About

Hi – I’m David Kong. I graduated from the University of British Columbia in Canada with a Bachelors of Commerce. I do marketing and product development now, working on building online tools that help kids get ahead in school and in life.

I also read extensively, both offline and online, and occasionally have a few ideas. This blog is here as place to explore and write about those ideas and connect with interesting and passionate people.

Here are a few of the big themes that I plan on writing about:

Education and Technology: Education is something which has been important for thousands of years. It’s fundamental to what we consider modern society – the medium upon which we pass knowledge and culture on to the next generation. Are our traditional institutions failing society? Is online education the answer, and in what proportions? These are exciting questions for our future and our children’s!

Technology and Power: The internet was recently defined as an “enabler, but not a human right” recently. As technology becomes even more persuasive and important in daily, modern life, we should think about the ramifications of this. Who benefits? Who loses? Right now, technology is concentrating enormous amounts of power, wealth and influence within an increasingly smaller group of people. What types of secondary and tertiary effects will this cause for ordinary people and the balance of society between the “have’s” and the “have nots”?

Startup and Personal Success: What attributes separate a successful startup from the a startup in the dead-pool? Books like “Good to Great” would like us to believe there are a similar set of characteristics and “success principles” that successful companies use to get ahead and stay ahead. The Startup Genome project is all about using data sets to establish patterns. From theories like Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to agile development to the Lean Startup Movement, there are myriad ideas on the “right” way to build a startup. And as an extrapolation, how do these ideas mesh with traditional “best practices” for personal productivity and success!

Technology and the Human Condition: What tradeoffs are being made as more and more of the human race moves online… what tradeoffs in privacy, societal norms, cultural trade-offs…

Gaming, Virtual Reality and Real Life: What are the trends going to be as games (and specifically game mechanics) are leveraged as a motivation system for a wide variety of tasks – some virtual and others in the real world.

There are many mor topics I want to explore but this gives a good measure of the a few that I think will come to shape technology, education and startups over the next few years.