Lin Chi-Wei: From an Internationally Awarded Physical Board Game Brand to a Software Platform for 200,000 Creators

30-Second Overview: Lin Chi-Wei (English name: Chi-Wei Lin, commonly known online as CW or CW Lin) is a Taiwanese entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Portaly. He graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU) and earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from UCLA. From traditional industries to software, and then to AI, he resets and relearns each time. His first venture was the children's educational board game brand Shepherd Kit, which won a silver medal at the U.S. Parents' Choice Awards in 2014, setting a record for Taiwan in the competition, and accumulated over $1 million in crowdfunding. It was sold to the CommonWealth Magazine Group in 2021. In 2022, he launched Portaly (company name: Real Engine), which became Taiwan's largest creator commerce platform within four years. Profitable since 2025 with zero paid marketing, it grew through organic PLG (product-led growth). He is also a 13th-cycle entrepreneur in the AAMA Taipei Incubator Program and a columnist for Manager Today and Meet. He continuously shares AI and startup growth methodologies in a "build in public" manner. The donation payment flow for the knowledge base you are currently reading is processed on his platform.

In 2014, at the U.S. Parents' Choice Awards toy design competition, nearly 400 entries competed in a contest often called the "Oscars of the toy industry." A small Taipei-based company swept two silver medals, beating LEGO and tying for second place with a remote-controlled car backed by Apple Computer, setting the best record for any Taiwanese entry. ¹ The company is called Shepherd Kit. Instead of making glowing plastic toys, it created physical board games designed to teach children aged 4 to 10 how to love math, archaeology, and ecology. The founder is Lin Chi-Wei, a graduate of NTU's Department of Electrical Engineering. After earning his master's degree from UCLA's Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering, he declined his doctoral admission offer, skipped Silicon Valley to write chip code, and returned to Taiwan to build children's educational tools. ¹²

He uploaded each board game to crowdfunding platforms one by one, from Taiwan's zeczec to the U.S.'s Kickstarter. Lin Chi-Wei stated that these campaigns cumulatively raised over $1 million, with products shipped to over 20 countries, and he was even invited to collaborate with the British Museum. ³ In 2021, Shepherd Kit was sold to CommonWealth Magazine. ³

The Man Who Turns Knowledge Into Games

Archaeology, forests, math. Every game under Shepherd Kit essentially does the same thing: it breaks down a difficult piece of knowledge from the real world into rules that children are willing to engage with. "Taiwanese kids are good at math, but they hate it," he described the problem he set out to solve in an interview with The Crossing. ⁴

In 2017, he accomplished something no one in the industry had done before: he persuaded the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung to license its IP, handing over archival materials on the Changbin Culture and Beinan Culture to a startup of fewer than 10 people to create the board game Prehistoric Adventure. This was the nation's first tabletop game developed through a collaboration between a private startup and a public museum. After two years of back-and-forth communication and ten complete revisions, it raised over six times its target amount on the crowdfunding platform. "Is there a way to make the knowledge within these museums, and Taiwan's history, easier for people to approach proactively?" he said. He wanted to be the museum's "translation konjac" (a pun on translator and a common food, serving as a bridge). ²

This habit later became the name of his company. Portaly's parent company is called "Real Engine" (Real Engine). ⁵

📝 Curator's Note
Looking at Lin Chi-Wei's two entrepreneurial journeys reveals a hidden thread: what he builds is always about "conversion." Converting knowledge into games, influence into income, traffic into business. But the greatest conversion is actually himself: jumping from the traditional industry of wooden educational tools into software, and then into AI, resetting and relearning each time, always reaching the frontier of that field. In the toy industry, he set the best record for a Taiwanese entry at a U.S. toy award; in software, he built Taiwan's largest creator platform; in the AI era, the methodology documents he wrote were republished by media and used by thousands. The products changed three times, but his ability to learn and adapt remained unchanged.

Portaly's Gateway Goes Live

After selling Shepherd Kit in 2021, the track reset to zero. He later reflected on this transition on Medium: ten years ago, he started a business for "self-achievement," but a decade later, the reason became "I want to understand the world more." "In the world of entrepreneurship, I became an explorer." ⁶

In 2022, Lin Chi-Wei noticed something: the work of influencers and KOLs he had collaborated with was scattered across IG, YouTube, official websites, and e-commerce pages, with no single place to consolidate them. Tools like Linktree already existed abroad to do this, but with fixed templates and plain text only, they couldn't differentiate personal brands.

Thus, Portaly emerged. It features modular blocks, allowing creators to piece together their own pages. "Creators can build a unique, dedicated page in under half an hour, breaking free from the traditional 'templated' Link-in-Bio impression," Lin Chi-Wei said in an early 2023 interview with Meet. ⁵

In September 2022, Portaly had only 6,000 registered users. By February 2023, it secured a $350,000 seed round led by the AVA Angel Investment Fund. ⁵ The user roster included individual creators like Blue Pigeon and Waste Girlfriend, as well as Eslite, CommonWealth Magazine, and the professional basketball league P.LEAGUE+. ⁵

The challenges faced in the Taiwan market differ from those in the overseas market. Lin Chi-Wei gave a very grounded example in the same interview:

Taiwanese users would ask: "Do you have a donate (tip) feature?"
Overseas users would ask: "Can you embed this donation platform?"

One wanted him to build the feature in; the other wanted him to connect it outward. "How to 'link' these platforms will be our top priority," he said. ⁵

From 0 to 200,000 Users, Zero Marketing Spend

On June 5, 2023, Portaly launched a new feature on Product Hunt: input a URL, and AI generates a personal page with one click. The team positioned it as the world's first AI-driven Link-in-Bio tool, climbing to #2 of the day within 24 hours. ⁷ That same year, Portaly was selected for Meet Taipei's "Neo Star" program, which selects 30 teams annually from roughly 250 applicants ⁸; Lin Chi-Wei himself was selected as a 13th-cycle entrepreneur in the AAMA Taipei Incubator Program, a long-term mentorship program led by seasoned entrepreneurs. ⁹

According to AAMA's introduction, Portaly is Taiwan's largest creator and KOC platform, with overseas traffic accounting for roughly 30%. ⁹ According to Lin Chi-Wei's public data, by 2025 it had accumulated over 200,000 creator users. The company became profitable in 2025, with revenue growing over 20 times from 2023 to 2025. Throughout this period, there was no marketing team and no paid customer acquisition; growth came entirely from the product itself, known as organic PLG (product-led growth). ¹⁰

📝 Curator's Note
"Having no marketing team" sounds like a drawback in the venture capital world. But for Portaly, it's actually a selling point: if a tool is good enough that creators will bring their peers in themselves, it fundamentally doesn't need to buy ads. Profitability, zero marketing spend, and PLG all holding true simultaneously is what makes it truly hard to replicate.

A Practitioner of Build in Public

In recent years, Lin Chi-Wei has taken on another identity: a practitioner of "build in public." He has been doing this for years: early on with Portaly, he publicly shared the team's methodology for interviewing 100 super-influencer clients within a month and a half ¹¹; in 2024, he spent two months growing his Threads account from 120 to 10,000 followers, then wrote out the entire algorithm logic and follower-growth strategy, which was authorized for republication by Business Next ¹²; in 2026, as he expanded into Silicon Valley, he documented the plight of Taiwanese entrepreneurs in the AI gold rush, publishing it in Meet. ¹³

He also maintains columns in Manager Today and Meet, writing not about successology but about the tools he is actively using: a practical workflow for fully AI-driven product development, an AI culture checklist for managers, and the AI Vault knowledge management system. ¹⁴¹⁵ He open-sourced his AI knowledge base architecture as Vault for Founders and wrote an "OpenClaw Beginner's Lobster Manual" for non-engineers; according to his public data, thousands have accessed and shared these AI documents. ¹⁰

In 2026, he was invited to attend the Stripe Sessions annual conference (reportedly representing Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs). His first action upon returning was to write a post-event reflection, reminding Taiwan startups: Is there room for an AI agent in your business model? ¹⁵¹⁰

This habit runs through both of his ventures: his crowdfunding and museum licensing experience during the Shepherd Kit era, and his PLG and AI implementation methods during the Portaly era, he has all organized into tools others can directly use. From physical board games to creator pages to AI management methodologies, the shape of the product has changed three times, but the underlying thread remains unchanged: find a bottleneck that stalls people, build a machine to help them push through it, and then share the method with the next person who gets stuck.

This also explains a neat coincidence. The sponsorship page for the knowledge base you are currently reading, Taiwan.md, states "Payment processing handled by Portaly," with the donation link pointing to portaly.cc/taiwanmd/support. ¹⁶ When a Taiwanese person wants to speak for Taiwan and raise funds from the world, the layer that collects the money happens to be built by another Taiwanese person.

Transparency Disclosure: The initial draft of this article was written and submitted by the subject himself (CW Lin). Content relies primarily on third-party public reports; only entries marked "according to Lin Chi-Wei's public data" are sourced from his official website or personal social media accounts.

Further Reading:

• AAMA Taipei Incubator Program: Lin Chi-Wei is a 13th-cycle entrepreneur in this two-year, one-on-one mentorship program, a Taiwanese startup support model that neither invests nor takes equity.

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