Aaron Ng - NFHN Reader

I'm Aaron and I'm currently building a new company. I'm also an investor + advisor to startups, was one of the earliest members of the CashApp design team, and spent some time on the Facebook AR Sharing team. During my time in technology, I've built multiple personal apps that have charted in the app store, helped startups like dYdX at their earliest stages, and have been lucky enough to be covered in a few publications.

I am self-taught and have been building and designing software online for as long as I can remember. You can reach me on X ↩ or find my projects on Substack ↩.

Founding

Apollo: Private & Local AI ↩

Acquired by Liquid AI. A popular platform for running offline AI models privately on a phone or tablet.

Hyper Online: Avatar Studio ↩

One of the most popular avatar tools on iOS, used by over a million avatar content creators. Backed by Y Combinator, Amazon Alexa Fund, Two Sigma Ventures, MakersFund, and more.

Projects

Mini-ITX PC [2021], A custom hardline liquid-cooling loop.View
Lutein & Zeaxanthin [2020], can they improve reaction speed?View
Flocknet [2020], A Twitter Graph Search EngineOffline
Phantom White Nintendo Switch [2020], a hand airbrushed hardshell mod.View
Harvesting Sulforaphane [2020], Growing & harvesting broccoli sprouts.View
Life in Silicon Valley [2019], iMessage Stickers based on living in SFView
Lightning Network Node [2019], A fun project with Raspbery PiView
Tracker [2017], A mood-tracking app for Quantified Self experimentsView
Blood Glucose Tracking [2017], With the Freestyle Libre CGMView
ARKit Experiments [2017]View
UnityVR Experiments [2017]View
Din [2017], An N-back brain-training gameView
Ashford [2016], An always-listening iOS assistantView
Chroma [2015], A popular Mac controller for your Philips Hue BulbsView
Sonic [2014], An App Store for music production plugins.Offline
Persona [2013], A Personal Website Builder for WebOffline
Chartsy [2012], A City-Wide Social Network for iOSOffline

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Projects & Interests

App Development & Design

I build and design software for myself and some of these apps have spent time charting on App Stores. Some of my apps include: Flocknet [2020] which indexed over 30 million accounts as a graph search tool for Twitter. Chroma [2015], the most popular Philips Hue app for macOS at the time. Persona [2013] a short-lived personal website creator and social network for the web. SystemLens [2012], a #1 charting macOS utility for performance monitoring, mentioned in publications like LifeHacker. Multimon [2012], a #1 charting macOS utility for multiple-monitor support. Chartsy [2011] another short-lived location-based social network on iOS. And many others.

Cognition & Enhancement

Why can't we be elves? I've spent a lot of time trying to juice out improvements in memory, f, and g because these are limiters to everything. Some of my more unusual projects include growing broccoli sprouts to harvest sulforaphane, attempting to induce grapheme-color synesthesia with daily training, and designing an exercise regimen that included dosing an HDAC inhibitor to open a closed neuroplasticity window. I've been tracking biometrics like sleep, steps, and co2 since the early 2010's.

Short-form Video Algorithms

I spent months dissecting the TikTok algorithm at the peak of COVID and coached a group of friends to 100K+ followers each. The most successful of our group grew to 500K+ followers in 3 weeks, and many of our group have since built businesses on their following.