Chloe Lau '27

I came to Princeton for psychology and somehow ended up running product.

Right now that means Hoagie, a lab I started for non-CS students, and this past summer on Disney+ Search.

Recruiting for full-time PM and Applied AI roles, starting 2027.

Taught

300+

students across all my AI workshops

Shipping to

9,000+

Princeton inboxes

Reengaged

85%

of inactive K-12 districts

Summer '26

projects on Disney+ Search

Currently

Building HoagieCalendar (beta)

Researching how 500ms of sound creates narrative

Reading The Creative Act · Rick Rubin

Listening La Source · Hasselmans

Selected work

i. PM Intern · Disney+ Search · Summer '26

Users couldn't find what they loved. The team couldn't see why.

Four projects in ten weeks. I built the ranking model its first feature-importance analysis, which turned up that adding every candidate feature at once did worse than adding the best single one. I also tested an expensive search-memory idea for almost nothing, and built Dory and Nemo, two AI assistants that two teams still use.

1stexplainability

~30m → secscited answers

2teams adopted

→

ii. Head of Product · Hoagie · Sep '25 → Now

From one product to six.

HoagieMail worked fine, it just wasn't good, which is a different problem. 40+ interviews turned up the same thing: stuff was getting buried and people had stopped trusting their inbox. The real problem was event discovery. HoagieCalendar is in beta now, and I work across all six Hoagie apps.

9,000+users

40+interviews

5products

→

iii. Product Success Intern · Cariina · Summer '25

Dashboards for districts that had stopped logging in.

20 K-12 districts had ghosted and the CEO wanted more features. I ran 15 admin interviews, talked him into treating it as a visibility problem instead, and built dashboards that showed them what their own data already said.

85%reengagement

15+dashboards

30m → 3sprocessing

→

iv. Founder & Co-Lead · Princeton AI Lab · '25 → Now

Teaching AI to students outside computer science.

A Spring 2026 pilot for the students who get left out of campus AI classes, humanities, social sciences, non-CS STEM, etc. Three workshops, a research project each, a postdoc mentor, and a symposium at the end.

25+students

3workshops

Spring '26pilot cohort

→

Side quests

Unwrapped.

Spotify Wrapped tells you what you played. This tries to tell you why.

vi.

Spotify MCP.

12 tools connecting Claude to Spotify. I built it for a workshop and kept using it.

vii.

Music sequencing.

I built a coherence metric for playlist order, then beat random shuffling by 39% across 114K tracks.

From the notebook

Dec 2025

Why 500 milliseconds of sound creates entire narratives.

Half a second of the right sound and people build a whole scene out of it, which we found at Princeton's Music Cognition Lab. What that changed about how I think about micro-interactions.

May 2026

Working with AI like it's a product sprint.

Most people just open a chat window and hope. I started treating it like a sprint instead, which mostly means deciding what a good output looks like before you ask for it, then actually checking whether you got it.

Sep 2025

Hong Kong, a harp, and how I ended up in product.

People ask how a psychology major ended up running product. The answer starts four years before I declared the major.

A few things about me

I grew up between classical music and code. The plan was a psychology degree, and product is just what it turned into.

Psychology taught me to ask questions without leading the answer, and the music cognition lab got me comfortable sitting with 300 free-text responses until one signal shows up. Hoagie is where I figured out that the gap between “I don't know how to build this” and “I built this” is mostly just starting.

Ten weeks on Disney+ Search in Seattle was the same thing at a much bigger scale, including a spec of mine that died at intake in week three. Mostly I got better at deciding while I was still scared of being wrong.

Outside of work I play the harp, sing jazz a cappella, hike whenever I can find a trail, and drink an unreasonable amount of cheese foam boba.

What I actually want next is to be the one catching up, around people who are better than me at the things I care about. Somewhere growing fast enough that I get handed things before I am ready for them.

Chloe in a Disney Internships shirt at Pixar Pier

Chloe at Kerry Park with the Seattle skyline behind her

I'm President of the Princeton Katzenjammers, the oldest co-ed a cappella group in the Ivy League. This is what we sound like, recorded for our 50th anniversary.