Lilly Chen, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of startup FSH Technologies, has gone through an unusual path: from a 16-year-old girl who dropped out of school due to a serious illness and became a nun, to a Meta engineer and founder of a promising IT business that successfully competes with giant consulting companies.
Lilly Chen, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of startup FSH Technologies, has gone through an unusual path: from a 16-year-old girl who dropped out of school due to a serious illness and became a nun, to a Meta engineer and founder of a promising IT business that successfully competes with giant consulting companies.
At 16, Lilly was diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease called Graves’ disease, reports Business Insider. Due to poverty, the family had only basic insurance, so the girl did not receive proper treatment and spent weeks in bed with a high fever. Disillusioned with Western medicine, her mother suggested a radical solution: enter a monastery.
Lilly took monastic vows in the United States and later moved with her mother to a remote Buddhist monastery in rural China.
The abbot of the monastery noticed that Lilly was constantly reading and missed American libraries. He told her, «Go back to America, go to university, and find something that interests you.»
Returning to the United States without a high school diploma, the girl was looking for a local community college at an education fair. She happened to walk up to a table with the abbreviation «CC,» thinking it meant Community College. In fact, it was Colorado College, a private, prestigious liberal arts college.
A college representative suggested that the girl take the standardized ACT test, which Lilly passed with a maximum possible score of 36 out of 36. Thanks to such an impressive result and a sincere essay about her unique life experiences, she was admitted to the educational institution, where she independently mastered programming during her education.
After graduating, Lilly got a job as a Software Engineer at Meta. However, the corporate routine quickly wore her out. She realized that she wanted to create her own solutions, and after a year she quit to found FSH Technologies.
FSH Technologies develops modern software for city administrations, school districts, and US government agencies, replacing outdated and slow government IT systems.
The startup has already raised $25 million in investment, of which $5 million came in a seed round from Contrary, Acrew, and General Catalyst funds, and another $20 million in a Series A round led by Lachi Groom, an early investor in Figma, Notion, Ramp, and Lattice.
The startup’s philosophy is based on the advice of a monastery mentor, «Be a pond, not a fish»: when Lilly was taking care of her koi fish, he taught her not to fixate on one detail, but to see the whole system as a whole. That is why FSH perceives software as just «one fish,» solving the problem of the public sector in a comprehensive way — taking into account bureaucracy, procurement procedures, and human resistance to change.
FSH Technologies regularly beats out large consulting companies like Accenture in tenders due to the lack of payment for consulting hours, the refusal of a staff of salespeople or consultants, and a focus on engineering, where each employee is a direct creator of the product.
