By most people’s standards, he had made it absurdly early—and he says getting there was “easy,” too. Not because of mentors, politics, or any formal promotion track. In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Chen says he just ignored every rule he was given.
“Climbing up was fairly natural and easy,” he tells Fortune, “simply because I just disregarded all the status quo and the rules and realized what’s the right thing to do, and went all the way with it.”
Chen’s not all talk either: When a senior team at HQ blocked his plans to launch Google Partners internationally, Chen launched it anyway—in foreign languages, in foreign markets, without telling anyone in North America. “Once we proved it was extremely successful, then they came and asked us, ‘Oh, can you also launch it in North America?’”
“I just told my manager, listen, I know this is a year thing. Look what I’ve been able to achieve. It’s way more than anyone else. We’re going to put me up for promotion now.” She did.
“We have all these rules, we have all these benchmarks, we have all these processes,” Chen says. “That’s what’s going to happen for most of you.”
“Corporate America can put you in these frames that discourage you,” he adds. But he says the one’s who will be most successful “actually just ignore these and say, “I’m going to do my own thing and take risks, internally.”
“I used to write code when I was 12, and every year I had to change my computer… the software I used to write was not able to run because it needed more memory,” he recalls. “But he couldn’t afford it.”
So at 15, he went straight to the importers and negotiated for parts so he could upgrade his computer himself.
“It was my first entrepreneurial adventure,” he adds. “I started selling computers for thousands of different SMBs, throughout my time at high school… this turned into a very big business.”
Given that background, it’s perhaps less surprising that the golden-ticket job at Google eventually started to feel like a “golden cage.”
When he handed in his notice, his family thought he was “crazy”. His Iraqi-Jewish mother, he recalls, was particularly alarmed—ironically, she inspired the idea for his next venture.
The concept for Tastewise, the AI food and beverage intelligence platform he went on to build, came directly from the family WhatsApp group, where his mom would message every Thursday asking what dietary phase everyone was on before spending a day cooking traditional dishes.
Financially, he freely admits he’s not ahead of his Google days. “Not yet,” he says. “I’m still building, and I’m all in in the business.”
But given his equity stake, a future Tastewise transaction would likely cement him as a multimillionaire several times over. And he doesn’t waver when asked whether walking away was worth it. “It didn’t matter,” he says of the seven-figure equity he left behind. “It’s almost like it was not a consideration.”
“I used to wake up in the morning, like ‘this is not enough’…. I loved my job. I loved my colleagues. I was extremely happy with my achievements. It was just not mine—not my idea, not my baby. There’s so much satisfaction in creating something out of nothing.”
