Joanne Chen just became the second normal accomplice in the historical past of the now 26-year-old, Silicon Valley enterprise agency, Foundation Capital.

Have been she nonetheless alive, Foundation’s founder, Kathryn Gould, would undoubtedly cheer the improvement.

Recognized for her large character, Gould first met Chen when Chen was an MBA pupil at the College of Chicago. Gould was recovering from a bout with most cancers at the time, and after being launched to Chen by certainly one of Chen’s professors, she initially suggested Chen not to enter enterprise. As Gould herself found early on, doorways open extra simply to males in the enterprise world, which is why she’d began her personal agency in the first place.

But, like Gould, being dissuaded solely motivated Chen extra. Whereas she started her profession as an engineer at Cisco, she was lengthy keen on finance, leaping right into a banking analyst position with Jeffries, then working as an affiliate with the capital advisory agency Probitas earlier than cofounding a cellular gaming firm she would later wind down.

Certainly, grad faculty in Chicago — and assembly Gould — solely strengthened for Chen how a lot she wished to develop into a VC, and following stints at Formation eight and Hyde Park Angels, she landed at Foundation in 2014. (Sadly, Gould handed away in 2015.)

Chen has definitely introduced a recent perspective to a agency that options 10 buyers altogether, the relaxation males.

Except for being the solely woman in the group, Chen has a powerful viewpoint, for instance, on the entrepreneurial potential of scholars from U.C. Berkeley, the place she studied as an undergraduate. Whereas the college is just not almost so organized as Stanford in relation to minting founders, in her view it has just as a lot expertise and, in consequence, it’s a community into which she invests quite a lot of time and power as an investor.

Chen, who was born in China and nice up in Montreal, additionally spends quite a lot of time eager about AI, each as an investor and likewise merely an individual in the world. Her father, who obtained his PhD from the College of Montreal, went on to work at Bell Labs as a researcher, and her mom is a pc programmer and “DevOps individual” who Chen routinely talks with about software program instruments. However their background isn’t so easy.

Like many immigrants, her dad and mom fled China throughout the Cultural Revolution. As a result of her grandfather helped architect a significant telecom firm in China, he was persecuted by the Communist Celebration, stripped of all his obligations and titles and, as an “mental,” says Chen, thrown in jail. In the meantime, his son (her father) wasn’t allowed to begin school till he was 21, and it was solely as a result of he was pupil that was he invited overseas to acquire his grasp’s diploma.

In the present day, her household’s expertise mixed with China’s use of synthetic intelligence — together with to trace its Muslim minority — is prime of thoughts for Chen in methods it is probably not for somebody with a lesser grasp of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go, and the way rapidly they will act.

It’s why most of Chen’s work facilities on understanding how AI, from how machines evolve from organizing exercise to changing people (which will certainly occur, says Chen); to how you can acknowledge and counter malicious functions of AI with AI (resembling by recruiting software program that screens out names and gender to remove human bias); and how you can in any other case guarantee that AI is used to enhance human life, she suggests.

In fact, Chen isn’t precisely alone in her curiosity in AI. Practically each startup immediately incorporates — or says it does — AI into its choices, from lending firms to startups that assist distant groups work extra successfully. And buyers, together with at Foundation, have funded lots of them.

Requested how she offers with competitors for a lot of of those offers, Chen says she strikes as quick when there’s a call to be made. She engages with VPs of engineering and technical founders who share concepts by Slack communities and elsewhere. She additionally notes that Foundation supplies capital to roughly 30 operators who write angel checks and assist steer the agency’s consideration to attention-grabbing offers.

Largely, suggests Chen, she focuses on no matter is just not touchdown in her inbox — a lesson discovered partly from Gould years in the past.

It’s simple to imagine. As Gould as soon as advised this editor of the recommendation she provides to different VCs: “It not the calls you are taking. It’s the calls you make. Everybody is asking you with dumb startup concepts, and you’ll keep vastly busy sorting by that crap. My recommendation as an alternative is to determine who’re the 10 to 20 smartest individuals and name them. One in every of them is all the time beginning an organization.”