Chris Nguyen and the Business Hidden Inside the Business

Chris Nguyen’s code would not work. Lee Liu helped him fix it. They were first-year students in Toronto, in a program that put business and programming in the same classroom. It is an unceremonious beginning for a partnership that would eventually put software inside IBM Cloud. Before there were investors, enterprise customers or a company called Mezmo, there was a classmate who could help.

Nguyen had arrived at university with a fairly ordinary ambition: become an analyst at Telus or Rogers. Entrepreneurship came later, encouraged by James Norrie, then the head of his Information Technology Management program. Nguyen graduated from Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University, with a commerce degree in 2005. The relationship with Liu outlasted the coursework. Together, they would keep finding reasons to start again.

A career with several checkout counters

The first business they started together was JobLoft, in 2006. It used location-based job mapping and text-message notifications to help people find work. The company appeared on Dragons’ Den and was acquired by onTargetjobs in 2007. Nguyen subsequently held product and ecommerce leadership positions at the buyer, including responsibility for the online dating business Cupid.com.

Recruitment, dating, shopping: his early career involved several varieties of people looking for something. TeamSave, another company he founded with Liu, supplied a white-label social commerce platform for businesses in the eBay Classified Group. These were businesses with interfaces, customers and transactions, where the distance between someone arriving and someone leaving mattered.

By the time Nguyen was running a developer tools company, that background was useful. He and Liu had approached software through businesses that had to persuade people to use it. Nguyen’s range of previous jobs also makes the later move into infrastructure less mysterious. Every online business, however fetching its storefront, has machinery behind the wall. Eventually someone has to open the wall.

The useful thing hiding inside the struggling thing

Their next direction was ecommerce marketing. Answerbook aimed to help stores send customers more personalized messages. Acceptance into Y Combinator’s Winter 2015 batch took the pair from Toronto to Silicon Valley. It did not settle the question of whether enough people wanted the product. An accelerator can provide advice, introductions and a room full of ambitious peers. Customers retain the right to shrug.

Money was becoming a constraint. Nguyen and Liu looked at what they had already built, including a logging system created to deal with their own frustration. Logs are the records software leaves as it runs. When something breaks, engineers search those records for clues. The founders thought their internal tool might be more useful to other businesses than the business it had been built to support.

Nguyen asked friends in Toronto and the Valley how they handled logging and what they wanted improved. The complaints concerned experience, capacity and cost. By 2016, the company had announced US$1.3 million in funding for LogDNA. The tool in the back room had acquired a front door.

The change carried an awkward personal admission. Nguyen later recalled feeling ashamed about telling his YC mentors that he was abandoning the idea that had brought him there. A pivot sounds wonderfully crisp in a company biography. While it is happening, it involves explaining why the thing you were recently explaining with such conviction has changed.

Early public reactions helped. Nguyen recalled that LogDNA reached third place on Product Hunt and the top of Hacker News within four hours. Microsoft subsequently helped with a Windows agent, infrastructure on Azure and introductions to potential customers. Technical assistance and commercial help arrived together. The company had found people who wanted the new direction to work.

His account contains both embarrassment and enthusiasm. That combination is more revealing than a neat founding myth. He could recognize that changing course felt uncomfortable, then describe the excitement of seeing developers respond. The willingness to admit the first feeling makes the second easier to understand.

Software for the moment the lights flicker

LogDNA launched in February 2016. By June 2018, Nguyen said it served more than 2,000 customers. Their requirements varied sharply, from a gigabyte of logs a day to ten terabytes. Traffic could surge when customers spun up thousands of computing instances at once. For a product meant to help explain trouble, being surprised by its own workload would be an unfortunate party trick.

Nguyen described the founders’ varied experience as a reason they approached DevOps differently. They had worked in recruitment, dating and commerce before selling to engineers. A logging product still had to be understandable, approachable and useful quickly. Familiar consumer software concerns had followed them into an industry fond of discussing infrastructure.

In 2020, his explanation of the product was refreshingly physical: “Think of us as mission control.” Engineers needed to understand whether a failure came from a server, code or access permissions. A few errors might be routine; a sudden concentration could demand attention. The product gathered scattered records so a team could investigate the same picture.

“Think of us as mission control.”

Chris Nguyen, 2020

He talked about scooter connectivity and websites staying available. Those examples bring observability down to earth. People encounter an application as a service that works or fails them. The engineering team encounters the systems responsible. Nguyen’s business occupied the distance between those two experiences, helping one group explain what the other had just noticed.

When IBM becomes the customer

In 2018, LogDNA partnered with IBM to provide logging for IBM Cloud. For a young company, that relationship meant a demanding route into enterprise infrastructure. The product that had emerged from the founders’ own needs now had to operate in an environment far larger than their original startup.

The partnership also provided a way to demonstrate capability. Nguyen described enterprise buyers questioning whether the product was ready for them. Having IBM use it gave him confidence in answering. Trust is difficult to put into a demonstration window; a recognizable customer can carry part of that conversation.

He remained attentive to the cost of running an alternative yourself. Some customers had used open source systems and reached a point where maintaining the logging stack consumed too much staff time. His argument asked them to consider what their engineers should spend their days doing. A system can be free to download and still require a remarkably well-paid collection of people.

In the same period, Nguyen emphasized a design-focused product, quick setup and efficient training. Moving toward larger customers brought new requirements, but he wanted to preserve the reasons existing users had chosen LogDNA. Enterprise credibility was useful only if the product remained useful too.

Handing over the chair

In July 2020, Nguyen announced two changes together: a $25 million Series C financing and a new chief executive. Tucker Callaway, who had joined as president and chief revenue officer, would become CEO. Nguyen would become chief strategy officer, concentrating on product partnerships and business development.

The handoff followed six months of working closely with Callaway. Nguyen presented the arrangement as a considered decision about how the company could succeed. Liu would continue as CTO. The founders were changing the division of responsibilities inside a business they had created together.

That decision belongs in Nguyen’s story as much as the original pivot. Founders often become shorthand for their companies; the shorthand can conceal how much work is shared. Bringing another person into the chief executive role made that sharing explicit. Nguyen’s next assignment drew on the partnerships that had already mattered to the company’s development.

His operating philosophy had been fairly plain years earlier. Writing in 2016, he stressed giving projects owners, making people accountable and keeping the team informed. He closed with three instructions: “Ship fast. Learn. Iterate.” There is little ceremony in that sequence. It leaves room for a product, a plan or a job title to change when the work requires it.

Back to the shop, with different machinery

Nguyen’s later projects extended his interest in what software can take off a person’s desk. He and Liu worked on Neurox, addressing GPU monitoring. In describing that venture, Nguyen connected it to his LogDNA experience: teams buying substantial computing resources needed a clearer view of their usage and costs.

His current venture, Minicart, returns to commerce. In September 2026, he introduced it on Product Hunt as a way for makers, collectors and resellers to launch and operate stores through conversation. Its named AI teammates divide storefront, marketing and operations work. The ambition is to reduce the expertise required to turn something worth selling into a functioning business.

The details matter more than the promise. Nguyen explained that the customer-support teammate drafts replies for the owner to review, edit and send. In his launch comments, he also described US availability and plans for later expansion. The longer aspiration reaches toward a business that can run itself; the immediate product still has a person reviewing the work.

From personalized shopping messages to logs, GPUs and storefronts, his career has returned to a practical question: what is making this harder to operate than it needs to be? He has answered with different products, alongside a familiar collaborator. The classmate who helped when his code failed is still part of the story. The business ideas have changed rather more often than the partnership.