<aside> 💛 Creating fun and meaningful experiences for people with people, looking to build generational products and learn from the best Currently tinkering w/ products that augment human relationships
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<aside> 📮 @mingxi_gu | LinkedIn [email protected]
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<aside> 📖 B.Sc Computer Science + Cognitive Science @ McGill University ‘25 Prev. Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf (#14 best academic standing) Born in 2003 Currently in Montréal, Canada
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<aside> 🎁 Projects & Products
Interpersonal AI (Work in Progress)
Currently building interpersonal AI assistants using multimodal LLMs in hopes of augmenting social relationship management. Basically, letting AI plan personalized dates, recommend gifts, find resources, manage your social calendar, reply to messages, all with personalized context.
We envision a future not of machines that do things for us, but machines that do things our way as an extension of our individuality.
More to come!
Timestack (2023)
A photosharing app that lets you store shared experiences in shared spaces I worked on during my first year at McGill. Shipped in 2 months with 400 beta users and interviewed for Y Combinator’s S23 batch.
Worked with my fantastic technical cofounder and led all the design/product work.
The problem was how most shared experiences are kept in individualistic, isolated locations rather than in a highly interactive space we can collectively look back on. Sharing photos between people were also a bigger hassle than many thought. Shared albums were boring, photos sent through groupchats are often lost or transactional. Google Drive/Dropbox are antiquated for modern photosharing. We wanted to explore how people can connect through shared experiences, first by rethinking how they are shared and stored.
Learned enormously about building real products, talking to users, how to collaborate, taking accountability, jobs to be done, pre-PMF products, shipping MVPs, set direction, and UI/UX.
We rethought groupchats as more than just a chatspace, but a shared media space with many chatspaces.
Invented the design of proximity circles (first screen below) to visualize relationship activity at a glance.
Social profiles are not public facades, but private, shared media spaces to capture all the shared memories between two individuals. From the shared medias you can come to deeply understand your relationships and how you spend time with others.
The upload flow is as quick as Snapchat to faciliate data input.
ABMX (Design Portfolio)
This is my design brand that I want to turn into a full fledged agency one day. Much of the design inspiration for the ABMX branding came from established agencies like Pentagram and Wolff Olins. I went for simplicity and what’s proven to have worked.
ABMX – UI/UX Design, Graphic Design, Brand Identity
Building 21
Building 21 is an interdisciplinary idea lab of ran by faculty of McGill University since 2017. Hundreds of undergrads to PhDs across all disciplines come to B21 to pursue bold and unconventional research.
I led the revamp of Building 21’s entire brand, design, website, and communications strategy, and digital library working alongside Alex Chen. The goal is to attract the best talent and establish B21 as the most innovative and interesting place at McGill.
I am quite passionate about environments that spur innovation. I must recommend Patrick Collison’s recommendations on this subject!
Thanks to Cosmodernism, Seeing Into The Unknown Christiann Heinemann of ALIEN project, Jules Roze, Refik Anadol, Samuel Pietri, and Christian Denis for generously featuring their incredible artwork for B21.
OpenResponse
Made in less than 48 hours at HackHarvard. Using the Mariupol damage assessment dataset from ScaleAI, we mapped damaged buildings of the city of Mariupol, Ukraine onto a navigable map for first responders and community members to assess damage and emergency response.
The Millennia
After falling in love with media journalism as the editor-in-chief of my school paper I decided to start my own digital media site. I recruited and led a team of 13 student writers in a month and published content around student life, local stories, resource guides and more.
Reached 30 000 monthly visits at its peak. I also designed and built the website, the branding, and socials. The Millennia had one of the most extensive resource list of scholarships for the entire province of Quebec.
This project made me realize how important team culture and vision is. It taught me in parts how to lead, how to delegate, and how to foster an environment for collaboration. The best teams are where each member has both high ownership and learning potential.
The Visionnaires Podcast
“Ideas, wisdom, and stories from leading visionaries across all industries to help you navigate through life.”
I ran a Minecraft channel when I was 12. So when podcasting gained popularity I had to give it a shot. Recorded 12 episodes interviewing distinguished folks across industries. Episodes range from 1h to 3h full-length conversations. Guests included the CEO of Goodfood Market, an Oscar-nominated director, a creative director, a rocket engineer, an educational nonprofit founder, a college dropout turned startup founder and more. Picked up audio production skills along the way.
Techaide
Techaide is Montreal’s largest nonprofit by the local tech community, with partners from Deepmind, Mila, Google, Behaviour Interactive, to Ubisoft. I led a team of volunteers to refresh Techaide’s website and branding. Also organized free programming courses with volunteers from Deepmind for underserved students.
Techaide get the tech community together to give back.
Arrière-Saison
Designed and built the eCommerce shop for the streetwear brand from scratch using Webflow and Shopify. We took the minimalist webshop signature of many modern fashion brands but used a video game-esque aesthetic for the home screen to immerse visitors into the Arrière-Saison universe. Made during high school.
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<aside> 🧗 Professional Work
Product Designer at Keyhole (2024 - )
Hired as the B2B social media analytics firm’s first product designer and working directly with the CEO and Lead PM to redesign the web platform. Working part-time while at McGill.
Freelance Designer (2022 - )
I enjoyed the freedom of working freelance a lot. I got the chance to quickly learn different fields from eCommerce to mobile to consumer to nonprofits. Most of the projects done during this time can be found above in ABMX.
During high school:
Designer at Goloot (2021 - 2022)
Worked with the CMO and CEO of the seed-stage adtech startup Goloot as one of the earliest employees. Designed and made the website and contributed to the early marketing strategy.
Content coordinator & digital marketing at Nakisa (2021)
Interned for the HR & Finance SaaS company Nakisa as a content coordinator/digital marketer two years before college, working under the CMO and Head of Product Marketing. I developed digital content strategies, marketing materials, and helped with projects around the website.
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<aside> 🐝 Community
Gathering people together in some way or another is my life’s mission. I value small, intimate communities over large ones. Depth of connection is more interesting to me than breadth. I also organize Catan meetups and an intramural volleyball team.
Fireside
I co-organize a regular, casual meetup of young hackers, builders, and startup people at McGill. Some of us have raised $5M in funding, founded YC companies, built poker bots, led engineering teams for international companies, worked at Roblox/Tesla/Microsoft/IBM.
Email me if you want to come by!
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