Chiu Chi-hung: Rising from Web 2.0 Failure to Reshape Taiwan's Digital Advertising Ecosystem with an Engineer's Mindset

30-second overview: Nathan Chiu (邱繼弘), PhD in computer science from National Chiao Tung University and nicknamed "Big Hippo," showed an intense interest in software from a young age, won third place at the National Science Fair in high school, and was admitted to NCTU's CS program through a "special talent" track ⁴. In 2006, swept up in the Web 2.0 wave, he co-founded the social website funP (推推王 / PushPush King); despite a moment of prominence, the site failed in 2007 for lack of a business model — nearly NT$20 million burned over three years ⁸¹⁰. In 2009, he pivoted from the wreckage and founded cacaFly Technology (聖洋科技), starting as Facebook's official Taiwanese ad agency and subsequently adding Google, LINE, Microsoft, Spotify, and other international platforms, while building sub-brands adHub, TenMax, and BeingDigital to create Taiwan's most comprehensive domestic digital advertising ecosystem ⁹¹¹. Beyond his commercial achievements, Chiu has actively engaged in politics, serving as a Taipei City mayoral advisor, and in 2019 running for a decision-making committee seat in the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (時代力量), seeking to infuse "left-wing boss" tech thinking into politics ²⁰²¹. More recently he has aggressively positioned cacaFly around AI marketing and retail media networks (RMN), continuing to lead the transformation of Taiwan's MarTech industry ¹²³.

Early Inspiration and the Technical DNA of the "New NCTU Gang"

Nathan Chiu was born in 1976. His path as an engineer began with an accidental substitution: in sixth grade he filled in for his older brother in a programming class and unexpectedly ignited a deep passion for software ⁴. That talent was validated in high school, when he won third place at the National Science Fair on the strength of an exceptional programming project, and was admitted to NCTU's Department of Computer Science through the "special talent" admissions track ⁴.

At NCTU, Chiu joined Professor Yuan Hsien-ming's Distributed Computing Systems Lab (DCSLab). This lab holds an important place in the history of Taiwan's software entrepreneurship: its core members include Kuo Jung-chang and Wu Ying-hao, who later co-founded Softnext Technologies, Shen Shang-chien, founder of Ubitus, and Song Mu-chi, founder of Qunqun Technology ⁵²⁴. This group of young people, dubbed the "New NCTU Gang" by the press, carried the early entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley and sought to steer Taiwan away from "hardware contract manufacturing" thinking toward "software-as-a-service." In 2004, while still a PhD student, Chiu led a team to win first place in Trend Micro's "Million-Dollar Programming Contest," and he interned at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab — an accumulation of academic and industry experience that became the foundation for his later technology-driven approach to advertising ⁴⁶⁷.

📝 Curator's Note: Chiu's early experience, especially the collective effects of the "New NCTU Gang," reveals a distinctive pathway by which Taiwanese tech talent moves from academia into entrepreneurship. DCSLab was both a technical nursery and an incubator for "software-as-a-service" thinking — a sharp contrast to the hardware manufacturing mainstream of Taiwan at the time. His engineer's DNA, from the very beginning, destined him to deconstruct and reshape digital marketing in ways that traditional advertising people never would.

Taiwan's Most Expensive Web 2.0 Tuition: funP

In 2006, caught in the global Web 2.0 wave, Chiu and four partners co-founded the social website "funP.com" (推推王 / PushPush King) ⁸. funP used a social filtering algorithm similar to Digg, emphasizing "crowd wisdom" and social sharing — one of the more substantial Web 2.0 experiments in Taiwan at the time ⁸. The following year, Chiu represented Taiwan on the stage of Silicon Valley's DEMO Show, explaining Web 2.0 concepts to an American audience ⁴.

Technical leadership did not translate into commercial success. funP burned through nearly NT$20 million over three years and faced multiple headwinds: Taiwanese advertisers remained heavily concentrated at portals like Yahoo and had little confidence in Web 2.0 traffic; in 2009, Facebook's powerful entry into Taiwan — with its social connectivity and API ecosystem far surpassing funP's — sent funP's traffic into a freefall ¹⁰. In 2009, seeing no viable business model, Chiu decided to abandon product development and pivot to advertising services, where "closing a deal means getting paid" ¹⁰. This failure taught him deeply: having powerful technology and traffic without a business model is ultimately unsustainable in the online world.

📝 Curator's Note: funP's failure was the pivotal "rite of passage" in Chiu's entrepreneurial life. It burned enormous capital and transformed him from a pure technology idealist into a practitioner who understood deeply why business models matter. This experience laid the groundwork for cacaFly, giving him the pragmatism to think through how to marry technology with commercial value when confronting the next technological wave — designing a "failure-proof system."

Engineer Reshapes Advertising: cacaFly's Technical Rise

cacaFly Technology, founded in 2009, carried a strong engineering DNA from the start. Unlike traditional ad agencies that emphasized creativity and connections, half of cacaFly's team were programmers expert in platform algorithms. Chiu treated algorithms as analyzable tools, running extensive tests to extract their logic and save costs for clients ¹².

In 2011, cacaFly officially became Facebook's official ad agency in Taiwan — a watershed moment in the company's development ⁹. The company subsequently secured agency rights for Google, Microsoft, LINE, Spotify, and other international platforms, and developed sub-brands including adHub and TenMax. TenMax focused on building a domestic real-time bidding (RTB) system and data management platform (DMP) for Taiwan, with the goal of keeping Taiwanese advertising revenue and data onshore and building a complete domestic digital advertising infrastructure ¹⁰¹¹.

📝 Curator's Note: cacaFly's rise is a victory for Chiu's "engineer's mindset" in the advertising world. He treats advertising as a system that can be data-analyzed and algorithm-optimized. This technology-first strategy rapidly made cacaFly a dominant local player for international platforms, while sub-brands like TenMax represent an attempt to establish an independent digital advertising infrastructure in Taiwan — reflecting his thinking about "digital sovereignty."

Entering Politics: Taiwan Statebuilding Party Committee and Mayoral Advisor

Chiu's vision has never been confined to commerce. During Ko Wen-je's tenure as Taipei mayor, Chiu was appointed as a Taipei City mayoral advisor, providing professional guidance on digital marketing and smart city development ²¹.

In January 2019, Chiu registered to run in the Taiwan Statebuilding Party's (時代力量) election for its second-term decision-making committee ²⁰. In his candidacy statement, he described himself as a "left-wing boss," emphasizing that his candidacy was about transforming the party's operating model, and that he hoped to inject the innovative energy of the IT industry into party operations ²⁰. He argued that a political party should have "data analytics capability" — using technical means to understand voters' needs. At the time, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party was at a critical moment of strategic debate, and Chiu's involvement was seen as a mid-generation tech leader's attempt to participate within the system to improve the scientific rigor and digital capability of political decision-making in Taiwan.

📝 Curator's Note: Chiu's political engagement reflects the concern of a new generation of Taiwanese tech elites for public affairs. He sought to bring the "system optimization" logic of an engineer into the political arena, emphasizing data analysis and rational decision-making. This represents both a personal identity shift and a symbol of Taiwanese society's hopes and experiments with tech governance.

Political Landmines and the Neutrality Challenge for an Ad Agency

As Facebook's official gateway in Taiwan, cacaFly inevitably became entangled in political controversy. In 2017, the KMT think tank accused "Facebook of turning green," questioning whether the Tsai Ing-wen government was using the ad agency for speech censorship ²²²³. In response, Chiu clarified multiple times: cacaFly only handles advertising (Business) and has no involvement in content review (Policy), which is managed directly by Facebook's US headquarters ²².

This controversy highlighted the challenges facing digital ad agencies in Taiwan's peculiar political ecosystem: how to serve clients across party lines while maintaining an image of technical neutrality. Chiu chose to respond from the vantage point of an "industry institution-builder," serving as DMA (Digital Marketing Association) chairman to push forward issues such as cybersecurity, personal data protection, data application, and anti-fraud — trying to steer the digital advertising environment toward a more transparent and regulated trajectory ¹⁵¹⁶.

📝 Curator's Note: Digital ad agencies in Taiwan's political environment are often at the center of storms. Chiu's handling of the "Facebook turned green" accusation demonstrated his crisis management skill as an industry leader. He pulled the controversy away from political ideology and back toward technical neutrality and industry standards, using his DMA chairmanship to establish an order for digital advertising that all participants could trust — at once a commercial consideration and a defense of industry ethics.

AI Transformation and RMN: Leading the Second Wave of MarTech

After 2020, Chiu shifted cacaFly's core battlefield toward AI marketing and retail media networks (RMN). The Alchemy AI creative generation platform he launched introduced "Layer Thinking," addressing the pain point of product distortion in AI-generated materials and dramatically improving their commercial value ¹¹⁸.

In the RMN space, cacaFly helped brands like "上山採藥" (Shang Shan Cai Yao) build data-driven solutions, and it is exporting the relevant technology to Southeast Asian markets ²¹³¹⁹. Chiu has repeatedly emphasized at industry forums that the key in the AI era is "data governance" — controlling high-quality first-party data is the way to survive in the digital advertising market after the disappearance of cookies ¹⁴. In 2024, cacaFly simultaneously received recognition as a Google Premier Partner and LINE Diamond-level Sales Partner ¹¹.

📝 Curator's Note: From the Web 2.0 era to the age of AI, Chiu has always been at the front of technological waves. His positioning around AI marketing and RMN is both a commercial strategic transformation and a forecast of the future digital advertising ecosystem. His emphasis on "data governance" shows that he understands privacy protection and data ethics — which will be the core competency of the MarTech industry in the post-cookie era.

Conclusion: The "Failure-Proof System" Designed Out of Failure

From the NT$20 million tuition of funP to the digital advertising empire of cacaFly, Chiu's entrepreneurial history is a continuous process of iteration from failure. He has replaced advertising's traditional reliance on intuition and big bets with an engineer's test-and-iterate logic. His nickname "Big Hippo" also fits his personal character: stable on the surface, but capable of moving with great precision and speed beneath the surface of digital waves.

📝 Curator's Note: Chiu's story comes down to a core proposition: how to design a "failure-proof system" in a constantly shifting digital world. The definition of this system is "the ability to learn from mistakes, iterate quickly, and deeply integrate technology with business model" — not the pursuit of never making mistakes. His "Big Hippo" philosophy is the best embodiment of this steady-yet-agile entrepreneurial spirit, offering valuable lessons for Taiwan's tech entrepreneurs.

References