Eden Chan

I explore semantic drift within institutional systems and build tools to help understand and bridge that gap.

Everything drifts from its original purpose over time. Medical education started as doctors sharing discoveries, now it’s checkbox compliance. Productivity tools that promised to save time become time sinks themselves. Social networks built to connect us turned into engagement farms.

Right now I’m scraping 50,000+ medical education courses to prove a hunch: doctors spend more time learning billing codes than breakthrough treatments. Got a few medical experts helping me tag which modules teach actual clinical skills vs compliance checkboxes that exist purely for liability insurance.

Previous adventures include visualizing knowledge graph interfaces for social graphs at Ideaflow, finding 100k missing parts in ERP systems at Bronco, and reconstructing images from brain signals at Alljoined.

A more detailed story

(skip)

  I grew up in the GTA and moved to Waterloo for school.

Got productivity-pilled in 2018 when I discovered SuperMemo: software that promised optimal learning but was so complex I spent more time learning the tool than learning anything else. That disconnect shaped how I think about tools: they should amplify, not complicate.

  At Waterloo

I made some of my best friends through Socratica. Saw how the most amazing things come downstream from following your curiosities. Ran the CS Club as President for a term, and built websites for nonprofits at Blueprint. I really enjoyed the maker culture, and seeing how kind and resourceful the peers I respected were.

  Climbed Kilimanjaro in 2022

Then flew straight to an EA conference in London. On the mountain, everyone was present: focused on the next step, sharing oxygen readings, encouraging each other to go slowly and cheerfully. At the conference, 200+ people were living in spreadsheets about 2030 AGI scenarios. One guy tracked his productivity in 15-minute blocks to "maximize his impact on the future." Another was so anxious about x-risk she couldn't enjoy lunch without calculating opportunity costs. Everyone was optimizing for futures they invented to avoid dealing with today. I felt way more alive at 19,000 feet with altitude sickness than in those conference rooms.

  One of my favorite summers

Living in a hacker house with 20+ friends following our curiosities, like collecting brain signals for Alljoined. When I started working at SF startups, I discovered that San Francisco was Twitter IRL. Most people I met at SF tech events were plugged into tpot.

Coming back to Waterloo, I started a ~1000 member community for folks to share opportunities: a feed designed to help plug friends into tech twitter.

  After graduating

Spent a summer building consumer apps from Bali and Japan with friends I met on the internet.

Building Summate with @0xraduan solving our own problem of information overload. AI reads everything you follow so you can read what matters. Because staying on top of YouTube and Substack subscriptions shouldn’t feel like another job.

Also doing engineering & design consultancy at Hecaton with @mayankja1n: helping companies bridge the gap between what they build and what users actually need.

Things I remind myself

The fastest way to attract what’s meant for us is to express yourself so honestly that everything misaligned falls away.

The more specific you are, the more visible you become. Being legible isn’t about fitting in: it’s about sending a clear signal so the right people can find you.

Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you’re interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.

Currently in San Francisco