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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. Read the previous interviews in the series including with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, Tabs founder Ali Hussain here, Craft founder Ilya Levtov here, GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti here, Incredible Health co-founder Iman Abuzeid here, and Hilt founder William “Will” Cielen here. Lilly Chen was 16 and had been repeatedly hospitalized for Graves’ disease when her mother suggested they move to China and become monks. Frustrated with the care her daughter was receiving through Medicaid, she wanted to try something different. Chen left high school and spent about two years as a monk, ordained in the United States before spending several months at a monastery in China. She meditated, reread the same books, and gradually felt well enough to consider returning to school. She went on to enter Colorado College without a high school diploma, briefly play video games professionally, and become an engineer at Facebook. When she quit that job, she didn’t have a startup idea. She just wanted to find work she believed in. That mission eventually led her to FSH (pronounced “fish) Technologies,” a Philadelphia-based company that’s building software for some of the government’s least glamorous tasks, including administering school food services and managing public records. After her brief stint at a large tech company, Chen realized she wanted to tackle the everyday problems that make people’s lives harder, even if solving them wouldn’t generate much excitement in Silicon Valley. “What does it actually take to solve the really unsexy, boring stuff?” she remembers asking herself. A different route to college Before Chen was thinking about government software, she was trying to get well enough to return to school. At the monastery in China, she meditated, ate food grown on-site or brought by nearby villagers, and lived without internet access. She continued taking thyroid medication and said her health became more manageable during that period. She also read. A lot. With no nearby place to buy books, she reread the ones she had brought, finding different places around the monastery to sit with them. Her attachment to those books prompted a conversation with a fellow monk who asked what she enjoyed about reading and where she might find more books. The discussion eventually turned to colleges, and why she wasn’t attending one. Chen explained her health problems. He observed that she seemed well. She realized she was. So Chen returned to the U.S., homeschooled herself and enrolled at Colorado College without having earned a high school diploma. She turned 20 during her freshman year and graduated in 2019 with a double major in mathematics and economics. While she was in college, Chen briefly played Dota 2 professionally. She also played against OpenAI’s game-playing bots, an early encounter with AI technology she would later help support as an engineer. After an initial job in Boston, she joined Facebook, where she built infrastructure used to train AI models. Leaving without a startup idea Then on Jan. 6, 2021, Chen was attending a remote company all-hands meeting while watching coverage of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on another screen. Her concerns about Facebook’s role in enabling the organization of violence made her question whether she could continue working there. “I realized that I couldn’t work for Big Tech anymore,” she recalls. She quit shortly afterward. To figure out her next move, she returned to the sort of questions she had encountered as a monk. What made her happy? What mattered to her? What was she good at? Programming remained her most concrete skill. She just needed to figure out where to apply it. An introduction through Envision, a student-run accelerator focused on nontraditional founders, connected her with Contrary, a venture firm that has backed the likes of Ramp and Anduril Industries. The firm wrote Chen her first check in 2021, before she had even settled on the business that would become FSH. Although she didn’t have a developed company pitch, Chen’s earnest explanation of what motivated her and her passion for solving a meaningful problem won investors over. That investment gave her room to experiment, she said. FSH took shape into what it is today in 2024. The Contrary investor who first backed her, Jason Chen, has since joined the company as its chief operating officer. The company has raised $25 million in total funding, including a recent $20 million Series A that Chen said came together in about a week. Participants in that raise included Lachy Groom, General Catalyst, Ramp, Scribble Ventures, Operator Partners, Basis Set Ventures. Contrary also led its seed financing. Finding the problem beneath the paperwork Ultimately, Chen landed on government software because in her view, it had the potential to solve many consequential problems that attracted relatively little excitement. For example, permits, licenses, grant applications and other administrative processes can be slow for reasons that extend beyond an outdated interface, Chen noted. Information may exist in separate departments. Updating a website may require approvals from multiple stakeholders including policymakers, communications staff and an IT team. Putting a chatbot on top of that system, Chen argues, leaves much of the underlying problem unresolved. Her approach to solving some of the problems that exist within governments draws on an exchange she had years earlier at the monastery, where one of her chores was feeding koi. The head monk would periodically ask her if she thought she was the fish or the pond? Initially, Chen didn’t understand what he was asking. But he kept returning to the question, and she began thinking about it. Eventually, she picked a fish she thought resembled her: one that stayed out of fights, swam with the group and occasionally ventured off on its own. The head monk’s response was, “You’re the pond, not the fish.” Chen viewed the exchange as a lesson in looking beyond individual pieces to understand how a whole system works. Looking at government software, she believed that it meant examining why information is scattered or processes are slow before deciding what technology to build. One early area for FSH has been K-12 food services, where administrators must perform tasks such as coordinating meal planning, nutritional information and reimbursement requirements. Another is records and archive management, including the paper documents that can still require residents to visit a government office to retrieve them. FSH does use AI for tasks such as optical character recognition, translation and natural-language search. But, Chen said, the company treats it as a tool within its software, rather than relying on a chatbot or an AI agent to handle an entire process. Government sales have required patience. The company generated less than $100,000 in revenue in its first year, Chen said, reflecting the time it takes to win contracts. At the time of this interview, FSH had roughly eight or nine employees, with additional offers outstanding. Thinking slowly, moving quickly Chen’s time as a monk has also influenced how she runs the company. She admits she is skeptical of startup culture that treats sleeping in the office or working extremely long hours as evidence of commitment or a badge of pride. Rather, Chen views some of that behavior as performative, especially when it comes at the expense of the rest that she believes people need to work effectively. Her preferred motto to the team is, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” “We think slowly about a lot of things, and then we do things quickly,” she said. Chen believes it’s crucial to first understand the people, departments and procedures behind a government service before trying to improve it. Looking back, Chen also credits her success to finding people willing to back someone whose experience didn’t resemble the usual résumé. That includes the college that admitted her without a high school diploma and an investor who wrote a check before she had settled on a company idea. “You definitely end up finding your own way if you just stick to being weird,” she said. 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