Eden Chan

Hi I’m Eden. I grew up in Toronto, graduated from Waterloo, worked at startups in the Bay, and now my dream job is to make it easy for smart people to hire smarter people.

Every time I’ve seen someone land their dream role, it wasn’t because of their resume. It was because someone vouched for them. A warm intro like “hey you should meet my friend who’s working on that exact problem.” goes a long way.

But most people are sitting alone sending applications into the void.

We’ve made helping each other so hard that most people just… don’t. I want to fix that. Starting with the alumni network at Waterloo because that’s the community I’m most familiar with.

The stupid thing is everybody knows everybody: through classes, group projects, exams we suffered through together, and especially through hackathons and hacker houses. I think one of the best things i can do is stay connected with my peers and alum after graduating.

Waterloo people WANT to help each other. We all remember the struggle. We all got help from someone. We want to pay it forward.

So I built waterloo.works and waterloogroup.chat

I want to make it easy to make warm intros. No awkward “networking.” LinkedIn feels corporate. Email feels formal. Randomly messaging on Facebook feels weird. But a warm intro feels just right.

Just friends helping out friends, and friends of friends. Six degrees of separation and all that.

Every technical community has this same problem. Brilliant people who want to help each other but can’t figure out how. Smart people recruit smarter people by building systems that create natural collision points - hackathons, research collaborations, shared tools.

One of the best ways to do this is by hosting more events!

Previous adventures include building tools for smart people to do research and hire people smarter than them at Ideaflow, finding useful data from siloed ERP systems to feed into ai agents at Bronco, and collecting image-stimulus pairs for reconstructing what someone saw from their brain signals at Alljoined.

A more detailed story

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  I grew up in Scarborough, Ontario and moved to Waterloo for school.

Got productivity-pilled in 2018 when I discovered SuperMemo: software that promised optimal learning but was so complex I spent more time learning the tool than learning anything else. That disconnect shaped how I think about tools: they should amplify, not complicate. Most productivity tools end up wasting you more time than it's worth, so one of the best lessons i've internalized is productivity = not getting stuck in accidental complexities.

  At Waterloo

I made some of my best friends through Socratica. You can see them on the some of them on the front page of the website. Good things come out of doing hard things with friends. Ran the CS Club as President for a term, and built websites for nonprofits at Blueprint.

  Climbed Kilimanjaro in 2022

Then flew straight to an EA conference in London. On the mountain, everyone was present: focused on the next step, sharing oxygen readings, encouraging each other to go slowly and cheerfully. I enjoyed the thoughtfulness of the EA community. Fun fact, I helped organize an AI safety retreat with the EA club at Waterloo and everybody at that retreat ended up working on AI capabilities—of the 8, three went off to do YC, and one helped cancel the proposal to ban all models bigger than GPT-4, and other 4 are working in consumer ai.

  One of my favorite summers

Living in a hacker house with 20+ friends following our curiosities, like collecting brain signals for Alljoined. When I started working at SF startups, I discovered that San Francisco was Twitter IRL. Most people I met at SF tech events were plugged into tpot.

Coming back to Waterloo, I started a ~1000 member community for folks to share opportunities: a feed designed to help plug friends into tech twitter.

  After graduating

Spent a summer building consumer apps from Bali and Japan with friends I met on the internet. Bali has a great tech scene if you want to be a digital nomad and build bootstrapped SaaS.

Built Summate with Raduan as a personal AI digest.

And joined Hecaton, started by @mayankja1n to help startups and non-technical businesses build digital products.

Things I remind myself

The fastest way to attract what’s meant for us is to express yourself so honestly that everything misaligned falls away.

The more specific you are, the more visible you become. Being legible isn’t about fitting in: it’s about sending a clear signal so the right people can find you.

Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you’re interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.

Currently in San Francisco