Occupation Entrepreneur Known for NerdWallet | Education Stanford University | |
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Residence San Francisco, California, United States | ||
Tim Chen is an American entrepreneur of Taiwanese descent. He co-founded and is Chief Executive Officer of NerdWallet, a personal finance startup with a valuation of $550 million.
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Early life and career
He was born to Taiwanese parents, who were computers scientists that emigrated to the US to study at the University of Oklahoma. He grew up in Atlanta and went to the same high school as childhood friend Jake Gibson, who would go on to co-found NerdWallet. He went to Stanford for undergrad and after worked for Perry Capital, a hedge fund. In New York, Chen lived in the same Murray Hill neighborhood as Gibson, at the time another finance professional. During the 2009 global financial crisis, Chen lost his job during a wave of layoffs on Wall Street.
NerdWallet
The inspiration for NerdWallet came after he was asked by family members about personal finance decisions and found advice online to be unsatisfactory. With $800 he founded NerdWallet with Jake Gibson in 2009 as a website to advise consumers on personal finance. The website has sought to distinguish itself from competitors by having a "newsroom" of journalists who write journalistic type articles on personal finance that help the website appear in search engine results, and also listing unsponsored credit card options.
A feature piece by Inc. magazine on Chen and his management style called the organizational culture he created "transparent, glaringly self-critical, not always comfortable."In the initial days, Chen looked to "hire smart people; let them figure it out". This meant hiring other former Wall Street professionals who resembled the co-founders but Chen found the result to be a company with shaky teamwork. To reset his company, he fired 20% of his workforce at the end of 2013, calling it an "extremely gut-wrenching" decision. Chen then restructured the management organization to move away from silos to a matrix that "requires near-constant communication among NerdWallet's leaders".
In raising capital, Chen has favored waiting for the company to grow before taking major financing. Six years after the founding the company held its first round of investment, raising $64 million from investors and $36 in bank lending from Silicon Valley Bank in 2015.