Editor’s note: The following is the latest profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies.
When Lilly Chen was 16 years old, she had been repeatedly hospitalized due to severe complications from Graves’ disease. Frustrated by the limitations and shortcomings of the medical care she was receiving through Medicaid, her mother proposed a radical alternative: they should pack up, move to China, and become Buddhist monks to try a completely different way of living and healing.
Leaving high school behind entirely, Chen spent roughly two years as an ordained monk, including several months residing at a monastery in China. There, she meditated for hours daily, reread the exact same selection of books because no outside library or bookstore was nearby, and ate food grown on-site or brought by neighboring villagers. Gradually, without the traditional pressures of adolescent life and modern infrastructure, her health stabilized enough for her to consider rejoining society and returning to formal education.
Today, Chen is the co-founder and CEO of FSH Technologies, a Philadelphia-based startup tackling some of the public sector’s most tedious and unglamorous administrative tasks, ranging from managing K-12 school food services to overhauling public records archiving. Her journey from monastic life to professional gaming, and eventually to engineer-turned-founder, highlights a distinct path through the technology landscape. Following a brief stint working on AI infrastructure inside Big Tech, Chen decided to focus her programming skills on solving everyday systemic bottlenecks rather than pursuing the typical high-profile ventures celebrated in Silicon Valley.
A Non-Traditional Route to Higher Education
Before Chen ever considered conceptualizing government software or navigating the venture capital ecosystem, she had to figure out how to step back into the academic world. During her time at the monastery in China, she lived completely disconnected from the internet, relying on thyroid medication while keeping her mind occupied with deep reading. Because books were scarce, she would sit in different quiet corners of the monastic grounds, reading the same volumes over and over to extract deeper meaning.
That intense attachment to her reading material sparked a pivotal conversation with a fellow monk. He asked her what she enjoyed about reading, where she expected to find more books in the future, and, crucially, why she was not attending college. Chen explained her chronic health struggles, but as she spoke, the monk observed that she appeared entirely healthy. Stepping back, Chen realized he was right; her body had recovered a remarkable degree of balance.
Empowered by this realization, Chen returned to the United States, homeschooled herself independently, and successfully enrolled at Colorado College without ever earning a traditional high school diploma. She turned 20 during her freshman year and ultimately graduated in 2019 with a rigorous double major in mathematics and economics.
During her undergraduate years, Chen also explored competitive gaming, briefly playing Dota 2 professionally. Notably, she even competed against early artificial intelligence game-playing bots developed by OpenAI—an early, informal introduction to the exact machine learning technology she would later support professionally. Following graduation, after securing an initial job in Boston, she joined Facebook as an engineer, where she built infrastructure dedicated to training advanced AI models.
Leaving Big Tech Without a Startup Blueprint
The turning point for Chen’s career trajectory arrived on January 6, 2021. While attending a remote company-wide all-hands meeting at Facebook, she simultaneously watched live news coverage of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on a separate screen. Witnessing the events unfold and grappling with growing internal concerns over Facebook’s structural role in facilitating the coordination of online violence, Chen reached a definitive ethical breaking point.
She realized she could no longer justify working within the architecture of Big Tech. She quit her job shortly afterward, walking away without a business plan, a co-founder, or a specific startup idea. She simply knew she needed to apply her programming talents to work that aligned with her core values and genuinely mattered to society.
To chart her next steps, Chen leaned on the introspective questions she had first confronted as a monk: What genuinely brought her fulfillment? What mattered to her on a human level? What were her core competencies? Programming remained her most concrete and powerful tool; she just needed to find the right canvas.
Through an introduction facilitated by Envision, a student-run accelerator supporting nontraditional founders, Chen connected with Contrary, a venture capital firm known for backing high-growth enterprises like Ramp and Anduril Industries. Impressed by her earnestness and clear-eyed motivation, Contrary wrote Chen her first financial check in 2021, long before FSH Technologies had even crystallized into its current form. That early backing provided her with the runway to experiment and explore problems worth solving.
FSH took its current shape in 2024. Jason Chen, the Contrary investor who initially championed her vision, ultimately joined the startup full-time as its chief operating officer. To date, the company has raised $25 million in total funding, highlighted by a $20 million Series A round that came together in roughly a week. The financing featured participation from prominent investors and companies including Lachy Groom, General Catalyst, Ramp, Scribble Ventures, Operator Partners, and Basis Set Ventures, alongside Contrary, which led the seed round.
Uncovering the Systemic Problem Beneath the Paperwork
Chen ultimately focused her company on government software because she believed the public sector presented immense, consequential challenges that traditional Silicon Valley companies largely ignored. Administrative bottlenecks like permits, licenses, and grant applications often move at a glacial pace for reasons that go far beyond an outdated user interface. Information is routinely siloed across separate municipal departments, and updating a simple web portal can require bureaucratic sign-offs from policymakers, communications officers, and legacy IT teams simultaneously.
Simply slapping a conversational chatbot on top of such a fragmented, legacy system leaves the underlying structural malfunctions completely unresolved. Chen’s philosophy for diagnosing these complex public sector issues traces back to a specific lesson she learned while performing chores at the monastery, where one of her daily responsibilities was feeding the koi fish.
The head monk would periodically ask her whether she considered herself to be one of the fish or the pond itself. At first, the question baffled her. As the head monk persisted in asking, Chen began to reflect deeply on the metaphor. Eventually, she selected a specific fish that mirrored her own temperament: one that avoided needless conflicts, swam harmoniously with the group, and occasionally ventured off to explore on its own.
The head monk’s response redefined her perspective: “You’re the pond, not the fish.”
For Chen, that exchange served as a profound lesson in systems thinking—understanding how an entire environment functions before attempting to alter any single component. Applied to government technology, this meant investigating why public data is scattered and processes stall before rushing to write code.
FSH’s initial software deployments have focused on critical, behind-the-scenes functions like K-12 food services, where administrators must meticulously coordinate meal planning, strict nutritional guidelines, and complex federal reimbursement requirements. Another core focus is records and archive management, aiming to digitize the mountains of paper documentation that still force everyday citizens to visit physical government offices.
While FSH utilizes modern artificial intelligence tools such as optical character recognition, translation utilities, and natural-language search, Chen emphasizes that AI is treated merely as a functional tool embedded within the broader software infrastructure, rather than an autonomous agent expected to manage entire bureaucratic workflows end-to-end. Securing public sector contracts has naturally demanded immense patience; the startup generated less than $100,000 in revenue during its first year, reflecting the deliberate pace required to navigate government sales cycles.
Thinking Slowly, Moving Purposefully
Chen’s formative years as a monastic practitioner continue to deeply influence her managerial style and corporate culture. She remains openly skeptical of conventional tech startup culture, which often treats sleep deprivation and grueling work hours as badges of honor or markers of professional dedication. Instead, she views much of that performative exhaustion as counterproductive, particularly when it undermines the mental rest required for sustainable productivity.
Her guiding mantra for the FSH team is simple: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
She believes leadership requires stepping back to thoroughly understand the people, departmental structures, and institutional procedures behind any government service before trying to optimize it.
Reflecting on her winding path from chronic illness and a remote Chinese monastery to leading a venture-backed enterprise, Chen credits much of her outcome to finding early supporters willing to bet on a resume that defied traditional expectations. That open-mindedness included the college that welcomed her without a high school diploma and the early investors who funded her before she had even settled on a business model.
“You definitely end up finding your own way if you just stick to being weird,” she said.
