Seed to Harvest IOVC General Partner Shuo Chen on Investing, Gardening, and Feeding Lemurs on Richard Branson's Island
Seed to Harvest is a new podcast focused on stories & tactics from a diverse array of investors, founders, and creators, hosted by Paige Finn Doherty, a founding partner at Behind Genius Ventures and author of Seed to Harvest, an illustrated children's book for adults.
Thank you to our sponsor for Season 1 - Stripe. Over the past decade, Stripe has supported the growth of the most ambitious businesses, including Shopify, Lyft, and Kickstarter. In fact, Kickstarter was able to scale to accept payments from 195 countries, all supported by Stripe’s payments platform.
Stripe uniquely knows how to support startups; from their 'Atlas' product that allows you to turn your idea into a business, by helping you incorporate quickly; to their 'Capital' product that provides funding to help scale your startup—Stripe has tools you need to grow your business and if you want to learn how Stripe can support you, visit stripe.com today.
In the first episode of Seed to Harvest, Paige Doherty interviews Shuo Chen. Shuo is the General Partner of IO VC, and a faculty member at UC Berkeley and Singularity University. Former Air Cadet, voice actress, Guinness World Record pipa (Chinese guitar) player and gardening geek.
Shuo is appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve as 1 of 13 voting members on California's Mental Health Commission (as the first Asian American Commissioner), which includes overseeing ~$2.6 billion annually in state budget and advising the Governor or the Legislature on mental health policy.
In her venture role, Shuo has invested in companies now acquired by Goldman Sachs, Ford, Caterpillar, Binance and Dialpad, as well as now unicorns including Boom, Checkr, Grubmarket, Instacart and Rescale. She has helped portfolio companies close deals with Amazon, Apple, Google, Mercedes-Benz and NASA among others, as well as scaled portfolio companies into Europe and Asia.
Prior, Shuo worked at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, where she worked with clients including Alibaba and Tencent, as well as represented the firm on the Board of Women in Finance. Before that, Shuo was at PwC, where she worked on Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola and LinkedIn’s $119 million acquisition of SlideShare. Shuo has also co-authored one of the leading books on financial regulations published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, and sits on the Advisory Board of Forbes China, where she advises on content and awards for Asian Americans in North America.
In our first episode, we cover her stories of visiting Richard Branson's island, feeding lemurs, gardening, and investing frameworks.