Lilly Chen left high school at 16 to become a Buddhist monk. Years later, she joined Meta and founded a startup competing with Accenture

Some career journeys follow a predictable path, while others take unexpected turns before leading to the world of business and technology. Lilly Chen’s journey stands out for its unusual twists, taking her from a Buddhist monastery to the technology industry and eventually to the founder’s seat of a startup competing with established consulting firms.

The founder and CEO of FSH Technologies describes founding the company as something she “fell into” rather than a business she had planned to create.

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Her unconventional journey began when she left high school at 16 after dealing with a chronic illness. She eventually spent roughly two years as a Buddhist monk, including two to three months at a remote monastery in China. The experience ended after the head monk asked her whether she truly wanted to remain there, prompting Chen to rethink her future.

She returned to the US, went back to high school and later attended college, where she studied mathematics and economics. Although she considered pursuing a PhD in economics, financial responsibilities pushed her toward finding work instead.

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Chen then taught herself programming through online resources and coding exercises, entering software engineering without a formal computer science degree. She worked as a DevOps engineer at a gaming AI startup before joining Facebook, now Meta, where she built CI/CD pipelines for machine-learning engineers.

The idea that would become FSH Technologies emerged when Chen took leave from Meta during the pandemic. She invited childhood friends to California, and the group decided to recreate the hackathon experience they had enjoyed in college.

Their first project was aimed at helping Twitch streamer Ludwig improve subscriber retention. After contacting him, the team agreed to provide the service for $1 per subscriber for a month. Ludwig reached 200,000 subscribers during the period, giving the group an early demonstration that their idea could deliver real results.

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That experiment changed the trajectory of the group. Investors became interested, and despite reservations about leaving stable careers and academic paths, the founders decided to take the risk.

In March 2021, the company secured $1 million in pre-seed funding, formally launching what was then called Contenda.

The company has since evolved into FSH Technologies and entered the government contracting market with an approach that Chen says differs from traditional consulting firms such as Accenture.

Rather than focusing on individual software projects, FSH Technologies aims to tackle administrative problems from end to end. Its work can involve everything from improving processes to navigating procurement rules and addressing operational problems inside government systems.

The company also avoids the conventional consulting model built around billable hours and a traditional sales-to-consultant hierarchy. Instead, it relies on hands-on builders who work directly on complex government challenges.

That strategy reflects the unusual path of its founder. Chen went from a monastery to mathematics and economics, from teaching herself programming to working at Meta, and finally from an informal pandemic hackathon to building a company competing for government contracts.

What began as a project among childhood friends has become a technology business attempting to solve some of the larger administrative problems inside government systems.