Public Biography
Kevin Shao is an opinion columnist for The New York Time5, where he writes “Ship It,” a weekly column on technology, innovation, and the future of human experience. He joined the paper in 2022 after a career in the technology industry.
Mr. Shao holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School. He spent eight years at Google, where he was a product manager on three projects that were launched, celebrated in internal blog posts, and quietly discontinued within eighteen months. He subsequently co-founded a startup called Alignr, described in its pitch deck as “the Uber for interpersonal conflict resolution,” which raised $4.2 million in seed funding before pivoting twice and shutting down in 2021.
He began writing opinion journalism during Alignr’s second pivot and discovered he had more to say about technology than he had been able to build. His columns have been praised for their accessibility and criticized for their optimism, criticisms he considers “a feature, not a bug,” a phrase he uses in approximately one column out of every four.
Mr. Shao lives in San Francisco and commutes to New York “as needed, which is to say, rarely.”
Selected Columns
- “Loneliness Is a UX Problem” (March 2025)
- “What If Democracy Had Better Onboarding?” (July 2025)
- “Your Kitchen Is an Unoptimized Workflow” (December 2025)