Gary Chou

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The Opportunity Beyond the Uncertainty

👋TL;DR: I’m seeking philanthropic funders to collaborate on grantmaking experiments in 2025 that are focused on supporting risk-taking and experimentation. Thanks to a grant from Nick Barr and the fiscal sponsorship of hackNY, I’ve spent the past year exploring a hunch: that the social sector needs more

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Teaching Entrepreneurship through In-Public Experiential Learning

Insights from the Teach the 1K Workshop In February 2019, Christina Xu and I convened Teach the 1K — a multi-event gathering of over 40 entrepreneurship educators and activators from a variety of backgrounds—academic, community-based, for-profit, non-profit—to teach them how to teach the $1K Challenge: Design, launch and complete

Some Personal News

Update: We’re live! Subscribe to our podcast here! Thanks to everyone who came out to our launch party! TL;DR: Last February, I made a viral tweet, which has turned into a real podcast called I Drink Two Beers and Try to Tell You How to Run Your Company.

Orbital Studios: Season 8

The hard part about making things with humans is humans. — Gary Chou (@garychou) April 2, 2019 Last week, we wrapped up our 8th cycle of Orbital Studios. 58 people from over 40 technology companies in NYC participated in our Studios for Senior Product Managers, Year 1 Product Managers, Engineering Managers

Gather Your People

How to check-in with your friends, colleagues (and yourself) We just wrapped up the early 2019 State of the Orbital — a biannual, semi-private ritual where our members deliver short talks covering: * what they’ve been working on over the past six months * what they’ve learned * how they’re doing

Call for Entrepreneurship Educators

Join us for Teach the 1K, a free one-day workshop for entrepreneurship educators and activators on February 8th, 2019 in New York City. Over the past 5+ years, Christina Xu and I have taught Entrepreneurial Design at School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design Program. Drawing from our collective

Infrastructure and Interdependence

Last month, I had the pleasure of returning to San Francisco to give a talk at Bond, a conference examining “how creators make a living through the internet”. This was a particularly special talk for me, as I unintentionally ghosted on SF and never gave it a proper goodbye when

The Self, The Work and The Process

Lessons Learned from the $1K Challenge We’re in the final weeks of Entrepreneurial Design 2018, and with the $1,000 Challenge now complete, the learning can now begin. To kickoff that process, Christina and I have taken the students through a process of review and reflection in-class. To complete

Why you should join a Community of Practice

In 2016, over 150 Designers, Product Managers and Engineering Managers from 50+ NYC companies joined a Community of Practice at Orbital to share stories, challenges and lessons with each other. When your job is fundamentally about navigating uncertainty — whether it’s the search for product market fit, the organizational changes

2016 in Review

On the one hand, it’s crazy that I haven’t blogged in almost a year, but on the other hand it’s not. Last Fall began a process of re-evaluating everything and putting in place a plan forward, which included a longer time cycle of operating. I’m starting

The Thesis After Your Thesis

On May 13, I gave the closing keynote at the The Graduate Show: The MFA Interaction Design 2015 Thesis Festival at the School of Visual Arts. The event is a platform for the graduates to present their master’s thesis projects. As one of their first-year instructors, it was a

On Constraints, Exploration and Chance

When you’re launching an idea, one of the best things you can do for yourself is introduce constraints. Constraints can be anything: a fixed time frame (“launch in a week”), a finite set of tools/resources (“writing code vs. using what already exists”), or limited scope (“for now, we’

Why I Launched Orbital Boot Camp

There are a plenty of places to help you develop your startup idea or product, but not a lot of places to help you navigate the initial creative process when you are just getting off the ground. That’s what Orbital Boot Camp is all about. It’s a 12-week

On Self-Sufficiency

In the age of the networks, I believe the first step for a creator should be to assess their own self-sufficiency. This could mean a wide range of things, but for most, the focus is financial sustainability. What is the economic model that enables you to focus on your work