Patrick Chou

Background

About Patrick Chou

It's true. Life is a journey, not a destination. My teenage self at MIT playing with a modelocked YAG laser never could have predicted that I'd still be working in optics today. While earning my PhD I watched the optical telecom industry boom. Shortly after I moved to Silicon Valley, I experienced its crash. I survived only to later worry about the financial crisis of 2008. That too passed, and now I get to marvel at communication hardware phenomena like hyperscale and AI datacenters. Today, I lead a small but mighty technical marketing team within Cisco’s pluggable optics business. The winding path that got me here includes early startups and two public companies. I started in R&D, but five years in sales and several years as a product manager unveiled the customer perspective. Those roles taught me how to straddle both the technology and business of pluggable optics. To bridge that gap, I created the Cisco Optics Podcast and Blog which help Cisco sales teams and customers understand what's inside our pluggable modules and why it matters. In parallel, I’ve also been on a quest to understand how humans communicate with each other. Years of improv and acting training have taught me tools that help people connect more authentically. I enjoy sharing them with technical professionals through coaching and writing to help them thrive in the workplace. When we're better at being human, everything gets better. If you think about it, the connection between my two passions is connection itself. Sometimes it's a fiber optic link, and sometimes it's a conversation.