{"id":173733,"date":"2026-04-23T10:49:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T10:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/173733\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T10:49:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T10:49:15","slug":"why-a-former-meta-engineer-moved-her-startup-to-philly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/173733\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a former Meta engineer moved her startup to Philly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philly Builds is a guest post series profiling local founders and sharing why they chose Philadelphia as the place to launch and grow their startups. This edition is by Erin Feeney<\/a>, president and chief product officer of InContext Solutions and co-organizer of the workgroup Philly Tech & AI Alliance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Lilly Chen talks about building a tech company in Philadelphia, she doesn\u2019t start with fundraising, disruption or scale.<\/p>\n

She starts with bagels.<\/p>\n

From her office, the founder of FSH Technologies<\/a> can walk to a neighborhood bagel shop and point out businesses along the way that have used her company\u2019s platform. She knows some of the owners. Sometimes they email her directly. Sometimes they share an observation she also feels: City government has never felt this easy to navigate.<\/p>\n

For Chen, that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting your first government contract is a difficult task \u2026 nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lilly Chen, FSH Technologies<\/p>\n

After moving her company from San Francisco to the Philadelphia region during COVID, the former Meta AI infrastructure engineer found more than proximity to family on the Main Line. She found a city whose startup culture felt more grounded, more civic-minded and more aligned with the kind of company she wanted to build.<\/p>\n

FSH Technologies operates in the govtech space<\/a>. It\u2019s not an easy market for startups. Government contracts move slowly. Procurement is complicated. Institutions tend to trust established vendors over young companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting your first government contract is a difficult task,\u201d Chen said, \u201cbecause nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chen said FSH\u2019s early traction was shaped by a local network of civic leaders, public-sector veterans and advisors who did more than offer encouragement. \u201cThe advisors we got on our board were so hands-on,\u201d she said. \u201cWe meet in person. They do legitimate work for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

That support helped FSH break into a heavily relationship-driven sector. But it also reinforced something Chen had already begun to realize: Philly was a better cultural fit.<\/p>\n

Building for real people, solving real-world needs<\/p>\n

When she was in big tech, Chen often felt like projects were driven by frontier technology for its own sake. The work was advanced, but the mission was fuzzier. She could help move a number up or down on a quarterly dashboard without feeling any real connection to what that change meant in people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the people here care so much about how we deliver better services to real people,\u201d Chen said. \u201cThat changes the process of building technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also has a clear-eyed view of how AI is changing the startup equation.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI makes the coding part easier,\u201d she said. \u201cSo really, the hard part is now the \u2018company\u2019 part of a tech company as opposed to the \u2018tech\u2019 part of a tech company.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of FSH\u2019s projects supports the Philadelphia Department of Commerce\u2019s small business programs as part of the mayor\u2019s Open for Business initiative. When a law changed and required some local businesses to begin paying a city tax they hadn\u2019t previously owed, the city needed a way to help owners adapt quickly. That was especially urgent for first-time filers, immigrant-owned businesses and operators who don\u2019t speak English as a first language.<\/p>\n

Chen said FSH and the city stood up a support program in just one month. Within the program\u2019s first month, it served more than 1,000 businesses in 12 languages. More than 85.2% of those businesses were first-time filers. More than 73.1% were located in areas with low and moderate median incomes.<\/p>\n

\u201cTypically, for city services, your hope is that you can launch in your first year within 12 months,\u201d Chen said. \u201cYou typically launch in just English. You typically launch on paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

For her, the point is not just that the program moved fast. It is that it moved differently.<\/p>\n

At Meta, Chen said, success often meant improving a metric with little visibility into who felt the impact. At FSH, the connection is immediate. A small business owner avoiding a late fee is not a dashboard abstraction. It is rent. It is payroll. It is family stability. That closeness to the outcome is part of what keeps her rooted here.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had people email me out of the blue and say, \u2018I want you to know I\u2019ve never had an experience with city government that was easy,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing more meaningful than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

She feels like Philadelphia is not obsessed with hype for hype\u2019s sake. That it\u2019s a place where a founder can be pushed to answer a harder question: Who actually needs this, and will it make their life better?<\/p>\n

For Chen, that is the opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Philly Builds is a guest post series profiling local founders and sharing why they chose Philadelphia as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[15427,5398,77927,1757,69,71,70],"class_list":{"0":"post-173733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-ecosystem-building","9":"tag-entrepreneurs","10":"tag-govtech","11":"tag-guest-posts","12":"tag-philadelphia","13":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","14":"tag-philadelphia-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}