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

​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.