Alumnus Peng Ong will be featured speaker at fall convocation

12/2/2016 College of Engineering

Peng T. Ong (MS CS '88), managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, will be the featured speaker at the College of Engineering Fall Convocation on Saturday, December 17.

Written by College of Engineering

Peng T. Ong, managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, will be the featured speaker at the College of Engineering Fall Convocation on Saturday, December 17.

Peng Ong
Peng Ong
Ong (MS, CS '88) is a coder, a successful business founder, an advisor, and most recently, a venture capitalist. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas and a master’s degree from Illinois, Ong worked in engineering and management roles at several companies before co-founding and serving as CTO of Electric Classifieds, which launched Match.com. Match.com became the leading online dating service.

After Match.com, he founded Interwoven, the leading provider of content infrastructure, and one of the originators of the concept of content management systems. It set the standard for world-wide companies, such as General Electric, General Motors, Federal Express, and Cisco Systems.

Interwoven made software to control the development, management, and deployment of business-critical content. It was successful because it did not force users to change the structure of their information. Ong believes information has a natural structure and the storage system should reflect the structure. The company had a peak market cap of $10 billion. Interwoven finally found a home in Hewlett Packard. Today, the businesses Ong created generate annual revenues of over $1 billion in total.

As a native of Singapore and an enthusiastic venture capitalist, he is passionate about growing the Southeast Asia tech industry into a climate similar to Silicon Valley. Today, Ong is a managing partner at Monk’s Hill Ventures, a tech venture fund focused on post-seed stage companies in Southeast Asia. He shares his valuable insights with young entrepreneurs through mentorship and serving on numerous professional boards.

Peng Ong was inducted into the Engineering at Illinois Hall of Fame in October 2016.

The College of Engineering Convocation will take place at 1:00 p.m. in the Foellinger Great Hall in Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.


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This story was published December 2, 2016.