Nelson Cheng

Startup Advisor, Film Producer, and Actor

Nelson Cheng is a former Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager for Google and Amazon with experience in product development, strategic planning, and marketing. He has been an advisor to several startups and is a mentor at MuckerLab, a startup accelerator in Los Angeles. Originally from the East Coast, Nelson holds an A.B. in Economics from Princeton University. He directed “The Magic Life”, a documentary about the business side of being a magician, which was a selection of the International Documentary Association’s DocuWeeks Showcase. It’s distributed by Gravitas Ventures and is available on iTunes, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. As an actor, you can see him in “Catherine” — a web series starring Jenny Slate and an official selection of Sundance 2014. He can also be seen in Adult Swim’s “For-Profit Online University”, HBO’s “The Newsroom”, Funny or Die’s “HUVr” (15 million+ views), and in Hulu’s upcoming series “Difficult People”.

Articles by Nelson Cheng

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for Early Stage Companies

In our latest session from the Mucker Growth Series featuring Ethan Smith from Graphite, we explored AEO, a significant new approach for optimizing visibility in AI-driven search, particularly relevant as...

Startup Guide to AI Visibility: Be the Brand ChatGPT Recommends

Introduction Today, users aren’t just searching on Google. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI systems for advice. AI visibility is the new frontier of brand awareness....

Practical Uses of AI & Automation for Startup Operations

In a recent Mucker Growth Series session, we invited Rock Vitale, Founder & CEO of Easie, to share how he’s helped early-stage teams move from manual, fragmented workflows to streamlined,...

2025 New York Tech Week Recap Of Mucker Sessions

Last week during New York Tech Week 2025, we joined more than 1,000 events hosted by founders, investors, and VCs. This post is a full Mucker recap of the three...

How to Build a Customer Support Function for Startups Using AI Tools with Alex Velinov

Delivering high-quality customer support can be one of the most resource-draining parts of a startup. The good news: we’re at a turning point where founders can use AI tools to...

Zero → 100: The Exact Steps We Took to Close Our First 100 Paying Customers

Going from zero customers to 100 in just four months sounds impossible—unless you’re a founder willing to roll up your sleeves and hustle relentlessly. I’m Gaurav Bhattacharya, co-founder of Jeeva.ai,...