jc

jarshan chen · san francisco

who i am

i'm JC, short for Jarshan Chen. i'm a technical founder in San Francisco and the co-founder / CEO of Sugar AI Lab, where i'm building an AI-powered game for 1 billion people.

i studied electrical and electronics engineering at National Chiao Tung University, spent time around entrepreneurship at Stanford STVP, and started research at Institute of Applied Mechanics, NTU while i was still in high school.

before this, i was a machine learning engineer at LINE. even earlier, i started a company around eco-friendly water supply chains for TSMC.

things i'm proud of

my co-founder Jerry Lee and i launched persona2.ai with 120k users in the first 3 days and 0 CAC. lowkey, i hacked the marketing algorithm.

this past June, i flew to Tokyo to pitch the company behind Pokemon GO and ShoPro for my second startup idea.

in college i built a reservoir MVP that could supply daily water consumption for 400 people, got it covered in the news, and did 100+ cold calls a day.

awards & research
my vision for the future of games

i think games are one of the highest-leverage interfaces for AI: people learn through play before they learn through textbooks.

too many people passively consume entertainment. Roblox showed that people love user-made games, but less than 1% ever make one. From my experience, the best way to retain a user is to turn them into a creator. And that's why i'm building Simu, where multiplayer games are directly created by the players without needing to know any code.

what i believe
  • the cost of inaction is more expensive than the cost of action.
  • A reproducible dev cycle is more valuable than any one idea.
  • any product that requires a "partnership" is a bad idea.
  • k factor and retention are 2 must-haves.
a few facts
  • speak 6 languages.
  • traveled to 11 countries.
  • Huge anime & comic fan
  • 4th place in national fencing competition 🤺
reach me