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Afterthoughts from Re-wiring Distribution Networks

Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friend Karin Chien in a conversation on "Re-Wiring Distribution Networks" hosted by The International Documentary Association as part of their Getting Real Now summer series.

I'm excited to join my friend + award winning independent producer and distributor @producerkarin for a conversation this Thursday hosted by @IDAorg as part of their #GettingRealNOW series. RSVP in the link below in the thread. https://t.co/kgxPy9bA21

— Gary Chou (@garychou) August 26, 2020

A video should be posted on YouTube shortly for all to see.

Upon reflection, there were a few points I'd like to emphasize, if not re-state altogether:

Everything is changing. The installation of large-scale, ubiquitous, real-time information networks is the single most impactful development in our lifetimes. It's not just affecting distribution networks or business models, it's affecting society and culture. As such, it's worth thinking about the ways in which we, as individuals, need to change in order to adjust to this.

Attention is now the scarce resource. Advances in technology have lowered barriers to participation—which is great for everyone—but it also means that competition for our attention has never been greater. What used to work in a world of surplus might not be viable anymore. This is a good post to read for more background.

What are the networks that you need? You're going to need access to different networks of people for different things (i.e. your collaborators aren't necessarily your financiers or your friends or family). If you lack sufficient access to relevant networks, consider whether the immediate work you produce be something intentionally designed to help you gather the people you will need for your journey vs. focusing solely on your creative vision.

Signaling helps your network find you. If the network you need doesn't exist, you'll need to consider forming it yourself, through a committed, regular practice of signaling. What is something you can regularly and sustainably share that is of interest to those who are best positioned to support you? This could be as simple as starting a blog or newsletter, or it could be as elaborate as a speaker series or a club. As this is really hard work—particularly for creators who are under-networked—it's a prime opportunity for foundations, intermediaries and other support organizations to operationalize and/or specifically fund.

Collective action can take on many different (new) forms in a networked world. We're still in the early stages of understanding how to wield the power afforded by networked systems and there's tremendous opportunity for creativity here. In addition to Tracy Chou's work mentioned on the call, which resulted in greater transparency in the tech industry, there are other interesting collective efforts like the Letters for Black Lives project, which brought together hundreds of strangers to coordinate mass translation efforts; as well as efforts to include diversity riders in term sheets.

Q&A Redux

Finally, there was a question posed towards the end of the Q&A session that I'd like to revisit, as my initial response zeroed in too narrowly on the topic of online advertising, which wasn't really the point, and it's a rather pertinent question:

When we think of distribution, we usually think of mass, untargeted distribution always hoping to expand our audiences. Can the panelists talk about distributing to more specific, pre-inclined audiences but using the worldwide network afforded to us by the interwebs, perhaps akin to how big tech companies use granular algorithms to target ads?

Here's what I would have liked to have said:

I'd reframe this question slightly—instead of thinking about how the big tech companies have leveraged this infrastructure, I'd look at how tech entrepreneurs have adapted to the changes in the environment as a result of the installation of these networks (which are the same problems we talked about in the conversation).

What's changed for tech entrepreneurs is that there's now an abundance of:

free information and educational resources contributing to an increasingly global trained labor force

free open source tools and frameworks which make it easier and faster to build applications

easy access to cloud hosting providers which make it possible to deliver and scale your application globally and instantly

global capital willing to fuel new ideas, good or bad.

All of this has resulted in an unprecedented amount of competition (and innovation) chasing a limited amount of attention. Thus, the hard thing about building a software business is no longer the software, it's the distribution—how you get in front of people who are likely to want your product, and how you get them to pay while fending off all of the competition.

We've seen two different strategies emerge, which depend upon how well-funded a company is.

If you're immensely well-funded and you have a product or service with good unit economics (meaning that you make money on every sale, unlike Moviepass), you can afford to raise a lot of capital and spend it on online advertising to acquire customers, and then re-invest your profits into even more online advertising and continue to grow until you can't.

But, the majority of businesses aren't immensely well-funded and so they can't run this playbook and spend their way to success. So, they've had to adopt a slower and more modest 3-part strategy in order to grow:

Find or gather a community of people who you hope to serve, and gain their trust / get them to care about you.

Set aside your grand vision, and instead build something small and focused (commensurate to your cost structure), which is compelling for this community.

Collect and share stories of success from your community and repeat step 2, incrementally expanding the size/scale/footprint of your vision each time you do so.

The core difference between these two strategies is the order of operations. Rather than trying to find more people (i.e. customers) for your stuff, it's about building stuff for your people. In essence, the marketing comes before rather than after.

What this means for filmmakers is two-fold:

First, instead of targeting audiences after you've made your film, focus on gathering allies before and while you make your film. Having more allies doesn't guarantee you success, but it increases the likelihood of unlocking new resources and paths as you move forward.

This doesn't mean you need to become yet another ostentatious internet influencer or turn your project into a reality TV show, nor does it mean you need to take on a second job as a promoter or marketer.

There's always a story behind the film's story: who you are and why you're choosing to spend your precious time working on this project. Often, this story unfolds over the course of the project itself. And so, there's a lot of value to be had simply by adopting a practice of working in public—publicly sharing the exhaust of your process: your artifacts, your lessons, your story—and enabling people to learn along side you.

There are a lot of practical reasons that drive secrecy in filmmaking, but I'd argue that these only benefit the existing gatekeepers. And certainly, if you're asking about how to fully leverage the value created by this internet infrastructure we're all stuck with, the system is designed to favor openness. (Pre-internet, startups commonly embraced secrecy by working in "stealth mode", and this cultural norm has flipped as well.)

Second, create a space that is intentionally designed to welcome these allies into your circle and where you can sustainably keep them engaged over the long term. The simplest space is an email newsletter, but this could be something more elaborate like a club. Consistency is better than frequency, and ideally, there's an opportunity for your allies to see each other and not just you.

(If we stick with our example of a newsletter this could mean that you're not only sharing your thoughts and stories, but that you're also inviting them to contribute questions and comments, perhaps monthly or quarterly.)

There's a tremendous opportunity here to get creative, and while it may initially seem like an onerous chore by itself, in the context of your broader career aspirations, this will increase the surface area of your optionality so long as you continue to tend to your garden.

And so, rather than leverage this new internet infrastructure simply to target the masses in the hopes of consummating a transaction, I'd take advantage of its ability to connect people, globally, in meaningful ways at virtually zero cost to form new networks—or gardens—around you and your practice.

But it won't be an easy shift because done right, it will require a different way of working.

The upside, however, is the ability to change the equation in this discussion around re-imagining distribution networks (and models) from a conversation about what a collective of individual filmmakers can do to a conversation around what a cooperative of gardens can support and grow.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/thoughts-from-re-wiring-distribution-networks/

Creative Friction

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 pushing even harder, almost as if you're trying to drive through a wall.

The reason for this isn't that you're attempting to brute force your way through the wall, it's that the willingness to consider that there's even a path forward will take you through an experience that will help you find a way around it.

My friend Jon Kolko wrote about this years ago in his essay: Simplicity on the other side of complexity:

The place you land on the right—the simplicity on the other side of complexity—is often super obvious in retrospect. That's sort of the point: it's made obvious to others because you did the heavy lifting of getting through the mess.

I saw it come up again in this wonderful Actors on Actors dialogue between Sandra Oh and Kerry Washington.

Sandra says:

“I feel like, when I look back, because it’s been six years now since I left ‘Grey’s,’ I feel like one of my biggest successes, for me, was I don’t feel I gave up,” Oh said. “We did 22 episodes, but in the early years, it was 24. It was crazy. Then you have to kind of pick your moments of where you can lay off the gas pedal, because it is such a slog. There would be scenes that I would just go, I don’t know, 10 rounds on, and I know I was difficult. And I really respect all the writers there who rode it out with me.”

“What does that mean, you would go 10 rounds?” Washington asked.

“I would go 10 rounds in saying, ‘It’s not right,'” Oh said. “You’ve got to do different levels with the writer, and then you bump it up and you eventually get to [Shonda]. You’ve got to bother her. When it felt like such an impasse, we would both be digging in our heels hugely. But just the friction itself, a lot of times a third thing would come out, and it would not be in my sight of consciousness at all; it would take that pushing against someone equally as strong. I started to learn how to trust that.”

This is one of the hardest things to do because it requires a tremendous amount of trust and faith between collaborators. You have to both understand that the pushing and the relentlessness isn't coming from a place of dominance or stubborness, but hope that another idea, option, or direction will emerge.

And the pushing is such a necessary aspect of the process because you can't achieve the same outcome alone, it'd be like trying to push a string.

Unfortunately, like most things in life, just being willing to dig in isn't a guarantee. of a successful outcome. And so, to make this a repeatable process, you need to have fostered a true partnership—one that can not only sustain that friction, as Sandra calls it, but one that can survive it even when it fails to produce a better option.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/creative-friction/

Progress vs. Feeling Better

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 up your time, that's a meaningful contribution in the sense that time is one of your most valuable assets.

However, if you're a profitable company, particularly one that has leverage in an existing market it's important to ask whether your program is really about advancing your field, industry, company forward or whether it's really just about making you feel good.

For such companies, Bernice King offers a good barometer:

Even the statement, “Let’s invite more Black people to the table,” implies ownership of the table and control of who is invited. Racism is about power.

— Be A King (@BerniceKing)

June 17, 2020

For that reason, I think it's worth keeping an eye on sports, where Black athletes have long held power that had not quite been fully realized.

First, there's the NFL effectively submitting to the will of the players:

According to multiple league sources, this video of Goodell, who responds directly to players' requests in powerful video yesterday, came after series of emotional meetings w/ league content creators dissatisfied with original NFL statement, and vocal player dissatisfaction. https://t.co/s2vpkPrZ1D

— Jourdan Rodrigue (@JourdanRodrigue)

June 5, 2020

And then, there's Kyrie Irving's statement (he's really come a long way from the whole flat earth thing):

Kyrie Irving “proposed” in a group chat with Nets that players could start their own league, per @SBondyNYDN pic.twitter.com/GhXH5rkPOX

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport)

June 16, 2020

He's completely right on this. This is exactly what all the players should do.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/progress-vs-feeling-better/

The World is Two-Way

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, unlocking new economic opportunities for those who didn't have it, increasing mobility, connecting people into new communities, etc...

This was a great, potentially inspiring message, but the core challenge was that these were growth strategies not truths. This social component served three primary functions:

Externally, it was a branding element that would drive their marketing and positioning.

Internally, it was both a recruiting and retention strategy.

For the founders, it was a way of attaining/maintaining differentiated social status amongst elites.

What would happen in most cases is that the founder and company narrative would be altered to retroactively fit the mission, when the reality was much closer to: "we tried 100 other ideas, but this one seems to either 'work' or be promising enough for us to raise a round."

Now, this is all perfectly fine, in that it's pretty much the history of all businesses and people are free to do whatever they like. Also, there's nothing earth shattering or revelatory here, it's just a mundane truth. But it's in that mundaneness where the problem lies for many entrepreneurs and founders who tacitly pursue this strategy. That is, they tend to overlook the shift in the environment.

Now, for the most part, none of this really matters at the end of the day simply because the vast majority of startups fail. So, it all becomes a moot point.

But, those who are successful at creating a going concern—a sustainable, growing business well on its way to profitability if not past that—have to understand that power dynamics have changed, thanks to a significant shift in the environment.

The very dynamic that enabled Craiglist to undercut newspaper classifieds has also enabled those with less perceived power to not only speak their truth but to be easily amplified. Power is no longer one-way, it's two way, and that's in part what has enabled #metoo and #blacklivesmatter (as well as complaining to customer service accounts on Twitter).

So what does this all mean in practice?

For starters, if you're using "community" as a marketing vehicle, is it just a bolt-on that you hope will take care of itself or have you considered the costs much less the design of the system? Do you expect to be able to exert control indefinitely or have you thought through how to truly align the interests of the constituents with the realities of your business? Do you really even "need" a community or are you just trying to build a large funnel?

If you are "standing" with Black Lives Matter, have you internalized that this moment isn't about simply showing support for Black people but rather (at a minimum) auditing and removing the systems which oppress Black people today—both inside your own company and within your industry? Again, are you simply exerting control or building an aligned system?

If you are a founder and entrepreneur who believes they're "on a mission", in what way does your financing strategy actually constrain or even contradict your ability to serve that mission? Or, are you using this as a hook to get funded in the first place?

Now, to be clear, the message here isn't that we should only have mercenary companies, but simply that we need fewer fakers—attempts at co-opting causes and communities in the service of turning them into high-growth vehicles.

This was expected behavior when we were in the "land grab" phase of internet, but we're thankfully in a much more mature phase where not every action, goal or purpose needs to follow an extractive high-growth startup template and playbook. Hopefully, we'll see more thoughtful approaches that truly re-imagine a different way forward—everything from how we finance such ideas, how we build and manage teams, and how we engage with those who we purport to serve.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/power/

Getting Back in the Saddle

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 I've been spending my time.

In mid-May, I started to turn my attention towards properly archiving the 155 Rivington phase. Obviously, there's a lot to say there so I focused all of my writing energy on that work rather than posting daily here. That kept me "on the bench" for about two weeks.

Then bad things happened in the world, which then led to the unfortunate revival of a 2016 project: Letters for Black Lives, which I'll probably write a bit more about soon.

For now, here's a long thread I posted from last week:

🧵Over the past week, I've been part of a ~400+ person effort to produce a 2020 update to @lettersforbl. On Monday, we published the first round of 26 translations (really localizations + adaptations) of the letter, with even more to come later today:https://t.co/1kuJjHTmqQ

— Gary Chou (@garychou) June 10, 2020

https://twitter.com/garychou/status/1270733134187900930

Week 1 was a pretty intense production because it's like everyone's arriving at the party before you're really ready; Week 2 was about managing down the debt incurred from the shortcuts we took in Week 1. And so, blogging again took a back seat.

We're now in Week 3 of the project, where we're attempting to gather audio/video readings which will help us get picked up by in-language media, and it's a bit more predictable, so I finally have the headspace to get back into a daily writing practice.

Undoubtedly, the past few months of blogging has proven to be instrumental in preparing me for this project, as I've really needed to lean on writing in order to be an effective communicator and scale.

What I didn't expect was that this project would help uncover a key insight related to my 155 Rivington writeup—which was clearly not going well since I wasn't anywhere near done after already investing two weeks of my time.

And that insight was this:

And, if we don't feel like we can reimagine what we can talk about with our families—in the space in which we "should" have the most control—how can we expect to reimagine anything at all elsewhere in our broader society (goog: grace lee boggs visionary organizing).

— Gary Chou (@garychou) June 10, 2020

https://twitter.com/garychou/status/1270736529334378496

That the act of starting Orbital was pretty rational though a bit radical. I needed to address a deficiency I had, and the only way in which to do it was to create my own physical and conceptual space in which to practice the skill (and art) of reimagining.

So, on the one hand, it's unfortunate that I broke my 2+ month-long blogging streak, but it retrospect it looks like it all worked out because that insight was a huge missing piece of the narrative.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/getting-back-on-the-saddle/

New and Different

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 sense regarding what is viable today seep into the design process of what you're making. Adhering to that sense of practicality can often be like an anvil that prevents you from fully embracing the innovative approach that will allow you to create something that is both compelling and enduring. And especially if you're attempting to "skate where puck is going", you can't be so tethered to the present.

Of course, this requires a balanced approach. If what you produce is so dramatically different from the norm or too ahead of its time, you risk confusing the market altogether and it'll be hard to get off the ground. You'll have what looks like either a user acquisition or engagement problem.

This is particularly problematic if your strategy relies on monetizing in the near term vs. say, a longer-term strategy that focuses on the scale component of your business model before you turn on monetization.

In the case of the former, people need to know what it is they're getting in exchange for their money and it needs to be understandable, if not familiar. This is where it's worth adhering to practicality: simpler, commonly accepted models for how you charge people and/or bundle products and services. Even if your thing is new and different, how can you make it feel like it's a familiar type of purchase?

In the case of the latter, this is well and good if you can raise the capital, but now you have another tradeoff to consider, which is how you grow what you have into a business that will generate a sufficient return multiple for your investors. But therein lies another pitfall. Often, people mistake confidence in a general trend (like podcasting) with an assumption that they will be well-positioned to capture most if not all of the value that is created once that vision becomes reality. (This is similar to the "Company X just launched something I invented 10 years ago" fallacy that you see on Twitter.)

Having a hypothesis for what type of business you will need to build in your future end state is a worthy intellectual exercise not because you want to then go and build that vision. But so you can start to ask how you might get to that point and thusly where you should start.

The answers—or guesses—to these questions are the inputs that you'll need for the present day challenge of whether to present your product or service as something radically different from the norm, or whether to adhere (for now) to simpler more practical primitives and models.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/new-and-different/

iPad, Pencil and Paper

I've been deep in ideation for the past two months, and have been using that opportunity to try out a bunch of new software tools.

By far, the tool that has been the most useful during this process has been the combination of the iPad, Apple Pencil and Paper by WeTransfer (formerly FiftyThree).

(As a side note, much of our early furniture at Orbital came from FiftyThree after they moved out of their original NYC office. Thanks! Also, they had excellent taste.)

Here's what that setup looks like:

It's worth unlocking Pro, btw.

One of the truisms of working on early stage projects with a team of people is that you need to get to a picture as soon as possible, especially if you're not the most expressive writer.

Most of the time this takes the form of whiteboarding together. But, if you're not in the same room together you can't do that. You might then turn to something more remote-friendly, like a collaborative Google Doc (or some comparable) or sometimes a Google Slide. I'm a fan of words, but I'm also a visual thinker so I need the ability to do both.

The end result is that it becomes challenging to dig into nuances and to really tear ideas apart and put them back together again. Thus, the ideas may take longer to develop.

The promise of the iPad has always been about enabling a richer form of expression, however it took the creation of the Apple Pencil (specifically the hand recognition feature) to really unlock that. That, plus an extremely well done application like Paper has been an incredible combination.

Further, iOS now has much better support for files and sharing into specific apps, so it's been pretty seamless to post drawings directly to Basecamp or Notion using their native apps.

The biggest issue for me so far has been ergonomic. Like a lot of Apple's products, aesthetics trump usability. I found the Apple Pencil almost painful to hold for prolonged periods of time. Thanks to YouTube I found a really easy workaround, which involved transplanting a grip from an existing old-school pen:

This is what you want.

Here's how to perform the transplant.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/ipad-pencil-paper/

Teaching People to Work in Public

The topic of Working in Public came up recently on Twitter 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 from attempting to teach people to do this.

First, I define working in public as sharing the exhaust of your process, largely through writing up what you learn as you go. That is, you are the primary beneficiary of your writing—the public is secondary.

This is important because if you lack a regular ritual of being alone in your thoughts to reflect, then you're simply not going to learn anything. And, in order to keep you honest you need to implement a system: a blogging platform and a challenge, whether it's daily, weekly or something else.

In our 2012 Entrepreneurial Design class, we had a requirement to blog once a week. And, over the years we experimented with a number of tactics, all of which you can find in our past syllabi.

Today, it's still a challenge.

Writing for yourself rather than for attention feels like it goes against the grain Further, the tooling is still too blog-centric. The practice of writing itself—much less blogging publicly—gets lost in the fray. The Internet is still scary and people are afraid to put their ideas out in the world.

Most importantly, we lack spaces that are really designed to facilitate such working in public. Most existing internet infrastructure—whether it's Twitch for livestreaming your coding sessions, or Medium which has become a repository for content marketing, or Twitter which is now for sowing misinformation—is designed for amplification and maximum attention, and it's been only the daring who've repurposed it for working in public.

These are metropolises designed for scale. They're not exactly conducive for such a use case.

On the positive side, we're starting to see a number of new products and services that at least feel directionally correct, and hopefully, we'll see a lot more.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/working-in-public/

Getting Unstuck

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 approach this.

First, a reframing: stuckness is just a symptom of not having enough information. That is, the path forward isn't for you to think harder or to magically snap your fingers and become smarter. You've already considered all the possibilities and scenarios 100 different ways. You're missing the information you need to make a decision.

To address this, there's a five-step process:

What information are you missing that would otherwise make the decision you face easier to uncover?

Who is likely to have access to that information?

How will you access those people?

Go talk to them.

Are you still stuck? If so, go back to Step 1.

Now, this is a pretty simple process, but in practice it's #2 and #3 where things get tricky.

For instance, we don't know who to talk to, but we believe that the answer is "out there somewhere". Or, it might be that no one has the information that we need, in which case the discomfort you may be feeling is simply the trepidation of knowingly putting an imperfect solution out in the world and having to cross your fingers to see what will happen.

Or, we might know who we need to talk to but we don't know how to access them. They may be outside of our network or there may be gatekeepers actively preventing us from accessing them.

In both these cases, a common strategy is to launch a signal—something you can easily make which is intended to elicit a response from your intended audience. Think of it as fishing bait. Certain fish respond to different bait, or they don't. Your job is to align the bait towards the types of fish you're trying to catch.

Practically speaking, it's something online with a URL and it should be easily produced in minutes or days rather than weeks. Tweets, blog posts, online resources, stories are great examples of this. They can be broadly distributed online via social media (in the event that you don't know who you're targeting or don't have access), or included as links in direct emails (if you do have access to who you need). And ultimately, they should be framed in a way that invite a conversation. Often you have to clearly invite people into a conversation in order for them to engage.

Signals are like prototypes, in that they can take whatever form possible—they're not just about putting out a crappy version of your product—and that they're modestly intended to get you just the information that you need so you can continue to make forward progress towards your overall goal.

This is also one of the best reasons to start an online community before you start building a product, almost as a preventative measure. If you can create a space—a forum, a slack, an email list—that successfully attracts and engages the people critical to your work, then you'll have proximity to who you are building for and it will make #2 and #3 a non-issue.

Aside from reducing the number of occurrences of getting stuck, you'll likely avoid numerous product development pitfalls (i.e. making incorrect assumptions, attempting to impose solutions, creating misalignment from the start, etc...) which may be an issue depending upon the complexity of your challenge.

And of course, especially as we are squarely in the Deployment Phase, it's never been more important to embrace a philosophy of building with and not simply for.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/getting-unstuck/

Investing in Alumni Networks

I wrote previously about 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 industry.

Carbone (nyc restaurant) seems to have nailed corona dining. They offer one special dish that’s only available for that night. This creates an event out of it, with everyone jumping to get this one-night-only meal. And it’s easier on the chefs bc it’s the same dish for everyone.

— Maya Baratz Jordan (@mbaratz) May 11, 2020

Yet another example of restaurants experimenting out of necessity. (via @mbaratz)

As we approach the end of the school year, we're starting to see a range of perspectives from higher education on how they are approaching the Fall Semester. Will they welcome students back to campus or will they go remote? Will incoming freshman opt to take a gap year?

It's also been interesting to see how these perspectives vary based upon level. For instance, graduate programs—particularly MBAs—have slightly different incentives and constraints from universities that are purely undergrad-based, or vocational.

It's a tough position to be in all around. Like the restaurant industry, there are so many different people's livelihoods intertwined with whether these institutions open up and whether they even survive.

I largely believe that the top schools with great brands will find a way to survive and return to some semblence of "business as usual", though it may take drastic cost cutting or otherwise.

But the schools that sit outside that, especially those that have not invested in an online offering of some sort, may need to consider more drastic measures in order stay afloat.

Underlying this is price perception—the ability to maintain and justify a certain tuition level for the prospective buyer, the student.

If I were not a school with a great brand and I was finding myself with fewer and fewer options, I'd consider investing in increasing the visibility of the alumni network and finding ways to create value for those people.

Ultimately, higher ed is perceived by a prospective student as a pathway to a better career. If they are valuing their tuition based on the educational experience (remote/online vs. in-person), it's a losing battle altogether. That is, if a prospective student simply feels like they're missing information, then they're simply going to shop by price and find the highest quality alternative. And, unfortunately for higher ed, there's a ton of competition out there to satisfy this demand.

However, if you can frame the educational opportunity as an onboarding experience into an alumni network, you're no longer shopping by price and trying to get the best deal.

Arguably, for many—especially for MBAs—that is what you're buying with your tuition. And, many graduate programs already do lead with this, but only from the perspective of finding jobs. That is, they'll parade a list of logos that represent the companies at which their graduates were hired. They present themselves—the schools—as gatekeepers.

I think there's a tremendous opportunity for more. Find ways to be of value to the alumni that go beyond simple social events. Just simply creating spaces engage—like email lists or forums—is no longer sufficient. Perhaps even consider that alumni have a set of responsibilities and duties they need to fulfill in order to benefit from the network, itself. Like any product, it'll take time to develop. You'll need to see what does and doesn't work, and commit sufficient resources to iterating.

Then, collect the success stories and invest resources in telling them well—not simply a list of great individual achievements, but new opportunities which were made possible by the network. Such stories can also serve to teach people how to use it, while simultaneously marking the value of such a system to prospective students.

Obviously this is conceptually easier said than done. But, innovation in this area represents the largest untapped opportunity that universities have proprietary access to.

There's no shortage of venture capital flooding the markets to fund startups that are all taking their shot at existing institutions up and down the stack, and most if not all are using that capital to subsidize a price war. Going head-to-head against that is going to hurt, especially during a pandemic.

However, what these upstarts can't compete on is the untapped value of your alumni network. It's unique leverage to you, if you choose to use it this way. But it, starts with treating your alumni less as a database of leads for donations, and more as an opportunity to be helpful.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/investing-in-alumni-networks/

Work, Learning and Support

As previously mentioned, I've been researching successful models of both remote working and remote learning, 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 an online medium.

This is why you're starting to see people and companies that simply "took everything to Zoom" start to struggle. It feels like the right thing to do in the short term, but it starts to incur a significant cost (mainly fatigue) over time. Similarly, the initial excitement around MOOCs led to a deluge of video-driven courses, which are extremely attractive and convert well but have a horrible completion rate. They cater to those who are already self-motivated, and they drive near-term business value for the respective platforms, but they're largely unsuccessful. That's led to a second wave of approaches that are bit more nuanced in how they facilitate instruction vs. synthesis.

I haven't come across as many instances of people experimenting with asynchronous support-related interactions and I've been wondering why that is.

(By "support", I'm mostly referring to the question of how people seek support in their professional roles, where they're constantly acquiring new responsibilities as the excel and thus finding themselves trying to learn how to do their jobs in real time.)

Of course, part of it is simply that I'm just getting started, so I'm largely ignorant. However, I wonder if it's because the nature of support-driven interactions require more immediate feedback. Work and some elements of Learning can be done independently on your own schedule, with some structure regarding how it fits back into a larger group effort. The nature of what it means to provide and receive support just might not be viable under such a delay.

Another consideration is that perhaps an async solution might need to lean more heavily on succesfully establishing personal rituals. That is, you rely more "single-player" strategies of support—which might look more like meditation and mindfulness, or say writing 500 words and blogging every day—which may enable lighter-weight or less-frequent synchronous interactions.

This might only work for certain types of people (perhaps more senior, or those who can set aside time to write), or who have certain types of support needs. That is, there might need to be a much clearer delineation of support. For example, in the Studios, we varied our program design based on the different types of participants (Product Mangers vs Designers vs. Engineering Managers) as well as their respective levels (Year 1 EMs vs. Engineering Directors).

Broadly, this broke down into:

accessing information ("how do I do something?")

accessing stories ("what are some examples of how this played out?")

accessing specific help ("I'm stuck on X, what do I do?")

Now, there's an argument to be made that 1 and 2 are going to be commoditized by the web. That is, there's no shortage of stories and how-to's on Medium and Youtube, and in fact that's breaking down even further as it's the core of almost every venture capital firm's Content Marketing strategy, alongside actual startups like Almanac, dev.to and much much more.

There's a concept in blogging that the real value is in the comments—the discussion around the post—not the post, itself. (Sadly, we now live in a world of bots and spammers which have all-but destroyed that space.). But I think there's a general understanding that a lot of what gets published online or presented at conferences can often be revisionist. Or, what they really want to understand is whether a particular how-to or story would be applicable to their own situation. This requires access to dialogue, and for that reason real-time synchronous programs still have value in the face of a content deluge.

This is even more so for #3. There's a lot to learn not just from the ability to get real-time help for your own problems, but to learn from the problems and challenges other people present. There might not be an async version of this that is worth doing (though a model that comes to mind is Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole, which is at the very least entertaining).

In addition to the async/sync design challenge, there's an additional undercurrent given that all of this is in the realm of support.

Support, itself, is a tricky business. First, there's a question of equitable access—those who most need it often aren't in a position to pay for it. Or, sometimes they're also the ones who don't realize they need it. They may see it as a performance improvement plan vs. having access to a board of advisors. You might find yourself in the business of making people feel good rather than actually having an impact.

Also, there's the topic of competition. You're not just competing against other companies, you're also competing against the marketing budgets of venture capital firms, a plethora of free volunter-run initiatives, as well as the inertia of simply doing nothing.

And so, how you design the sustainability model around this—or more appropriately, whether the business model you have in mind is compatible with the problem you're attempting to solve—is something you need to consider from the very start.

If you decide to pursue this as a business, what are the ways this could go sideways? Is there enough "tolerance" or upside in the model to account for the challenges you'll inevitably run into? Or, would you be better off pursuing something else?

Of course, on the other hand, you could also look at this as a naturally occurring defensive moat. That is, given all of these challenges, should you find a way to make something work in a pandemic that is widely accessible and which people choose in spite of all of the alternatives, that in itself might be a huge advantage.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/work-learning-and-support/

Last Lecture

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 close out the collective journey you've been on with your students.

After all that you've been through, what do you want to leave them with? What hasn't yet been said?

Yesterday, I stumbled upon this lecture by Professor Derek Cabrera, who teaches Systems Thinking (amongst other things) at Cornell.

Given the pandemic, his last lecture was broadcast via Zoom, and I caught hold of it via this tweet from Marci Harris:

🤔 +1: “leadership is the art and science of changing things and management is the art and science of maintaining things” - @_derek_cabrera https://t.co/5mCARl7D8T

— Marci Harris (@marcidale) May 10, 2020

If you've been thinking about how to make sense of the world we now live in, it's a really wonderful talk. There are some gems including the "Chinese Farmer" story which my friend Kenyatta Cheese recently shared with me.

Here's a video to the talk, along with a transcript and slides available here.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/last-lecture/

Shedding your Defaults

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 you transition from a world where your purpose was to be good at your job to one where you're tasked with exploring an unsolved problem.

With enough trial and error, you'll likely be able to adapt to any scenario. However, if you are working under time constraints—like if you're working on a startup—you have the added challenge of needing to adapt within a specific timeframe.

There are a lot of compounding factors here.

First, you often may not realize the context has changed until it's too late. And even then, you may also need to check your assumptions since they may not necessarily apply to your current situation. Further, your ability to do this may be hindered by how you perceive your own identity. One's self-awareness can't be turned on like a light switch.

This is the type of problem that you address by changing how you prepare. That is, there's not much you can do in the moment. Instead, you need a preventative approach.

Simply having hobbies, creative pursuits and side projects that necessitate interacting with other people can be helpful since they catalyze the creation of new experiences you wouldn't otherwise get at your job. These experiences may give you broader perspective which may make it easier for you to adapt when you need to. Similarly, finding ways to signup for new challenges or to find or create relevant peer groups can be helpful as well. Essentially, find a way to gain a breadth of experiences.

In doing so, you're preparing yourself to more quickly shed your defaults—your instincts, assumptions, vocabulary—if not disavow them altogether once you recognize they no longer apply.

The world is constantly and quickly changing—especially now—and so an over-reliance on what has served you well in the past may hinder your ability to adapt to the present.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/shedding-your-defaults/

Being Fair vs. Being Right

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 feel certain about an option simply because it will allow you to move on to the next step, and you have a need to feel like you're making progress. Or, you'll prematurely divorce yourself from an option because at first glance it didn't seem to be the whole package. And thus, it makes it cognitively difficult to go back to a discarded idea, but you then question why you eliminated it in the first place.

Navigating uncertainty is never fun, but you have to have a willingness to persist in that state, while also putting forth the continual, iterative work that will hopefully uncover the information you need.

This work sometimes takes the form of a more tangible process of prototyping and testing, other times it's as simple as pushing yourself to go out and talk to stakeholders. What you hope to get from this work is either new information or an insight that supports or refutes the options you're considering.

If you exit that phase prematurely as a result of your own discomfort, you may be committing a strategic error and going down a flawed path. (As an aside, there is a common case where you just need to pick a path and go, but that's a topic for a different post.)

If you're able to persist, you might find (commonly) that new information revitalizes old ideas that you had previously thought were not viable.

This is often a problem if you have an achievement-oriented mindset (which, given our educational system is the majority of us). That is, you tend to look at explorations as a process of finding the most efficient way to eliminate your options until the Right Answer remains, as if it were a multiple choice test.

If this is you, you need to set this mindset aside.

Instead of finding the answer that will make you right (by default), you want to focus on being fair to the options you're considering, almost as if you were a teacher and your ideas were your students.

As you consider your ideas/students, your short-term attention at an individual level may ebb and flow over time, but at the same time you haven't written off anyone in the class who is lagging behind. You're still teaching to the whole class, not just the ones who happen to be performing well on a given day.

Nascent early ideas work the same way.

You want to be fair and equitable to them—because you never know what they might become or how they will surprise you.

But if you are too quick to judge and discard them immediately once they displease you, it can hurt you in two ways. It may prevent you from really understanding the big picture, and it may also prevent you from identifying a strategically favorable starting point, which is usually the hardest part of the process.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/being-fair-vs-being-right/

Asynchronous Interaction Design

A few months ago, as cities began going into lockdown, I started researching best practices in working with distributed teams. There were a plethora of experienced managers hosting webinars and sharing their lessons learned over the years.

Here are a few of the things I learned along the way:

3/18: Lessons in Remote

3/28: "Remote" or "Distributed" is a Misnomer

One key thing that stuck out: while every company needs something different, there was a clear difference between companies that saw this as a completely net new design challenge vs. a mere accommodation. That is, "remote" isn't something that one could simply tack on to an existing model.

Recently, I turned my attention towards education. Now that we're a few months in, teachers have had time to go through the experience of moving their courses online. And so, I've been eager to understand what they've learned.

Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of similarities to the remote work research.

Here's what's seems to be fundamental:

Async. It's not about remote or colocated, it's whether you've redesigned your processes to work asynchronously by default vs. simply sticking to the existing plan and simply"bolting on" remote. Unsurprisingly, if you have a small company/cohort, you can get away with a "bolt on" approach. However, if you are working on anything that necessitates scale, embracing async is pretty much required.

Intentionality. If there are desired, critical behaviors that need to happen, you can't simply leave them to chance. You have to actively and intentionally design for it. If you're experienced in designing software products, this comes as no surprise. The challenge is that we're not used to thinking about iterating on process design when it comes to physical spaces because usually the constraints of the space itself, or the fact that people are working on the same schedule will enable such behavior in a consistent manner. Not so, when you take away those constraints.

Loneliness. In the shift to remote, the attention seems to be squarely placed on productivity. However, what often gets overlooked is the, well, human side of people. In the company context, there's a common understanding that some mechanism of socializing with co-workers is beneficial not just to productivity, but to their own individual well-being. The same goes for the students, however it's not necessarily the same kind of problem.

There's a great old-school talk from over a decade ago by Robert Fabricant who offers that the medium of interaction design is behavior:

(check out the fashion choices in the audience)

I love that definition, particularly because too often people frame interaction design as the design of a user interface, which is too limiting. Behavior happens within physical spaces even more so than it does in relation to our screens and devices.

And, in 2020, as we find ourselves socially distant, it strikes me that there's an opportunity to surface best practices and patterns that are specifically focused on how we design for asynchronous behavior.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/asynchronous-interaction-design/

Making Sense of the Data

There's been no shortage of data flying around to help characterize what's happening right now. None of it is really a huge surprise, but it's helpful to look at these different charts as a way to internalize the severity of the dislocation happening.

At a simple level, there's a change in consumption, even a reversal of a 20-year trend in spending at grocery stores vs. restaurants:

Reversed a 20 year trend in weeks. h/t @Alex_Danco pic.twitter.com/C7Rk8Mjk3W

— Austin Rief (@austin_rief) May 5, 2020

Changes in consumption

And of course, we have record unemployment, of which there will likely be more coming:

Unemployment via The Coronavirus Depression

Looking at Covid 19 cases is a bit trickier due to a number of factors.

For instance, not everyone is getting tested, so there's an argument that generally speaking the total cases are undercounted. Further, the availability of tests hasn't been constant, so one could argue that of course there will be more cases as tests become increasingly available.

All that said, it looks like NYC is generally seeing a decline in cases while the rest of the US is still increasing.

Cases are declining in NYC but rising overall in the US. (via NY Times)

On that issue of testing, here's how the US fares in terms of testing relative to other countries, normalized per 1,000 people:

We're paying the price for not ramping up testing quickly enough. (via Our World in Data)

I think the most sobering metric is Excess Deaths—the number of deaths higher than normal.

This metric feels a bit more meaningful because it theoretically accounts for the discrepencies in looking at reported cases mentioned above as well as any inconsistency with respect to differentiating between deaths with Covid 19 vs. deaths caused by Covid 19.

The NYC chart is so off the scale that they had to get creative with the layout of the page:

via What is the Real Coronavirus Death Count in Each State?

This is just one group—the excess cases. The rest of the article shows the other groups: states where deaths are slightly above normal as well as states where deaths look about the same as previous years.

The Financial Times has been looking at excess mortality as well, and have their own tracker.

Here's what excess deaths look like internationally at both a country level:

Excess deaths by country (via Financial Times)

as well as at a city-level:

Excess deaths in urban areas (via Financial Times)

Probably the most depressing data from the Financial Times analysis is that the US is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of both deaths (which are overall decreasing) as well as new cases:

If you consider that the the US is still under-testing, it's pretty clear that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of the impact in the US. This curve should be going down.

Underlying all of this are the sources of data, which in the US depend solely upon what the states are reporting. The COVID Tracking Project—which is a whole interesting project to explore in itself—has been leading the way in terms of making data available and accessible for journalists and others. Notably, they've also started tracking and reporting data by race, which is important given that the long-standing institution of racism has an adverse effect on who is vulnerable, who does or doesn't have access to adequate testing and healthcare, not to mention who makes up the primary population of frontline essential workers.

While the quantitative data has been easier to aggregate, work with, and scale, the qualitative has been incredibly important, too.

The best source of qualitative data by far has been Twitter, and I've found both the official news reporting along with individualized stories from Twitter users to be helpful in crafting a picture of how this is affecting people both inside and outside of my social circle.

That, however, is probably a topic for a separate post altogether.

Generally speaking, though, it feels like we're just getting started in the US, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/making-sense-of-the-data/

Inbound vs. Outbound

While I've been working on next steps, I've also been plugging away at redesigning the underlying infrastructure and processes around how I communicate with people: family and friends, followers and friends on Twitter, various networks that I'm a part of, communities that I'm responsible for managing, as well as newsletter subscribers.

My primary challenge over the past few years has been that I often don't have the time or headspace to think about outbound communication because I've been overloaded with the inbound. Now, I have nowhere near the scale of problem that Fred has, but I find myself ignoring things I don't want to simply because I just run out of energy.

Inbound is reactive. It's responding to Slack messages and replying to emails, but it always feels like treading water rather than moving forward. It's never-ending, and it eats into your ability to set your own priorities.

Particularly in the context of managing communities, outbound has the potential to create a ton of value for people. It's the difference between being proactive vs. reactive.

Some of this is a productivity problem. Simply having different rituals can be helpful, and the same goes with setting limits. However, it's ridiculous that the best we can come up with is to become an olympic athlete-level productivity hacker rather than to change the system entirely. Inbox zero is not a strategy.

So, how do you turn this around?

I've been thinking about this as an infrastructure problem, and creating this blog is one aspect of fixing this. As part of my daily writing ritual, I now have a regular place where I'm creating outbound.

For me, the majority of unclaimed opportunity / value is in the realm of having more powerful tooling to assist with managing and maintaining the communities I'm responsible for. In fact, I think there's a whole class of software to be built there.

Just look at how much the sales and marketing stack has grown in sophistication over the past decade. Those tools aren't the ones you'd want to use for a community because they're mostly one-way, but the functionality is very similar: automations, easy integrations, self-serve capabilities, and more.

Generally, people think of community software as variants on containers: forums, chat, mini-facebooks, etc... But, I have yet to see anything that is truly about enabling systems to exist: constrained interactions that help align incentives within a set of people, and which respect the attention models of the individuals.

And ultimately, how they facilitate (and constrain) inbound and outbound interactions across the network would be a key factor.

Originally posted: https://garychou.com/notes/inbound-vs-outbound/

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