EPISODE 74

Kiko Zang spent more than half her life pretending to be someone else — born in China, sent alone to boarding school in New Zealand at 12, then to USC at 17, then back to China as the Chinese-looking person who couldn't hold an adult conversation in Chinese. Pretending, as she puts it, was a survival instinct that became one of her strongest skills. In this episode she traces that pattern from the classroom in China where she refused to rehearse a fake PTA lesson, through the years of self-censoring at work, to the full head-to-toe mascot costume she wore around crypto conferences — where, strangely, the expectations placed on a female founder vanished and she got to be more herself than she was without it. Now CEO of Chomp, she's building an app around the gap between what people say in public and what they actually believe in private, and she brings the receipts: 50,000 users, two million answers, and a question about saying "I love you" in the first month of dating that came back 93% green flag when nobody was watching — while every single player assumed it would be a coin flip. Kevin and Jason play a live pack on air, and the conversation moves into why honest human opinion may be the most valuable data set of the AI era, why there's no durable moat in consumer, and what Kiko learned after a co-founder breakup when her own team had to tell her she'd been muting herself in meetings. Her conclusion: the fear felt true not because it was real, but because she believed it was.

CHAPTERS

00:00 – More herself inside the suit

00:40 – Know your audience or know yourself

04:07 – Half a life spent pretending

06:14 – The PTA rehearsal that got her sent abroad

08:34 – The reluctant founder

11:44 – The fursuit and who gets assumed to be the founder

14:05 – Anonymity, honesty, and shared reality

16:12 – Playing Chomp live

19:24 – 93% green flag and the perception gap

22:20 – Pluralistic ignorance and why consumer has no moat

24:31 – Honest opinion as the data of the AI era

27:50 – The co-founder breakup and fears that aren't real

30:06 – Where to find Chomp

LINKS

Connect with Kiko Zang

chomp.fyi • LinkedIn • X/Twitter

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Connect with Kevin

LinkedIn • X/Twitter

Connect with Jason

LinkedIn • X/Twitter