I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and I find knowledge and discretion
Proverbs 8:12

Exploring the intersection of technology, product development, and obedience to God.

What I've built

Full work history

Two of the products I built are running as demos, so you can try them yourself.

The Archimedes site: "Gain the confidence to make investing a bigger part of your life," with lesson screens on a phone

Archimedes · Your investment coach

Founder & CEO · 2019–2022

Archimedes makes investing part of everyday life with personalized lessons, playful learning, and trusted experts.

Once we launched on Product Hunt, we had massive spikes of signups where users started by playing PaperChase (think Oregon Trail for investing) where they invite their friends to play along. Through the game-play they are introduced to bite-sized lessons where they can get connected to an expert advisor's content and services.

The hardest problem was building and balancing the liquidity of a two-sided marketplace. Being a first-time founder building for both sides of the marketplace, we quickly saw that too much distribution early became a bad thing. The faster an advisor's calendar fills up, the quicker our monthly churn.

  • •Acquired 10K users in first month with 16-min avg session via targeted GTM (Product Hunt, Craigslist, Facebook)
  • •Launched two-sided marketplace for financial services professionals with a 20% match rate
  • •Product of the Month on Product Hunt
Try the apparchimedes.gufamily.orgBest on your phone.
The Builder demo sandbox: a component library with a hero component and Add Component, Create Collection, and Publish changes controls

Mason · Front-End-as-a-Service

Co-founder & Head of Product · 2017–2022

Front-End-as-a-Service React UI delivered via API that empowers marketers to visually create stateful websites.

React was a new technology at the time. For the first version of Mason, we used plain React and the D&D kit, but it was too slow to handle big trees. We eventually had to refactor and speed up drag and drop by using plain DOM events and event propagation to reorder the elements.

Just when we thought the hardest technical problem was solved, we launched and saw that engineers hated using our tool. This led to one of the most important lessons in my career. Workflow tools need to meet the user where they do work. Engineers did not want to leave their IDEs or CLIs, but our saving grace was that marketers loved us.

  • •Achieved 60% MoM user growth, 300% MoM API call growth, 200% MoM component creation
  • •Sold business to Sitecore (during Covid-19)
Try the Builder sandboxYour changes are private to you and reset after 24 hours.
Full work history

Latest in Product & Tech

All 7 posts
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A Bitter Lesson in Finding Needles

Every new model makes hand-built rules look dumber and good search look smarter.

2026-10-20

Irreducible Context

If a model can write the doc, what exactly did you add?

2026-10-15

Seeing Is Believing

If an agent tells you it got it right, should you believe it, or should it show you?

2026-07-31

Trust Is the Rail

Payments move at the speed of trust, and AI payment systems should be designed around that boundary.

All 7 Product & Tech posts
Simon Gu

About

I'm a follower of Jesus, a devoted husband to Valentina, and a proud father to Arabelle and Barnabe. After those 4, I'm passionate about building products that matter and exploring how technology shapes our world.

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