Shuonan Chen

Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that describes its focus as investing in “fractional founders” who are transforming part-time projects into full-time startups. Earlier public profiles identify the firm as Agile VC and describe Chen as cofounder and General Partner of Agile VC.

Chen is also an entrepreneurship educator. IOVC’s team page lists her as a Lecturer at Stanford, Faculty at UC Berkeley, and Chair of the Board at Decode, described by IOVC as the largest tech and entrepreneurship community co-hosted between Berkeley and Stanford. Singularity University lists her as a faculty expert focused on entrepreneurship, blockchain, and exponential thinking.

Before venture capital, Chen worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and in advisory at PwC. Singularity University states that she worked on Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola and LinkedIn’s $119 million acquisition of SlideShare. Lifeboat Foundation’s bio says she worked on deals with combined market capitalization above $300 billion while at Goldman Sachs.

Chen earned a J.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and undergraduate degrees from UC Berkeley. Forbes lists her education as a law degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a BA/BS from UC Berkeley; Lifeboat adds that she studied financial regulation and co-authored work published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

• IOVC’s stated thesis: “We invest in fractional founders,” defined as founders “actively transforming their part-time projects into full-time startups.”
• The firm says it invests at the earliest stage, “earlier than any other investors or accelerators,” with a focus on founders still testing and iterating part-time before going all in.
• Chen’s sector focus is early-stage Silicon Valley startups in future of work and enterprise/SaaS, according to Singularity University.
• IOVC offers either direct funding or an “advise-to-invest program” for founders who need help validating ideas part-time before committing full-time.
• Chen’s recent AI writing emphasizes reinvention over automation: IOVC summarized her June 2026 co-authored article as arguing that “the real winners of the AI era” will use AI to reinvent how business gets done, not merely do the same processes faster.