Harry Cheung

Harry Cheung is best known as one of Google's earliest engineers, joining the company in 1999 and staying until 2003 (leaving roughly 18 months before the IPO). Nicknamed "Spiderman," he worked on Google's web "spiders" — the crawlers that index the web — and is credited with helping expand the search index from about 50 million to more than 2 billion documents. He also contributed to Google's enterprise search, Google News, and unified search efforts. He earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis (1998), and in 2015 the university's McKelvey School of Engineering named him its Young Alumnus of the Year.

After Google, Cheung became an active angel investor and served as president of HNK Ventures, backing a range of early-stage startups. In 2012, together with a Washington University engineering classmate, he co-founded Roostify, a digital home-lending platform designed to make mortgage applications more transparent and give borrowers, lenders, and agents real-time visibility into the loan process. Roostify's founding team also included CEO Rajesh Bhat. Cheung served as the company's Chief Technology Officer (and later sat on its board). Roostify was acquired by CoreLogic in 2022.

Outside of technology and investing, Cheung is a competitive race-car driver: he competes in Global Rallycross and, in 2014, took two first-place finishes in the Trofeo Pirelli division of the North America Ferrari Challenge. Public records list him as based in San Francisco.

• Invests as an individual angel at the pre-seed and seed stage, generally as an early check into founder-led software companies.
• Sector lean toward mobile, consumer internet, and social/gaming, with additional exposure to cleantech and fintech (his own company, Roostify, was fintech/mortgage tech).
• Brings a deep engineering and search/infrastructure background (early Google) plus operating experience as a startup co-founder and CTO — a fit for technical founders who value a hands-on, product-and-engineering-savvy backer.
• No formally published thesis; his selection signal is best inferred from his portfolio — early consumer/mobile products and technically ambitious teams.
• Note: publicly visible angel activity appears concentrated in the 2013–2015 period, so he reads as a less-active / opportunistic angel today rather than a full-time institutional investor.