Christopher Nguyen

CEO & Co-Founder of Yatown, The Trusted Neighborhood Network. Venture-backed CEO, 2 successful exits as co-founder, former engineering director at Google. BS UC Berkeley, PhD Stanford.

Los Altos, California, United States
Member since March 04, 2012

About

I am a(n):

Entrepreneur

If you're an entrepreneur or corporate innovator, why?

I want to change the world.

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

#1 Frustration: Don't have the same clout or leverage as when having a big corporate name behind you.
#1 Reward: Complete freedom to move and change at lightning speed.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs/innovators make?

Those of us with large-company background don't know how to think small, and those with small-company background don't know how to think big.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

1. You are never adapting as fast as you need to. I just admit defeat and try to adapt faster.
2. Need to have co-founders. A real co-founder is someone who's up when you're down, and vice versa. Anything else is not.
3. You need to develop a rare balance of realism and optimism. Realism to assess challenges with your head out of the sand. Optimism to keep an absolute faith (and convince others) that you & your team can beat them.

Full bio

Christopher Nguyen is CEO & Co-founder of Yatown. Prior to Yatown Christopher was CEO at Bluepulse, a venture-backed mobile social start-up. Before that, he worked at Google as Director of Engineering responsible for the operations of Google Apps (GMail, Calendar, etc). He is a recipient of the Google Founders' Award.

Previously he was founder and CEO of ACTGent Software, where he delivered five generations of a multi-million dollar real-time trading system, which was acquired by SHB Bank in 2005. He was also a co-founder and CTO of Agenda-Asia, a 400 strong pan-Asia digital presence agency acquired by WPP in 2008.

Earlier, he was a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, where he helped launch their Computer Engineering program. He has also held technical positions at Xerox, Hewlett Packard and Intel. Christopher holds a bachelor's degree with highest honors in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS and PhD from Stanford University.