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Chieh Huang

Chieh Huang is a New York-based entrepreneur known for co-founding and leading Boxed, an online wholesale retailer, and for subsequently launching Pelgo, an AI-focused career transition company [1][2]. He began his career as a corporate lawyer before moving into entrepreneurship, first joining the founding team of mobile gaming studio Astro Ape, which was acquired by Zynga in 2012, after which he served as a director at Zynga [6][7]. Huang has said his legal training, though brief, prepared him for founding companies by exposing him to the workings of entrepreneurial ventures and teaching him which business risks warranted professional caution versus which could be navigated independently [7]. He describes leaving his law firm job the day after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 as a formative and frightening decision, comparing it to jumping off a cliff with no way to climb back down [7].

Huang founded Boxed in 2013, starting the company out of his garage before it scaled to serve customers nationally, went public in 2021, and was ultimately shut down in 2023 [6]. Reflecting on his tenure as CEO, he has argued that the most consequential aspect of his leadership was not a mission or set of stated goals but an underlying sense of purpose that emerged gradually, particularly through the company's treatment of frontline fulfillment center workers rather than being articulated from the outset [6]. He has said this purpose was never formally written into the company's values but became evident in how employees behaved when making difficult decisions without explicit guidance, and that it contributed to Boxed's public reputation as an employer [6]. During his time running Boxed, Huang also took on outside roles, including as a board member of Six Flags Entertainment Corporation and an advisory board member of McLaren Racing [6].

In February 2026, Huang co-founded Pelgo with Frank D'Souza, a co-founder of Cognizant, describing the company as an AI career transition agent intended to help workers move into AI-related jobs as automation displaces existing roles [1][5]. He has argued that career changes, once historically rare, are becoming standard practice as the pace of technological change accelerates, and that within coming years having a single career for one's entire working life will become unusual [5]. Huang has pointed to physical roles within data centers, including positions requiring expertise in temperature regulation, security, and electrical systems, as examples of jobs into which displaced workers, including those from automated fulfillment centers, might be retrained [5]. He has expressed particular concern about the elimination of junior-level positions at technology companies, arguing that the loss of entry-level roles threatens the traditional mentorship pathway by which early-career workers develop skills [5].

Huang has also spoken publicly about survey data his venture commissioned on unemployed American workers, citing findings that only 15 percent of 5,000 respondents said they would reapply to a four-year university given what they now know about AI, and that only 6 percent had attempted to upskill or reskill during their unemployment [8]. Drawing on the historical precedent of Cognizant, which he notes provides services that did not exist when it was founded in 1994, Huang has argued that AI will function as a long-term net creator of jobs despite causing significant short-term displacement [8]. He has advised workers to focus on developing skills in decision-making, human interaction, and effectively directing AI systems, including the ability to ask well-formed questions, rather than treating AI as a competitor to be resisted [8].

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Chieh Huang argues that career transitions, once rare, are becoming the norm as AI accelerates workplace change, predicting it will soon be unusual for anyone to spend an entire career in a single industry [1][2]. He believes AI will destroy many jobs in the short term, particularly junior roles, but will ultimately be a net job creator over the long run, pointing to Cognizant's evolution since 1994 as a precedent [1][2]. He founded Pelgo to bridge this gap, retraining displaced workers for AI-enabled roles such as data center jobs requiring specialized skills in temperature control, security, and electrical work, rather than assuming displaced workers can leap into unrelated highly skilled fields [1]. Drawing on a survey of 5000 unemployed Americans, he notes most people are not reskilling or returning to traditional education, and instead argues workers should build capabilities in decision-making, human interaction, and directing AI through effective prompting rather than competing against it [2]. He rejects both a purely dystopian view of automation and the idea of a future built on universal basic income, insisting displaced workers need active retraining and support [1].

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