Timothy Chen, a seasoned engineering leader and Managing Partner at Essence VC, has a vast experience of working in enterprise infrastructures and open-source communities. Before joining Essence, he held prominent roles in companies like Cosmos, Cloudera, Mesosphere, and CloudFoundry, among others.

Mr. Chen co-founded Hyperpilot with Stanford Professor Christos Kozyrakis, where he leveraged decades of research and disrupted the enterprise infrastructure space. Hyperpilot later exited to Cloudera. Mr. Chen is an active Apache Member and involved in various open source initiatives.

Mr. Chen has invested in many successful startups as a Seed Investor, such as LaunchNotes, Signadot, and Transform. He also advises startups like Rupert, Composure.ai, and DataMan.

Mr. Chen studied B.S. in Informatics at the University of Washington and Computer Science at Digipen Institute of Technology.