Tom Ngo

I ache to understand this universe that I’ve landed in. How did I wind up here, and what lies ahead? One element of my seeking has been a passion quest to comprehend aliveness by asking many different forms of this question: “How do living things do what they do?”

I’ve loved pushing boundaries between artificial and living systems, working with great collaborators. How does a protein become a little molecular machine? How do toddlers learn to walk and jump?  How do party goers “tune out” extraneous voices? How can the mechanisms of evolution solve complex search problems? How can machine constraints enhance human creativity? At the start of my career, I enjoyed developing enough depth in each field to publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In personal life, I’ve been deeply influenced by experiences such as being taught by my own children to unicycle. How did my psyche leap from perceiving utter impossibility, to commuting on one wheel nearly every day? What mental representations snowballed as I extended twelve inches of progress to twelve miles?

At Lumin.ai, we’ve spent four years quietly pushing similar frontiers related human communication and problem solving. We are disturbed by the crisis of attention that distracts people from those who matter, and we are making conversational AI help stem the tide. If this is done right, the interests of vendors and consumers can be aligned: everyone wants to respect personal time and space—and, as result, match willing seller with willing buyer.

As we engage in this cause, I’m grateful for so many outside of Lumin.ai who have helped make us successful: customers for whom this work is mission critical, partners who see a transformative opportunity and want to take it on together, and investors—especially at Idealab, where I served as Chief Product Officer, and with whom a great collaboration continues.

Thank you.