Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friend Karin Chien [https://www.karinchien.com] in a conversation on "Re-Wiring Distribution Networks [https://www.documentary.org/event/getting-real-now-re-wiring-distribution-networks] " hosted by The International Documentary Association [https://www.documentary.org] as part of their Getting

There's a pattern that I've seen show up again and again in pretty much any creative process—whether it's in startups, education, or my own collaborative work—which can be somewhat counter-intuitive. That, when you hit a point of friction, you need to keep

There've been no shortage of ad-hoc mentorship programs and opportunities being created by companies and brands all in the service of helping to level the playing field. They're very much well-intentioned, but context really matters here. If you're a solo individual who is offering

One of the trends that began to emerge close to a decade ago was the notion of the mission-driven tech startup. These startups weren't "boring" enterprise software companies, they were somehow having a social impact, broadly defined. Meaning they were elevating quality of life,

This is going to be more of a personal update than a true "note", but I wanted to get back into the swing of publicly blogging again, as I've only posted twice in the past month. So, I thought I'd start by explaining how

As we near 100,000 lives lost due to COVID19, and the New York Times marked the milestone by remembering 1,000 of those lives in their print edition: There's an online version as well [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/24/us/

When you're creating a product or service that is not only new, but different from the norm, you'll find yourself bouncing back and forth between a variety of cascading design tradeoffs. On the one hand, you need to be careful about letting your practical

I've been deep in ideation for the past two months, and have been using that opportunity to try out [https://garychou.com/notes/retooling/] a bunch of new software tools [https://garychou.com/notes/prototyping-organizations/]. By far, the tool that has been the most

The topic of Working in Public came up recently on Twitter [https://twitter.com/context_ing/status/1260686520383496193?s=20] and it's timely given some of the things I've been working on, so I thought I'd walk through a few observations and lessons learned

When you're working through new ideas, inevitably you'll reach a point where you get stuck.  Left unchecked, you'll start thinking in circles until you reach exhaustion and then stop moving altogether.  Moreover, you start to waste time. Here's what I've learned about how to

I wrote previously about Pandemic Entrepreneurship [https://garychou.com/notes/pandemic-entrepreneurship/]—ways in which people have been forced to change in order to adapt to the new world we live in, and I don't think there's a better example of it than the restaurant

As previously mentioned, I've been researching successful models of both remote working and remote learning [https://garychou.com/notes/asynchronous-interaction-design/], and have found a common theme to be designing asynchronous interaction models from the group up vs. simply copying what you do in-person to

It's May, which amongst other things means that we're in "last lecture" season. For teachers, it's an incredibly special moment—you're in the home stretch of the semester and there's an extra energy boost you get in terms of thinking about how to best

One of the hardest parts of working in a new domain is that it takes time to figure out what will remain useful from your past experience vs. what no longer applies vs. what will lead you astray. This is a significant problem when

One of the challenges of being in the idea phase—where you're considering a number of options and attempting to find the path forward—is that there's a pitfall in rushing to an answer. This manifests in two ways. Sometimes there's a tendency to