Trung Ngo brought
the work home

A customer is an excellent person to impress before asking him to become your co-founder. Trung Ngo managed the sequence in that order. In 2009, Chok Ooi bought software services from Ngo’s business in Vietnam. By 2011, they had formed AgilityIO together. The relationship began with work to be done, which gave their partnership a rather useful advantage over a pitch: somebody had already seen the work.

Ngo had returned to Vietnam after studying at the University of California, Irvine. He chose to build a consulting business serving Silicon Valley companies from home. The direction of travel matters. A technology career could take him abroad; an engineering business could bring overseas work to people in Vietnam. Da Nang became the place from which he helped make that arrangement practical.

Today, as AgilityIO’s co-founder and CEO of its Vietnam operation, he belongs to the part of the technology industry that makes other people’s products possible. His career also contains a code-search engine, an iOS puzzle game and a talk about making games with Unity. The executive title has some interesting company.

Before the company, a search for better code

At UC Irvine, Ngo worked on Sourcerer, a research project concerned with finding useful software in large collections of open-source code. His collaborators included Sushil Bajracharya, Erik Linstead, Paul Rigor, Cristina Lopes and Pierre Baldi. Their names appear together on work that treats software as something researchers can collect, examine and search at scale.

The 2006 OOPSLA presentation described a search engine that looked beyond keywords. Sourcerer extracted structural information from programs and stored it in a relational model. CodeRank used information about those relationships to help rank results. A familiar word in a file could be a starting point; the structure of the program offered another way to judge its usefulness.

It is a pleasingly practical research question. A programmer searching for code has little use for an enormous pile of almost suitable answers. Finding something is easy enough to celebrate. Finding the thing that helps with the job is where the celebration earns its refreshments.

The journal work combined textual and structural information, alongside statistical models for exploring the topics within code. Ngo was one of six co-authors; the paper recorded equal contributions from Linstead, Bajracharya and Ngo. The scale of the experiment makes a useful counterweight to the smallness of the ordinary search box.

A later account of Sourcerer’s infrastructure credited him with contributions to its original design and implementation, context-sensitive analysis, core indexing and CodeRank. Those are specific engineering tasks. They place him inside the machinery of the project, working on how information would be organized and retrieved.

The customer who stayed

Ooi encountered Ngo through a concrete technical need: software for older phones. Ngo was already providing services to American companies from Vietnam. Their eventual business therefore grew out of an existing connection between a customer and a delivery team, rather than an abstract discovery that the world had time zones.

AgilityIO was formed in 2011. Ngo served as chief operating officer. The company’s early proposition addressed a familiar startup predicament: founders had a product to build and lacked the engineering capacity to build it. Dedicated teams could help them reach a working product while they developed the rest of the business.

There is an unglamorous intimacy to that kind of work. A product idea has to become decisions about what to make, what to leave for later and what will actually function. The distance between those decisions and a working release is where a software partner earns its place.

The partnership gave Ngo’s Vietnam-based operation a route into that demand. Ooi brought the customer perspective as well as his own technology background. Their first transaction had already tested the connection. A satisfied customer can supply revenue; one who becomes a co-founder supplies a considerably longer conversation.

A California education, a Da Nang address

Ngo’s route back to Vietnam gives the story its geographical shape. His education at Irvine connected him with a research community in California. His consulting career put the delivery operation in Da Nang. The two places became parts of the same working life, rather than successive addresses with a closed door between them.

His work also includes a directorship at AsNet and independent technical consulting on Da Nang’s e-Government project. That project concerned the city’s information and communications technology environment, public digital services and technology skills. Alongside startup work, it places a civic technology assignment on his professional record.

In 2014, AgilityIO expanded into Singapore, with Charmaine Ong appointed managing director there. The move extended a business already linking American customers and Vietnamese engineers into another Asian market. Ngo had grown up in Vietnam, Ooi in Malaysia; both had spent substantial time in the United States technology industry.

Their company called its cross-market framework “Startups without Borders.” The phrase gives geography a commercial assignment. A border can separate a prospective customer from an engineer; a functioning business relationship has to carry requirements, questions and finished work across it. The slogan fits on a page. The coordination takes rather more room.

A detour through Wonderland

In February 2016, Ngo’s LinkedIn page carried a brief announcement for Lokipoki, an iOS game. The introduction was refreshingly direct: “My latest game just hit Apple Store.” It invited readers to download it for iPhone, iPod and iPad.

The project description introduced a journey through Wonderland, villages to explore and match-three puzzles. Its selling point involved a twist on the genre’s physics and actions. Here was the co-founder of a software services company publicly putting a game into players’ hands, with the small, immediate satisfaction that a release announcement allows.

“My latest game just hit Apple Store.”

Trung Ngo, announcing Lokipoki · 6 February 2016

Later that year, his DevDay Da Nang session took up game development with Unity. He spoke in Vietnamese about building cross-platform 2D and 3D games using existing Unity assets. It was a practical subject for a local developer audience: how to make use of available building blocks when creating a game.

The combination is a welcome detail in an executive biography. A corporate title describes a position; a game release describes something a person helped bring into the world. A puzzle game also has the good manners to make its proposition intelligible without requiring a meeting with the procurement department.

The work beyond the client list

March 2016 also brought a different international connection. Fringe Diplomacy lists Trung Ngô Chí, identified as AgilityIO’s co-founder and COO, among participants in its Myanmar delegation that month. The program brings people from business and other fields together to explore partnerships in emerging markets.

The appearance places him in an exchange built around meeting people across professional and national boundaries. It is a different setting from a software project, but it sits naturally beside a career connecting Vietnam with overseas technology work. The delegation record is a small, specific glimpse of that wider professional orbit.

By 2017, he also appeared on the organizing committee for the Vietnam ITO Conference, listed as COO of Asnet/AgilityIO. Conference organizing and technical speaking are two distinct forms of participation in an industry. One puts a person on the program; the other helps assemble the occasion on which the program depends.

Vietnam gets its own line on the map

Ngo’s later role is CEO of AgilityIO Vietnam. That wording is consequential in a distributed company: it names responsibility for the Vietnam operation. AgilityIO’s global chief executive and its Vietnam chief executive are separate roles. His career spans both the earlier operating title and the country leadership position.

The company now describes a network spanning New York, Latin America and Vietnam. Product and design leadership sit in New York. Latin American engineering teams overlap with American working hours. Vietnam supplies an engineering bench and extends the working day. The arrangement makes Ngo’s part of the business central to delivery.

AgilityIO’s current positioning includes AI-assisted engineering and building AI capabilities into products. That is the company’s present commercial direction. The engineering vocabulary has changed considerably since a research team was indexing Java projects at Irvine. The recurring practical question is recognizable: how can technical resources be organized so that somebody can use them?

Read together, the episodes give Ngo’s career a particular texture. He has helped build tools for finding code, a business for supplying engineering capacity and a game for people to play. He has spoken to developers in Da Nang and joined a delegation abroad. The work moves between systems and people, with a finished product somewhere in view.

His return to Vietnam remains the choice that gives those episodes their setting. California supplied an education and research collaborators. Da Nang became a place to build an engineering operation connected to customers elsewhere. A customer became a partner. A local team became part of an international company. The journey home left plenty of room for the world to come along.