How an ex-Buddhist monk & Meta engineer founded a startup that now rivals Accenture

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​A former Buddhist monk who later worked as a software engineer at Meta accidentally became a startup founder after a pandemic-era hackathon with childhood friends. In 2021, Lilly Chen and three friends turned a project they built for fun into FSH Technologies (formerly Contenda), which has since positioned itself to compete with Accenture in government contract bidding.In an interview with Constellary, Chen described the company’s beginnings as something she “fell into” rather than a business she had planned to build. Before becoming a founder, she spent two years as a Buddhist monk after leaving high school at 16, living for a period at a monastery in China. She later returned to the US, completed high school and studied mathematics and economics in college before teaching herself to code and working as a software engineer, including a stint at Facebook.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she took leave from Facebook and invited childhood friends to California, where they decided to build a project together.In another Business Insider interview, Chen noted that unlike Accenture, FSH Technologies takes a different approach to government consulting, focusing on end-to-end fixes for administrative systems rather than isolated software projects. The company does not use traditional billable consulting hours or a conventional sales-and-consultant structure, instead relying on hands-on builders to address processes, procurement rules, and other operational challenges.

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Lilly Chen's path from Buddhist monk to software engineer

​Chen said she left high school at 16 after dealing with a chronic illness and spent about two years as a monk, including two to three months at a remote monastery in China. The head monk eventually asked her whether she actually wanted to remain there, prompting Chen to reconsider her plans.​She returned to the US, re-enrolled in high school and later attended college, where she studied mathematics and economics. Although she had considered pursuing a PhD in economics, financial responsibilities led her to seek employment instead.​Without a computer science degree, Chen taught herself programming through online resources and coding exercises. Her first software engineering position was as a DevOps engineer at a gaming AI startup, after which she worked at Facebook building CI/CD pipelines for machine-learning engineers.​

Contenda's startup journey began with a hackathon

​Chen said the group initially had no plan to start a company. During her leave from Facebook, she and her friends began playing video games and decided to recreate the hackathon experience they had enjoyed in college.​The group built a project to help Twitch streamer Ludwig with subscriber retention. After contacting him, they agreed to provide the service for $1 per subscriber for a month, during which he reached 200,000 subscribers.​The project led the group to speak with investors. Chen said the founders initially had reservations about leaving their existing paths, particularly because some of them were still in college and she was concerned about maintaining her family’s financial stability. They ultimately accepted their first pre-seed funding of $1 million in March 2021.​