day to day functions after our series A raise. We built predominantly proprietary systems for account management/billing, sales, marketing, and BD teams. I was in personally in charge of managing and ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the company's business and financial data. I also built and maintained all the ETL processes for our data warehouse used for company wide reporting and analysis.
Software Engineering -- Product
2014 - 2015
I led web development efforts of our core product for a year and a half. I worked directly with our designer and head of product to rebuild our initial MVP. This involved developing our API and frontend application from scratch. My day-to-day responsibilities involved: building out new product features and fixing bugs / ensuring stability with the product. I later worked with my team to migrate the frontend from Backbone.js to React.js.
Software Engineering
2013 - 2014
I worked on the team that was responsible for the web applications of Groupon Goods. I joined in the midst of a company wide effort to migrate Groupon's web applications from a RoR to Node.js. I worked primarily on developing the product listings and product details pages in Node.js to achieve feature parity with the legacy RoR application. I then continued to worked on various new features for those pages. I also built an internal dashboard that synced and displayed real-time inventory numbers of products from various different data inputs.
Intern
2012 - 2012
I joined LightBank VC to help out at one of their porfolio companies for the summer. I worked as an iOS developer. I built a Q&A app and API for users of BenchPrep ask and answer questions posted by the community.
Summer Analyst
2011 - 2011
I worked on the Business Applications Infrastructure team. I developed automated tests to check the statuses of trading servers prior to market open that resulted in savings of 3-4 hours each day. I also assisted in server migrations and failover tests.
Education
BS
2008 - 2013
Investments
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