Danny Wen

Danny Wen is the co-founder and CEO of Harvest, the New York City–based time-tracking, timesheet, and invoicing software company he started with fellow Cornell alumnus Shawn Liu. Wen studied Computer Science at Cornell University in the late 1990s (graduating around 2000), where he and Liu bonded over a shared interest in design as much as engineering. After university he moved into consulting/services work, and in 2003 he and Liu founded Iridesco, a design-and-development studio that built visual design, front-end, and back-end projects for clients across pharmaceutical, finance, and non-profit sectors (including a multilingual CMS for the AFS student-exchange organization) and was an early adopter of Ruby on Rails around 2005.

Harvest was born directly out of Iridesco's own pain: the studio struggled to track billable time and invoice clients cleanly, and Wen and Liu figured other service businesses had the same problem. They built a web-based solution in roughly four months and launched it in 2005–2006. Within about a year the product was generating enough revenue for the pair to wind down client consulting and focus entirely on Harvest. (Along the way they also experimented with SuprGlu, a Web 2.0 content-aggregation product.)

A defining feature of Wen's story is that Harvest has been bootstrapped and profitable, never raising outside venture funding — a point he has emphasized repeatedly in interviews (Mixergy, Groove, TechCrunch). The company grew from a two-founder side project into a widely used SaaS product serving tens of thousands of customers worldwide, from freelancers and small agencies to teams inside larger enterprises. Wen's own strengths lie in product design, user experience, and business development, shaping Harvest's reputation for a clean, focused product.

Having built and self-funded a durable software business, Wen also participates as an angel investor at the seed stage, backing early-stage companies on a selective, personal basis. *(Note: several investor databases conflate him with a different, San Francisco–based "Danny Wen" — a Y Combinator alum tied to Graft, Crowdmade, and Quarry Ventures who invested in GOAT, Patreon, and others. Those companies belong to the other person and are not attributed here.)*

• Invests as an operator-angel at the seed / early stage, writing personal checks rather than deploying an institutional fund.
• His credibility and likely lens come from having bootstrapped a profitable, capital-efficient SaaS business — suggesting sympathy for founders building sustainable, product-led, revenue-focused companies rather than pure blitz-scaling plays.
• Natural affinity for B2B SaaS, productivity, and small-business/creator tooling, mirroring Harvest's own market, though he has not published a formal, quoted thesis.
• A publicly stated thesis document could not be verified; the above reflects his profile and background rather than a direct quote, and is flagged as such to avoid fabrication.