Chaki Ng, PhD

Chaki develops and ships technology products that serve millions, driven by user-centered design, data insights, and his passion of assembling and leading teams can identify and solve the right problems.

In the past 5 years, he has led as CTO and CPO at various startups on both East and West Coast. At Forge (next-gen construction workforce, CTO) he builds various enabling technolgies (e.g., AI, CV, AR) to transfer masters’ skills to students. At Hopps (on-demand expert help, Head of Marketplace) he assembled dozens of experts for popular SaaS (from FB Ads to WordPress) who are paid-by-minute. At Luminopia (digital healthcare for children/teens) he led tech team to build video-first interactive mobile apps for emotions.

Earlier, he spent 8+ years at Viacom / Paramount, a Fortune 500 company, as the SVP Product: led MTV + VH1 brands to launch 15 industry-first video streaming apps on  in just 2 years (early versions of Paramount+ today), with combined 500M+ video streams per year and helped 2.5X revenue. He also led redesigns of VMA + MTV News with data science to cement Top 10 spots among entertainment properties (e.g., 40M+ uniques). Chaki was then appointed by Viacom CXOs to be the first GM of Innovations and founded two new business units, including Viacom NEXT - an VR + AR studio that shipped over 10 projects (on Steam + iOS stores, premiered at Sundance, SXSW, the Obama White House and won Grand Prix at Cannes Lions and Webby, with numerous collaborations including artists like William Corgan and organizations like Microsoft ) in just over a year and a half.

Right out of college, Chaki was eager for entrepreneurship and co-founded Interactive Constructs, an edtech company that powered top products such as Read 180 for publishers like Scholastic + Harcourt via multi-million dollar licensing of its learning platform. ICI was self-profitable from Day 1 (grew 2x annually to $13M+ ARR with 65 employees) and was successfully acquired by Follett.

Chaki lived a parallel academic life: did research on distributed systems (sensor / cloud / grid computing and mechanism design) at Harvard (PhD + SM in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Margo Seltzer and Prof. David Parkes) and augmented interfaces + RFID screens at MIT Media Lab. He also holds degrees from MIT Sloan (product development) and Northeastern (BS in CS). He did all the degrees while he was working, bouncing between offices and Cambridge.

Connect
 |  |  | name plus “fy” @ gmail

Inspirations
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt