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The Millennial’s Guide to Personal Development
Talks about Life Lessons, Startup and Entrepreneurship
TC
Thomas Chen
Founder of Slow Rodeo
TC
Thomas Chen
Founder of Slow Rodeo
Los Angeles, California
Overview
Thomas Chen is a co-founder of Slow Rodeo and Stitchroom, with a background in software engineering and product management. He has invested in various companies at different stages, such as NoRamp and Fieldproxy, focusing on sectors like Developer Tools and FinTech.
Chen's career highlights include co-founding successful ventures, investing in promising startups at early stages, and holding roles in companies like Magic Fund and Zurp, showcasing a strong background in technology, entrepreneurship, and venture capital.
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.
Stitchroom specializes in crafting upholstery products, aiming to offer tailor-made and individualized items.
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.
MAGIC Fund is an early-stage venture capital fund built by founders for founders.
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.
Zurp is a fintech platform built for superfans.
Raised $5,000,000.00 from New Form Capital, Chaos Ventures, Niklas Jansen, Dhani Jones, Dan Becker, Baron Davis, Bobby Goodlatte, Scott Belsky, Siqi Chen and Launchpad Capital.
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.
Albert is a financial technology company aiming to democratize money management by making financial advice accessible and affordable.
Raised $175,639,020.00 from Invus Opportunities, General Atlantic, QED Investors, CapitalG and Portage Ventures.
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.
Adentro helps businesses build real relationships that have real impact, which is a difficult challenge for offline businesses.
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.
Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that offers discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies.
Raised $1,387,000,000.00 from MIG Capital, RTP Global and Atairos.
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.
BenchPrep offers a learner success platform to improve engagement and outcomes for learners.
Raised $28,200,000.00 from Owl Ventures, Revolution Ventures, Revolution, Jump Capital and NewView Capital.
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.
Goldman Sachs is a multinational financial services firm providing securities, investment banking, and management services.
Education
BS
2008 - 2013