Eli Chen

Eli Chen knows the roller coaster ride that a startup can be. As an early engineer at cloud computing platform iGware, he was there for the rapid ride from the ground floor to powering hundreds of millions of Nintendo devices in a few months. 

“We went from zero to hundreds of millions of users over a couple of months,” he says of the experience. The company was later acquired by Acer and having gotten a taste for startups, Eli plowed forward.  

His next stops were Netflix and Twitter during their transformational early stages. He joined Netflix as one of the first engineers on the streaming team when the company was transitioning away from its early DVD-by-mail model. At Twitter, he helped bring operational excellence to the platform and scale it through its IPO. 

Later, he founded a startup that focused on neural network explainability and testing tools, before co-founding AI Fund portfolio company Credo AI. As Credo’s CTO, he helped the company pioneer the AI governance category by developing a platform to apply human oversight to AI. 

At AI Fund, he works with founders in the studio to develop their product on accelerated timelines using rapid engineering techniques. “Ten years ago, you would have to raise funding just to find a dev shop to build you an MVP, and that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now you could maybe spend $100 and build that MVP using AI,” he says. 

“I think the critical quality that’s needed now for building AI companies is not coding ability,” Eli explains. “What is key to being successful is AI literacy—understanding the landscape of AI, understanding the pace of change, because understanding will allow you to explore effectively.”

Eli holds a degree in electrical engineering & computer science from UC Berkeley and has been granted multiple patents for his innovations in streaming media and AI model assessments.