Episode Details

How much of what we say publicly reflects what we actually think?

In this episode of Thought Atlas, I sit down with Kiko Zang, CEO and co-founder of Chomp, a consumer technology company exploring how people think, what they believe others think, and the gap between the two.

Kiko grew up across four continents. Born in China, she moved to New Zealand at 12, studied jazz music, attended university in Los Angeles, and later spent around 10 years across Shanghai, Singapore, and Berlin before returning to the United States.

Her career has taken her through several industries, including corporate America, education, human-centered design, user research, and crypto. She describes a recurring thread throughout these experiences: understanding people, finding unlikely connections, and paying attention to what people don’t explicitly say.

That observation eventually became the foundation for Chomp.

Kiko believes people often filter their opinions based on what they think is socially appropriate or what they believe others expect them to say. She argues that social media can intensify this problem by creating what she describes as “siloed realities”—different perceptions of the world shaped by what individuals see online.

We explore how Chomp was designed to examine this gap. In its previous version, users answered questions twice: first with what they personally thought, and then with what they believed other people would think. Kiko explains how the product used those answers to compare individual reality, individual perception, aggregate reality, and aggregate perception.

She shares examples from the product, including questions about relationships and everyday behavior, and discusses the responses from its previous user base. She says that version attracted 50,000 users and generated 2 million answers.

We also discuss why the company is moving away from its previous incentive structure and toward a new version of the product, which Kiko says will be an iOS app. She explains why the challenge isn’t simply building the technology, but creating the right combination of questions, mathematics, and analysis to produce useful insights without relying on assumptions about users.

Then we explore AI.

Kiko sees the growing amount of AI-generated content as potentially making genuine human opinions more valuable. She describes how she envisions AI being used within Chomp to generate personalized insights by comparing a user’s answers with the answers of other people.

She also shares a longer-term vision in which aggregated, non-personal information about what people think could potentially help AI systems better understand human preferences and behavior.

Finally, Kiko reflects on why she wants Chomp to help people feel more connected to who they genuinely are and to discover that opinions they assumed were unusual may actually be shared by others.

CONNECT WITH KIKO ZANG & CHOMP

Chomp waitlist: https://chomp.fyi

Kiko says listeners can also find her on Instagram at @KikoChompes.

Learn more about Thought Atlas:https://joinpodmatch.com/thoughtatlas

Food for thought from Kiko:

“Always check your assumptions by asking a question.”

She encourages us to question the assumptions we make about ourselves, other people, and society—and to ask why we believe what we believe.