Meet Chris Cheng, The Googler Who Moonlights As A Primetime TV Sharpshooter [TCTV]


For whatever reason, the world of sharpshooting is not always closely associated with Silicon Valley. Sure, everyone knows that many techies love video games that involve shooting. But when you think of real-life expert marksmen, you usually think of people who have served in the military or the police force — or at least, people who live in rural areas with big yards where they can practice shooting on empty cans of Keystone Light (not that I have any familiarity with that.) San Francisco Bay Area techies don’t usually fit in with any of those sterotypes.

That’s why Chris Cheng’s rise has been especially fascinating. Cheng’s day job is as a program and project manager at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, but millions of people have come to know him in recent months as a contestant on the fourth season of Top Shot, a reality competition show airing on the History Channel in which 18 contestants battle it out to win the title as the top target shooter. With four episodes left until the season finale, Cheng is still in the running as one of the eight contestants gunning for the Top Shot title.

So we were really happy to have Cheng stop by the TechCrunch TV studio for an interview. Watch the interview above to hear him talk about his brush with reality TV fame, how working in tech has made him a better shooter, what the response to Top Shot has been like from the tech community, and more. The show airs on Tuesday nights at 10pm PT, 9pm CT, and it’s also available on Hulu. To see Chris Cheng in action, you can watch the clip we’ve embedded below: