Simon Chan
General Partner at Firsthand Alliance
New York, New York
Overview
Work Experience
Founding Partner
2022 - Current
FirsthandVC invests in seasoned founders at the inception stage to build the future of autonomous agentic AI software. We provide more than capital—we connect founders with a unique network of industry leaders and accomplished entrepreneurs to accelerate their journey from vision to success.
Firsthand.vc is an inception stage VC investing in autonomous B2B software across industries.
Producer & Founder
2025
Creating the premier AI conference for curated AI leaders and industry executives to connect and learn from each other. No hype, just real-world agentic AI.
PEF Chapter Lead - NYC
2024
PEF is a community for the post-exit founders.
Angel Investor / LP
2013 - 2022
I invest personally in startups that are not within the scope of Firsthand.vc. I also invest in some funds as an LP. Highlighted personal portfolio: - Caper - AI self-checkout shopping carts (Acq by Instacart) - Indus.ai - construction intelligence (Acq by Procore) - Brightback - an automated subscription retention service (Acq by Chargebee) - Lawyaw - legal document automation (Acq by Clio) - Hummingbot - open-source crypto trading software - HomeCourt - an app that uses AI to record and track basketball shots, makes, misses, and location - Carta - company ownership management platform - Smith.ai - a receptionist service for live calls & website chat and other companies still in stealth mode. Select Web3: - OpenSea - Kraken - LikerLand Select funds: - Pantera Capital - Soma Capital - Animal Capital - 500 Global
CEO and Co-founder
2013 - 2019
PredictionIO is a machine learning server. It empowers developers to build predictive engines and deploy them as scalable web services in a fraction of the time. The open source version of PredictionIO is ranked by Github as the most popular Apache Spark-based ML projects in the world. Acquired by Salesforce in Feb 2016. Built up the Einstein Platform product team after joining Salesforce. Initiated and launched AI-related platform products.
Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management software and applications.
Raised $65,375,124.00 from Starboard Value.
CEO & Co-Founder
2006 - 2010
Created two popular social networking sites: 1. WaZhua -- an online VR entertainment world. Pioneered China's live digital DJs and Karaoke market. 2. CityIN -- a networking site for professionals. Developed face-recognition technology for photo-tagging, QR code service for users to scan up to 1000 Chinese characters of data from the site into their mobile phones and a real-time learning recommendation engine. Acquired Moochi, a Tsinghua University spin-off company, which developed an online video editing platform for the China market. Managed a 50-people company in Guangzhou and Beijing.
CEO & Founder
2004 - 2006
Established the online career social networking. Powered by social graph recommendation and NLP for automated resume matching.
CEO & Founder
2003 - 2004
Established a tutor-student matching platform. Operated 6 profitable SAT preparation centers under the name Elite1600.
Software Engineer, Core Technology, Retail
2002 - 2004
Developed the intelligent Financial Advisor for mutual fund recommendation.
E*Trade is a financial services company that specializes in online discount stock brokerage service for self-directed investors.