Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, where she focuses on early stage venture investments in Silicon Valley with a focus on future of work and enterprise/SaaS. She is also Faculty at UC Berkeley and Singularity University. Shuo is appointed by California Governor Gavin Newson to serve as 1 of 13 voting members on California's Mental Health Commission as well, which includes overseeing ~$2.6 billion annually in state budget and advising the Governor or the Legislature on mental health policy.
In her venture role, Shuo has invested in companies now acquired by Goldman Sachs, Ford, Caterpillar, Binance and Dialpad, as well as now unicorns including Boom, Checkr, Grubmarket, Instacart and Rescale. She has helped portfolio companies close deals with Amazon, Apple, Google, Mercedes-Benz and NASA among others, as well as scaled portfolio companies into Europe and Asia.
Prior, Shuo worked at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, where she worked with clients including Alibaba and Tencent, as well as represented the firm on the Board of Women in Finance. Before that, Shuo was at PwC, where she worked on Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola and LinkedIn’s $119 million acquisition of SlideShare. Shuo has also co-authored one of the leading books on financial regulations published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, and sits on the Advisory Board of Forbes China, where she advises on content and awards for Asian Americans in North America.
AI's revolutionary impact extends far beyond finance. In this session, Shuo Chen, an entrepreneur, venture investor, and expert in the enterprise/SaaS and fintech, will share insights about how AI and exponential technologies are reshaping industries, including but not limited to financial services. Explore the disruptive potential of AI across sectors, and discuss implications and opportunities for financial institutions.
Entrepreneurship is the most efficient way of solving a problem--one can be entrepreneurial whether it is running a startup or working inside a large corporation. With exponential technologies including artificial intelligence, AR/VR and blockchain that rapidly change how we do business as well as how we recruit and retain talent, the future of business will be shaped by entrepreneurial minds who can effectively leverage these exponential technologies and its value drivers to bring the most innovative solutions. This talk covers how entrepreneurship drives value creation in the workplace, how one can be more entrepreneurial in their current role regardless of job title, as well as case studies of how entrepreneurship and exponential technologies are shaping how we do business, where we do business, and the skills we need to succeed for some of the most renowned startups and corporates.
After Elon Musk led Tesla's $1.5 billion investment into bitcoin in January and has already generated $1 billion in profits from this investment year-to-date, blockchain and the cryptocurrency markets have received unprecedented attention. The rise of DeFi (decentralized finance) has accelerated unprecedented changes in the financial industry, changing the way everyone from startups to traditional banks do business, making this discussion around the future of finance more relevant than ever. With these changes, we are on the verge of one of the most significant technological transformations in modern history – with vast implications for financial institutions and banking, including both tremendous challenges as well as great opportunities. It is important to understand how blockchain and AI in particular augments and empower financial services. This talk covers 1) how blockchain and AI impact the future of finance, 2) how these applications have been leveraged by some of the largest financial institutions as well as most promising fintech startups around the world to bring exponential change to their respective businesses, and 3) future opportunities for financial services professionals and organizations from payments and lending to capital markets and asset management, especially in a world post-COVID.
The future of work will see exponential change across digital transformation, automation of work, hybridization of workplace and diversity of workforce. Research indicates that 85% of the jobs available in 2030 were not even invented back in 2016, so that shows how different the world will look in 10 to 20 years from now. In that future, it's important for us to imagine a world in which our work is better enhanced by automation (e.g. people can focus on jobs that need human ingenuity and have more tedious jobs optimized and automated by AI), where we have a workplace not limited to just working in the office versus working at home (e.g. working in a VR-enabled world), and where we see true diversity in our workforce (e.g. freedom to focus on work that truly aligns with people's values).
With exponential technologies changing how we live and work, it is more important than ever to consider where we as humans fit in. In this talk, we will cover the importance of social-emotional development of human potential with practical case studies.
As one of the major driving forces of economic growth around the world, tourism has been revolutionized by exponential technologies including AI, Blockchain and VR, particularly in terms of how destinations attract travelers and enhance visitor experience while improving returns and ensuring sustainability. The future of smart tourism depends on forward-thinking destinations that will leverage technology to develop innovative tools and approaches to improve the industry, from efficient resource management to integrated services. This talk covers the foundations of exponential technologies that impact smart tourism, the opportunities that technology brings for destinations, as well as the strategies that destinations can apply to successfully leverage exponential technologies to further develop smart tourism.
Building a real-life application with AI or blockchain e.g. building an algorithm to recognize photos of cats, or constructing dashboards for an effective analysis of data on the blockchain