Nelson Cheng was born in Wayne, NJ—a sleepy little town and a suburb of New York City. In between playing Nintendo and listening to Yankees games, he dreamed of becoming an “inventor”. In high school, he had a broad range of interests but none more so than sports where he was a varsity runner all four years and was a two-time captain in cross country. He attended Princeton University, majoring in Economics and graduating in 3 years, and began working at amazon.com.

At amazon.com, Nelson was a Product Manager, where he led the launch of the site’s popular Wedding Registry feature. He then joined Google and worked as a Business Product Manager in International Products where he helped develop the framework around Google’s global expansion. He also worked as a Product Marketing Manager where he oversaw the marketing associated with the acquisition and retention/upsell of the company’s largest advertisers. In his 20% time, he product managed the launch of Google’s AdWords Reporting tab.

After a number of exhilarating but exhausting years at Google (the company grew from ~800 employees to 15,000+ by the time he left)—he took a step back to evaluate what he wanted out of life and what he wanted his life to look like. He went about trying to figure this out by taking classes in everything from writing to photography to acting. Acting stuck. He studied acting in New York at the Stella Adler Studio, improv at the Peoples Improv Theater, and was an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Most apprentices are in college so in pretty short order, he had gone from the youngest to do something (Product Manager at amazon.com) to the oldest to do something (he was the oldest apprentice at Williamstown). It was quite a culture shock to say the least. However, what it taught him more than anything was that his love was for film and TV, and he made the decision to move out to Los Angeles upon completion of the program.

One day in L.A., while waiting around for his big break, Nelson realized that he could be waiting for a very long time. Inspired by another friend’s web series, he set about to create his own material in the spirit of work begetting work. Based on a college classmate’s summer internship at the Boston Consulting Group, he wrote, produced, and acted in the web series “The Consultants”. The series was named a finalist in the Producers Guild of America’s 2010 Producers Challenge and Nelson presented it at the Tuck Media & Entertainment Symposium at Dartmouth. Currently, he is directing a documentary on the business side of being a magician. (Nelson is also a magician member of the Academy of Magical Arts / the Magic Castle.)

Not wanting to completely leave the world of tech however, Nelson currently is on the board of advisors of a number of startups including Signpost, Miso Media (both backed by Google Ventures), and Slated—a startup building a technology platform for film financing. As a kid, he loved the idea of creating new things which he gets to do with his entertainment projects and to help out on with his advisory work.

In his downtime, Nelson thinks about getting a dog, moving closer to the beach, and the next project to work on.