Tim Chen is an operating advisor with Bessemer and managing partner of Essence VC, an early-stage fund focused on data infrastructure and developer tool companies.
Prior to Essence VC, Tim was the CEO & co-founder of Hyperpilot, where he built a performance and cost automation platform. Hyperpilot was acquired by Cloudera in 2018. Tim was also the SVP of engineering at Cosmos, an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other, and was an early employee focusing on container systems at Mesosphere (now D2iQ) and Grid.ai.
Tim graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. in informatics and studied computer science at Digipen Institute of Technology. He is also active in the open-source space as an Apache Software Foundation core member, maintainer of Apache Drill and Apache Mesos, and CNCF TOC contributor.