Justin Lau

COO | Company Builder | prev Playground, Mixpanel, Cooley

San Francisco, California, United States

About

Experience

  • Principal at 1AC Advisory
    Mar 2025 - Present · 1 yr 4 mos

    Operational & legal support for high-growth companies.

  • COO at Playground
    Nov 2022 - Dec 2025 · 3 yrs 2 mos

    Playground started out as one of the first image generation tools on the web (right before ChatGPT launched). Our goal was to build a new way to make advanced graphics using AI—a new kind of Adobe. We trained 4 generations of image foundation models as a AI engineering team from scratch, acquired 15m+ users, and built several variations of editing graphic design.

  • COO at Mighty
    Jun 2021 - Dec 2022 · 1 yr 7 mos

    Mighty’s mission was to make a new computer that changes what apps can do. We built a way to stream at 60fps with extremely low latency, built custom datacenter hardware, figured out how to run with positive unit economics with shared compute, built an app that can work on low-end computers, and tested it with 100s of customers.

  • Mixpanel (6 yrs 1 mo)
    • Vice President, Finance & Partnerships
      2019 - 2021 · 2 yrs

      Led the Finance, Revenue Operations, Partnerships & Customer Success teams.

    • General Counsel
      2017 - 2019 · 2 yrs

      Led the Legal, Partnerships, HR, Recruiting, InfoSec, IT & Operations teams.

    • Vice President, Legal
      2015 - 2017 · 2 yrs

  • Corporate Lawyer at Cooley LLP
    2009 - 2015 · 6 yrs

    Represented public and private technology & life science companies in various corporate, strategic, operational, governance and securities matters, including VC financings, capital markets offerings, and M&A.