TC

Thomas Chen

CO-FOUNDER OF SLOW RODEO AND SOME OTHER THINGS…

Los Angeles, California

Work Experience

2023

  • Co-Founder

    2023

    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.

2021

  • 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.

2022 - 2022

  • 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.

2017 - 2017

  • 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.

2017 - 2017

  • 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.

2014 - 2016

  • 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.

2013 - 2014

  • 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.

2012 - 2012

  • 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.

2011 - 2011

  • 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.