AppWorks founder Lin Chih-chen has pushed back on the view that the startup accelerator’s rise was built on his family background. In a recent post, Lin said the only business meeting he secured through his father’s connections during AppWorks’ founding period was with Acer co-founder Stan Shih, and that meeting brought no investment. Instead, Shih told him the model would not succeed in Taiwan. Lin said AppWorks later proved otherwise, with the firm becoming one of Taiwan’s best-known startup accelerators and going on to raise multiple venture funds with assets under management exceeding NT$10 billion. Lin argued that the four major institutional shareholders in AppWorks Fund I — China Development-related H&Q, Cathay Life, Phison Electronics, and United Daily News Group — were not introduced through his family. He traced all four relationships back, directly or indirectly, to the network he built through his MR JAMIE blog, startup events, accelerator activities, and the broader entrepreneur community. Fund I, formally Ben Sun Venture Capital Co., Ltd., was established in 2012 with initial capital of NT$300 million. His account details how each investor came in through a different path: H&Q saw AppWorks as an early pipeline for software startups, Cathay Life arrived through a chain that began with an email interview request from a Singapore exchange student, Phison invested after a book-promotion interview with founder Pua Khein-Seng, and United Daily News Group joined as it searched for e-commerce and new media opportunities.