Founder Spotlight: Siqi Chen of Serious Business
You might call 26-year-old Siqi Chen an accidental entrepreneur. The UC San Diego grad didn’t intend to be his own boss; he mostly wanted to do fun things for a cool Web development company. Indeed, after logging time at startups Webmetrics and Veoh Networks, Chen joined one of hottest startups to form in 2007, the San Francisco-based semantic search startup Powerset. (Most readers will recall that Powerset was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $100 million.) Then a side venture, a Facebook game he began developing in late 2007 called "Friends for Sale," changed his life. Almost overnight, the game became one of Facebook’s most popular applications. Suddenly Chen had enough cash in his pocket to quit Powerset, and start his own company with pal and fellow Powerset engineer Alex Le. Today, Chen’s now two-year-old startup, Serious Business, has grown more serious than its tongue-in-cheek name implies. It is backed by $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, it's competing for an opportunity that analysts now place in the billions of dollars, and its profitable business is being threatened by aggressive startups like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom, whose growth has far outpaced its own.
